Call Center Quality Assurance: Guide with Tips and Best Practices

Call center quality assurance is all about ensuring customer satisfaction. The positive impressions a customer receives after interacting with an agent are vital. The internal quality control department handles conversation monitoring and enhancing your customers' experience.

Customer service often suffers due to staff unfriendliness, lengthy wait times, and poorly trained employees. Thus, maintaining quality is crucial. Good customer service quality control prevents these problems by identifying where they occur during the actual interactions, enabling teams to avoid repeating the same mistakes. Quality in call centers should always be high, so there needs to be constant checking to make sure they're doing things right.

Let us explore what quality assurance in a call center means and how it can make your contact center work better. As an extra perk, we will share several effective tips on setting up your call center QA system and spotlight top quality assurance practices to guide you proper way.

What is Call Center Quality Assurance (QA)?

Call center quality assurance (QA) is a comprehensive process examining customer interactions to ensure they adhere to set quality benchmarks.

This approach uses performance evaluations across various criteria to offer specific feedback and identify areas for improvement. It’s based on constant striving to meet changing client needs and raising call center standards. 

In other words, QA for a call center reflects how well your customer service agents fulfill the expectations of users, and even surpass them, and how they meet industry standards and customer support goals. Getting top-notch quality in call centers usually involves several components: customer satisfaction, on-time service and sticking to standards, call monitoring and assessing, as well as agent training. In short, it means having a strong program for keeping call quality high.

The Role of Contact Center Quality Assurance

Quality assurance programs are crucial in any sector focused on customer service, experience, or engagement. These programs play an important role in ensuring consistent service quality. 

Call center QA becomes increasingly vital as the number of customer support agents grows. Medium-sized answering services, with 15 to 50 agents, often handle more intricate products and services. In contrast, large call centers, which staff over 100 reps, provide more advanced support levels and, as a result, face more significant quality challenges.

A robust call center quality assurance program can significantly benefit your organization by enhancing CSAT, streamlining operations, and boosting overall contact center performance. Many successful businesses worldwide already know the benefits of benefits of business process outsourcing and the effective ways of improving call center quality and operations. 

The outsourcing of call center services, including quality assurance (QA), has become a significant trend across various industries, aiming to enhance efficiency, reduce operational costs, and leverage specialized expertise. A lot of organizations, approximately 75%, utilize external providers to use data and analytics on regular agents’ interactions with customers and their feedback. 

Understanding the Assessment of Call Center QA

Evaluating call quality is a key task often handled by a quality assurance manager, a QA expert, or a specialist in analyzing contact center quality. Call center quality assurance metrics are based on three main assessment categories with different extra quality indicators, that are considered:

Call Metrics:

• Average Response Time (ART): The average time it takes for a CS agent to answer a call.
• Average Handling Time (AHT): The total average duration of a call, including talk time, hold time, and the time spent on related tasks after the call ends.
• First Call Resolution (FCR): The percentage of customer calls resolved on the first contact, without needing a follow-up.
• Call Abandon Rate: The percentage of calls abandoned by the caller before reaching an agent.
• Transfer Rate: The percentage of calls that need to be transferred to another call center agent or department to be resolved.
• Occupancy Rate: The percentage of time agents spend handling calls versus waiting for calls.
• After-Call Work Time (ACW): The average time a rep spends on follow-up tasks after a call has ended.

Customer Metrics:

• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Scores: A measure of how satisfied customers are with the service they receive, usually obtained through post-call surveys.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS): A gauge of customer loyalty, measuring the likelihood that a customer would recommend the company's services to others.
• Customer Effort Score (CES): Measures the ease with which customers can get their issues resolved.
• Call Quality Score: A composite score based on agent adherence to protocols, communication skills, and the ability to resolve issues, often evaluated through call monitoring and scoring by quality assurance specialists.
• Customer Churn Rate: The percentage of customers who stop using the call center services over a certain period.
• Service Level: The percentage of calls answered within a predetermined threshold (e.g., 20 seconds).
• Resolution Rate: The percentage of all customer issues that are resolved, a broader measure than FCR.

QA Assessments and Control: 

• Agent Professionalism: Evaluates the agent’s professionalism, including tone, language, empathy, and understanding, demonstrating their ability to connect with and respect the customer.
• Communication Skills Assessment: Measures clarity of communication and active listening skills, highlighting the agent's ability to clearly convey information and accurately understand customer needs.
• Compliance and Accuracy Performance: Assesses adherence to call center protocols and the accuracy of information provided to customers, ensuring reliable and trustworthy customer service.
• Attendance Rate: Measures the percentage of scheduled work days an agent attends over a given period. High attendance rates indicate reliability and commitment to the team and objectives.
• Overall Quality Rating: Provides a comprehensive evaluation of the agent's performance across all metrics, reflecting their total contribution to delivering quality customer service.

Comparing Quality Control and Quality Assurance in Call Centers 

Before we explore ways to enhance contact center quality assurance, let's clear up commonly misunderstood terms so as not to confuse them and understand the process of quality assessment better.

Call Center Quality Control

This focuses on making sure the day-to-day operations run smoothly. Key areas encompass checking on agents' attendance, their timeliness, and the thoroughness of their work after calls.

Call Center Quality Assurance

This process is also known as call center quality management and involves keeping standards high in your contact center to ensure your customers have the best possible experience. It covers everything from the flow of the calls and the scripts used to the soft skills agents employ.

While both play critical roles, they evaluate different facets of the call center experience.

Call Center Quality Assurance Tips 

Boosting call center QA effectiveness doesn't have to be a daunting task. Embrace these practical strategies to simplify the process and achieve remarkable results.

• Actively monitor goals and performance. Adhere faithfully to the evaluation metrics and timing you've set.
• Remember the role of contact center software and utilize features such as conversation recording, live call center quality monitoring, reports, and analytics to keep a close eye on team performance.
• Tailor coaching sessions to meet the unique needs of your team members, focusing on their specific strengths and weaknesses. Whether the expertise comes from onshore or offshore locations, the goal is to use global insights and practices that respond to the diverse nature of your team.
• Implement a clear system of penalties and rewards to motivate excellence and prevent low-quality performance.
• Commit to ongoing training for your team, ensuring skills remain sharp and up-to-date.
• Integrate regular customer feedback into performance evaluations to provide direct insights into the quality of service and to identify poor areas. This added perspective can enhance the relevance and impact of your quality assurance efforts.

These quality assurance guidelines for call centers offer a solid foundation for maintaining high standards of QA in call center operations. Remember, consistency is key to sustaining quality and productivity.

Implementing an Effective Call Center Quality Assurance Framework

Before developing your call center quality assurance framework, you need to take into account and analyze a great number of interactions. Moreover, it is important to define quality objectives within the organizational structure to enhance your evaluation efforts. This means setting quality targets that are detailed, measurable, realistic, relevant, and confined within a specific timeframe, and distributing this information through every level of the organization. 

Imagine your call center QA framework as a roadmap for success that highlights specific areas of focus. Here's how to lay the groundwork for a winning QA call center strategy:

Identify Essential KPIs and Metrics: What's your measure of success? Choose key metrics that correspond to your targets. Whether it's enhancing CSAT or achieving first-call resolution, select metrics that mirror your goals.

Decide on Your Analysis Approach: Strike a balance between manual monitoring and automated data gathering. Bear in mind that certain sectors, like healthcare, have strict regulations regarding the handling of patient information.

Take Action Based on Insights: Once you've gathered and analyzed your data, decide on the next steps. This might involve revising agent scripts or drafting a Quality Standard Definition Document (QSDD) to ensure ongoing enhancement.

When crafting your framework, consider drawing from these three established models:

Operational Framework

Focus on real-time call center performance to identify and address gaps. This insight can direct the right contact center agents to necessary training sessions, boosting their efficiency and confidence.

Tactical Framework

Look at how your team works to find where things get stuck. Identifying recurring issues in scripts or procedures allows you to make necessary adjustments, bringing call center agents more flexibility and improving their customer interaction.

Strategic Framework

Aim to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. Focusing on metrics like the net promoter score and customer effort score can lead to greater customer retention and loyalty.

Mastering Call Center Quality Assurance Best Practices

Making sure your customers are happy is essential for any business. Indeed, great service can make all the difference in keeping them coming back. It’s very important to know every call goes well in your contact center.

When you focus on making calls the best they can be, you're telling your customers they can trust you. This makes their experience better and helps your business grow. Here are 6 simple but effective practices to boost your call center's effectiveness in serving customers:

Coaching, Training, and Personal Meetings

Train and coach agents continuously to improve their communication and problem-solving skills, and keep them updated on the latest product information and techniques. You can also involve special supervisors to make this approach more personalized and build strategies to improve not only service quality but also call center agent morale and satisfaction with the work. 

A quality assurance process helps teams improve their skills. If you're a data-driven call center, you can spot trends and repeated errors. QA not only improves performance but also increases understanding of agents' feelings.

For instance, an agent solved 40% more tickets this week, but their work quality dropped. Lots of grammar errors and skipped steps. Maybe they were rushed?

Now, you know it's time to act. You can plan to help them improve with one-on-one meetings, feedback, training, and ongoing QA checks. But first, talk to them. Are they overwhelmed? Are family commitments pressing?

QA helps create a supportive work culture. Prioritizing personal meetings gives agents the help they need. Connecting with agents is essential for a positive work environment and consistent quality.

Call Monitoring and Evaluation

Call center quality monitoring encompasses listening to and analyzing calls in real time to identify training needs and areas for improvement. This important stage in quality assurance processes helps in maintaining high-quality customer service by providing targeted feedback to agents.

Balanced Scorecards and KPIs

Use balanced scorecards and key performance indicators to get a comprehensive view of performance across customer satisfaction, agent productivity, and operational efficiency, guiding data-driven improvements.

Customer Feedback Mechanisms

Implement feedback tools like surveys or interactive systems post-call to collect valuable information from customers. This direct feedback helps measure satisfaction and identify areas for service enhancement. For example, ask your clients to give a score for how well the agent helped them. Interestingly, 85% of customer service representatives say that users are more likely to share both good and bad experiences compared to previous times. This is usually done right after the call, while the customer still remembers everything clearly.

Use New Technology

Incorporate advanced technology and AI for call centers to make operations more effective and quick. Special AI tools for voice and speech analytics, sentiment analysis, and agent coaching can transform call center operations.

Adaptability and Flexibility

Stay adaptable and flexible to quickly respond to changing customer needs and expectations, ensuring the contact center evolves with advanced tools and call center quality assurance software for ongoing improvement.

Outsourcing Quality Assurance

Call center activities are always connected with communication and interactions with different people with certain needs. All these daily actions form their satisfaction level. While some companies lean towards keeping quality assurance under their roof to cut expenses, this approach can end up being more costly over time.

Choosing to entrust your contact center quality assurance to external specialists from call center outsourcing companies guarantees you first-rate service, as you tap into a pool of seasoned professionals and call center managers. These experts not only bring a wealth of knowledge but also come equipped with advanced tools and software. These technologies seamlessly integrate with your systems, boosting efficiency and elevating the CX. Choose the onshore, nearshore, or offshore solution for your specific niche to serve your audience in the best possible way and level up your CS team's QA. 

Improve Quality Assurance with Helpware

Finding the perfect call center quality assurance partner can be tough, especially one that understands what your customers need. Our QA department at Helpware aims to deliver maximum efficiency and the most accurate results, and this is possible due to quality assurance software and the careful touch of human experts.

We provide the comprehensive expertise, hardware, software, processes, and personnel essential for a top-tier QA system. This approach can add significant value to your company making it ready to use these advantages. No matter how large or small your business is, even outsourcing for a startup proves to be a strategic move, especially in establishing a successful call center. 

Interested in exploring how Helpware can transform your quality assurance? Give us a call to share about your project and to see how Helpware can make a difference for your call center.