5 Ways to Improve Call Center Monitoring

Excellent customer service is one of the key differentiating factors that allows many companies to stand above their competitors. In fact, approximately 90% of Americans use customer service as a deciding factor in whether or not to do business with a company. For this reason, call center monitoring is an essential part of quality control related to customer service interactions. Insights gathered from monitoring call data can improve the customer experience. Nearly half (48%) of customer service teams named call center monitoring their top priority and the best way to generate more revenue.

For this reason, monitoring customer interactions can tell a company a lot about how well they are meeting customer expectations. While most companies would agree that they want to achieve these goals, it’s not always easy. However, many companies can improve their current call center monitoring processes.

Here are 5 of the best ways to improve call center monitoring:

Strategies to Improve Call Center Monitoring

Monitoring call center performance can help agents become more effective and improve customer satisfaction. But there are several different ways to monitor calls (and support chats and emails, for that matter) and determine agency performance. These strategies can enhance your current call center monitoring processes.

1.       Implement Call Monitoring Software

Implementing call monitoring software is one of the best and easiest ways to get better performance data. The reality is that no companies have the resources to analyze every call with human quality assurance specialists. It would simply take too long and be too costly. 

Additionally, human monitoring can fail to notice key patterns across all customer interactions. On the other hand, call monitoring software is designed to handle an unlimited number of phone calls and capture detailed metrics, such as average call times, percentage achieving satisfactory resolutions, and total wait times.

Call monitoring software can also analyze these metrics to identify patterns that lead to actionable insight to improve customer service. 

The key to analyzing data well and making the process easier is partnering with the right platform. Level AI can help you understand what this process may look like for your company.

There are also monitoring platforms that also monitor email, chat, and other communication channels if you run a contact center rather than a dedicated all center. Be sure to take these channels into consideration.

2.       Identify the KPIs That Matter Most

Call center managers can select from many KPIs to track.

It is often more helpful to narrow down the field and focus on just a few KPIs at a time. The reality is, teams tend to perfect what you inspect the most, so if you have a few critical KPIs, be sure to start there. 

For instance, if you are receiving customer complaints about call waiting time, you may want to track time on hold, average handle time (AHT), and agent-specific resolution times. Monitoring calls for these KPIs can help you identify targets for improvement, which can be tracked over time. 

The process of identifying the right KPIs to track can be difficult. However, focusing on your weakest areas or areas that can make the most significant impact quickly are solid strategies for determining where to start.

For example, if qualitative customer feedback mentions time spent on hold, average wait time might be one of your top KPIs.

The key is, don’t try to focus on everything at once, or you will tend to see smaller incremental improvements in the areas of primary concern. Stay focused!

3.       Get Creative to Analyze More Calls

Tracking all calls may be difficult, especially with high call volumes. As mentioned earlier, call center monitoring software makes this task more manageable, but some software can still only handle a fraction of the total conversations.

If, for some reason, you are unable to analyze calls in real-time, you can record them for later analysis. The data from this type of research helps you understand agent behavior, which can only enhance call quality because call center managers can then know how agents interact with customers. 

The ability to analyze more calls rather than a small portion of the total will give you more meaningful data. When only some calls are subject to analysis, the data can be skewed based on which calls were monitored.

If you are only now deploying call center monitoring software or if the option to upgrade exists, consider looking for a vendor that can deliver 100% quality assurance coverage. Level AI is one such vendor, and we would love to speak with you.

4.       Focus on Anomalies

While analyzing all calls can provide great general insights, abnormal calls are also important. By looking at your top, or most successful calls, it may be easier to identify best practices for the entire staff. You can also determine your top performers. 

Call center managers may rely on these top-performing employees to share their strategies and techniques for dealing with different types of customer interactions. This information is beneficial for everyone. 

It’s also a good idea to identify particularly unsuccessful calls. You can use recordings or transcripts of these calls for training purposes. It often helps if one-on-one analysis and training are provided to the employee when reviewing an unsuccessful call. 

Additionally, looking at the lower-performing call center agents can help call center managers identify who needs additional training opportunities. Looking at both top and bottom performers can result in better performance by everyone!

5.       Don’t Neglect the Call Monitoring Process

It is easy to focus on call center monitoring when experiencing customer satisfaction problems. 

Unfortunately, after quality and performance problems have been successfully addressed, focus on call center monitoring and performance management can wane. After all, the feeling can be that it served its purpose, and busy managers often have other problems that require attention. 

Abandoning the process of call center monitoring would be a huge mistake! Quality improvement is a continuous process, and even if you meet one target, there are still other areas that can be improved. 

You cannot manage what you don’t measure, so stay engaged with your call center monitoring program. Even if you have limited human resources, the proper monitoring platform can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.

Call center monitoring isn’t a new strategy, and call center monitoring software isn’t a new concept either. The tools and technologies are changing, however. 

When combining common-sense quality assurance practices with best-in-class technology like Level AI, you will be able to take your call center monitoring up a notch.Level AI enables autonomous learning with agents because they can have their call monitored and evaluated (scored) by our AI, which essentially coaches them and reduces agent onboarding times while providing continuous learning without the need for constant human intervention from the QA Team.