Tools & Techniques to Increase Call Answer Rates and Sales for Contact Centers

7 QA Techniques Every Call Center Should Implement

Written by Brian Keep, Ytel | Mar 22, 2017 2:33:00 PM

Does your call center have QA policies and procedures already in place? If not, now is the time to implement some. We're sharing some key suggestions of a few different techniques your business should emphasize during call monitoring, customer satisfaction, benchmarking, and more. You're sure to find a few new ideas in this post, so don't miss it!

Emphasizing Outliers

Because you may not be able to monitor each salesperson individually, emphasizing the outliers in your call center will give you a good indication of how successful your scripts and sales techniques are. Top performers and extremely wayward performers can give you insights into best practices and worst-case scenarios that can shore up quality assurance very quickly.

Theme of the Month

Having your salespeople focus on a theme to improve for each month can help them develop better habits. It can be overwhelming to your employees if they feel as though their technique is being monitored arbitrarily. Focus on one aspect of call recordings, usually the aspect that needs the most help, and you may see better results more quickly.

The Team Assesses Itself

It is usually a mistake to hand down a quality monitoring checklist to a call center group. Why not include your team in the process? Mutually deciding what needs to be improved keeps your sales agents involved, mindful of their own mistakes and most of all, motivated to improve. After all, if someone is pointing out his own mistake, he is more likely to consider that assessment valid than if a manager arbitrarily hands down a critique.

External Benchmarking

In order to keep performance metrics and analysis truly objective, external benchmarking must be part of the QA process. Outsourcing this function to a QA agency can also be very cost-effective, especially if there are no internal resources that can handle the job.

Saving Golden Calls

Your agent should be empowered to save their so-called "golden calls," or the calls that go extremely well. There should be some basic benchmarks set as to what constitutes a golden call. Other than that, these calls can be used to showcase successful techniques, voice intonation, use of certain words and even silence that pushes the call forward to a successful conclusion. Discovering and saving your team's golden calls can be done easily through call recording

Customer Satisfaction Feedback Process

There absolutely must be a feedback process that helps to monitor customer satisfaction. As well as a caller may think he is doing, the customer may have a completely different perspective on the interaction. Under no circumstances should your company ever assume what it is that customer wants on a call. When an agent has what he deems to be especially good call, this is a perfect time to levy a customer satisfaction survey. 

Call Quality Forum

Setting up a forum helps a company to identify standards and practices that pay off in positive feedback and conversions. Many companies cannot agree on a QA process because they cannot agree on the metrics that should be analyzed. The best solution to that dilemma is to let customers decide for you.

One Day On Script

It is also essential to create a benchmark for analysis that can be used down the line. One day out of every month, everyone should go completely on script. This allows a company to remove the script as a variable, focusing on the other aspects of the sales agents that may be affecting the call. Going one day on script is a great way to note vocal techniques, pauses and intonations that work well.