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Get free accessAny call center that wants to provide excellent customer service must closely monitor performance to gain meaningful insights. Satisfied customers and great customer service result from a cycle of data collection, analysis, training, and improvement. In other words: quality assurance.
Call center quality assurance helps you ensure the service your agents offer lives up to your customers’ expectations. Whether you are setting up your call center quality assurance process for the first time or want to optimize performance, this article provides 16 best practices to follow.
Why Your Business Success Hinges on the Performance of Your Call Center
Your ability to build customer loyalty and increase revenue hinges on the quality of your call center interactions. And a single poor experience can leave a lasting impact; nearly 74% of consumers report they’ll switch providers after just one negative contact center experience. If your call center isn’t up to par, your bottom line could be at risk.
Additionally, businesses risk losing around 9.5% of their revenue due to negative customer experiences, while a positive experience makes customers 3.5 times more likely to buy again. So optimizing your call center’s performance isn’t just an operational goal; it’s a vital business strategy.
While the customer journey has many touchpoints, the call center often makes the most lasting impact. Quality assurance identifies training needs and supports effective coaching to yield high-performing agents. This focus on quality directly increases both efficiency and team morale. Happier agents also stick around longer, which reduces turnover costs and strengthens service consistency.
Getting Started: Set Clear Goals
Before implementing or upgrading your system for call center quality assurance, you need to define what you hope to achieve. This will help you lay down solid groundwork.
1. Pinpoint your issues, and decide what “good” means
Your first step for call center quality assurance is to evaluate which areas of your call center need improvement. What standard do you hope to reach? How can you measure this? Without a clear idea of what you want, you can’t build out an effective quality-monitoring strategy.
Pro tip: Think in terms of what you should START, STOP, and CONTINUE doing.
2. Put the customer first
When you keep customer needs front and center, you’re more likely to make a positive impact on their experience. So design your quality assurance approach to enhance the customer experience directly—whether through faster response times, better communication skills for agents, or more personalized interactions.
3. Collect caller feedback
A reliable way to improve service is to ask your customers what they want. We recommend providing a short, efficient feedback questionnaire after every call center interaction to help you pinpoint the areas in which your agents can improve.
Pro tip: Launch an online forum that makes it easy for customers to share feedback on service quality whenever they’d like.
4. Benchmark against competitors
Compare your business to call centers of similar size and comparable activity, zeroing in on metrics like Average Handling Time (AHT) and First Call Resolution Rate (FCR). Just know that the benchmarking process is a continuous loop, and as you improve your performance in one area, you will need to start evaluating another.
It can be tricky to remain impartial when comparing yourself to competitors. For these reasons, hire an external quality assurance consultant to help maintain objectivity.
Ongoing QA: Monitor Your Call Center’s Quality of Service
Once you've laid the foundations for what you hope to gain from your call center quality assurance process, it's time to set your plan in motion.
The operational side of call center quality assurance relies on performance monitoring. Take a look at how to leverage technology for call center quality assurance.
5. Choose the right software
Choose call center software that already comes with quality assurance features, such as call transcription, recording, and monitoring. Consider several factors when picking out a tool for running and monitoring your call center:
Features: Your call center software should come with built-in analytics features, as well as AI-powered tools like call summaries, key topic recognition, and talk-to-listen ratios.
Ease of use: Make sure that the software is intuitive. If you need to heavily train your employees before they can use it, it will hamper your call center’s productivity.
Scalability: Your workforce needs will fluctuate, as will your workload (especially if your activity is seasonal), so pick software that will scale up and down with your company.
Discover Aircall’s powerful customer communication platform for a call center that maximizes agent productivity and customer satisfaction. Try for free.
6. Decide which metrics to analyze
Quality of service can be measured by many key performance indicators (KPIs). However, trying to track all of them requires extensive time and resources. So instead, focus on the KPIs that are most relevant to your activity and will interact with one another to create a coherent picture. Use this to create a scorecard, which will be the structure of your analysis.
Popular call center KPIs include:
Average wait time
Missed call rate
Conversion rate
First-call resolution
Employee satisfaction
7. Frequently record your calls
Modern customer communications software lets managers record and listen to active calls. However, given the volume of calls your business receives, we’d bet there’s no way supervisors can listen to all of them. So you need to decide which calls to examine closer.
Use the metrics you identified earlier and identify and analyze calls that are in conflict with your goals so you can pinpoint where agents need support. This could include calls that:
Ran long
Resulted in low customer satisfaction
Required customers to call back multiple times
Involved multiple transfers
Additionally, pinpoint calls that went particularly well and resulted in high customer satisfaction scores to help you develop agent training and protocols.
8. Monitor calls from start to finish
Once you choose calls to analyze, examine them in their entirety. Exemplary calls should show how the agent solved the problem over the course of a single conversation. Pay attention to how the agent started the call, their tone and demeanor throughout, the solutions they offered to the caller, and how they signed off.
Each call is like a self-contained case study. If you only pick bits and pieces of them, the agent's choices won't be put in context and the training-value of the recordings will be diminished. The best examples of high-quality calls should be saved as training materials.
9. Monitor conversations across several channels
You may not just be operating over the phone, but also over live chat, email, or texts. Your call center quality assurance must extend to every channel you use to reach customers and vice-versa. While the medium differs, you must have the same concern for quality assurance—regardless of where the interaction takes place.
10. Leverage AI for quicker insights
The 2024 CallMiner CX Landscape Report shows that 87% of organizations see generative AI as crucial for their customer service strategy and 91% believe AI technology will improve efficiency in customer satisfaction levels. AI-powered tools can help you act fast to boost agent performance and customer satisfaction.
Aircall’s AI features, for example, can help you:
Streamline call reviews: Pinpoint key terms and critical moments across conversations. Aircall’s AI tools allow you to focus on areas needing deeper analysis to save you time and improve call quality.
Enrich coaching with context: AI-generated summaries and sentiment analysis provide actionable data, helping you train agents effectively and build stronger customer connections.
Increase sales conversions: Ensure sales calls hit the mark with balanced, engaging conversations. AI-driven insights and call center analytics let you quickly review pitches, coach reps, and drive better call outcomes.
Turn support calls into loyalty builders: Identify friction points and train agents to deliver smoother interactions. AI analysis makes it easy to evaluate agent performance and find ways to enhance the customer experience.
See how Aircall’s powerful AI features can help you strengthen quality assurance in your call center. Try for free.
Getting Everyone Aligned: Bring Your Staff on Board
Now that we've looked at the operational side, let's explore the human aspect of call center quality assurance.
11. Bring on a quality assurance manager
Call center managers already have a lot on their plate. Moreover, what makes a great call center manager won't necessarily translate to an effective quality assurance analyst.
Consider hiring a call center quality assurance specialist to design training material, monitor calls and trends, and uphold the standard you set for your business. This person could be an external consultant, or part of your staff.
12. Hire the right employees
Call centers contend with a great deal of employee turnover. And every new agent you hire to fill an empty role needs a period of training before they can start working at full capacity. This represents quite a bit of time spent training new employees, making it crucial to select candidates who are likely to get up to speed quickly—then stick around.
Pro tip: Present prospective hires with a range of assessments during the vetting process. Personality and aptitude tests can help you identify whether a hire will be an asset to your call center.
13. Write solid scripts
Call center scripts help agents respect the quality standards you've set for your call center. Whether your call center deals in outbound or inbound calls, a script will help your agents deliver consistent, quality service.
Your scripts should reflect the results of your technical monitoring, and the insights gained from analyzing real calls will guide how to craft and refine your scripts.
Empower your agents to feel confident enough to go off-script when the situation calls for it. While a good script is a great safety net, being able to improvise with confidence is the secret to exceptional service.
14. Provide proactive and regular training
Effective onboarding is crucial to empowering new agents and can spare them confidence issues and knowledge gaps down the line.
However, call center training shouldn’t stop after an employee’s first month. Use the insights you gain via call center analytics to design ongoing training sessions tailored to your employees’ areas for improvement, whether that’s learning how to improvise on calls or making the most of your CRM software and integrations.
15. Involve the whole staff in a non-judgmental process
To ensure your agents accept your quality assurance efforts, you need to remove any associations of discipline around it. If you include all your agents in your quality assurance efforts, newer or low-performing agents won’t feel targeted or stressed out by the idea of being singled out.
During training sessions, give agents the opportunity to evaluate each other and self-assess. The quality assurance manager running the session should be flexible and make themself available for agents who seek out extra training on issues they’ve identified in their own performance.
16. Establish clear goals and corresponding incentives
Educate agents about your call center KPIs and offer rewards for improving results to get buy-in from your whole team. This doesn't have to just mean financial incentives for your employee of the month; you could offer little bonuses like extra time off or a free lunch to any agents who are doing an exceptional job of driving quality in your call center.
Set Yourself Up for Success with Powerful Call Center Software
Delivering exceptional call center quality starts with reliable, feature-rich software. Aircall provides AI-powered transcription, real-time coaching insights, and seamless CRM integrations to keep your team efficient and customer-focused—so you can consistently enhance service quality.
Built for reliability and scalability, Aircall’s cloud-based platform ensures clear, uninterrupted calls. Whether you’re looking to increase sales, improve support, or simplify operations, Aircall helps your agents do their job better so you can exceed customer expectations.
Discover Aircall’s powerful customer communications platform for a call center that maximizes agent productivity and customer satisfaction. Try it for free.
FAQs
How do you pass QA in a call center?
Passing QA in a call center involves meeting specific performance standards and consistently delivering positive customer experiences. This usually includes following call scripts, adhering to compliance guidelines, and resolving issues effectively.
Agents should be knowledgeable about products or services and actively listen to understand customer needs. Regular feedback and coaching sessions can help agents perform better, and call recordings and AI-driven tools can also assist in identifying areas for improvement to ensure agents meet and exceed QA benchmarks.
What is the role of a QA specialist in a call center?
A QA specialist in a call center monitors and evaluates agent interactions to ensure quality standards are met. They review calls, assess adherence to scripts and protocols, and provide feedback to improve customer service quality.
Their role includes identifying training needs, suggesting improvements, and helping agents improve their skills. QA specialists also track KPIs, analyze call trends, and work with management to create action plans for continuous improvement.
What are the objectives of QA in a call center?
The main objectives of contact center quality assurance are to optimize overall agent performance, ensure compliance with company policies, and improve customer satisfaction. By monitoring and evaluating calls, QA helps identify areas where agents excel and where they need improvement.
Effective QA also aims to improve operational efficiency, minimize customer churn, and support ongoing training efforts.
What is the QA score in a call center?
The QA score in a call center is a metric that reflects an agent’s performance based on quality standards. It’s calculated by evaluating various call aspects, like script adherence, response accuracy, empathy, and problem resolution.
The score can vary based on each call center’s specific criteria but generally indicates how well an agent meets customer service expectations. QA scores are vital for tracking individual and team performance, identifying trends, and guiding coaching efforts.
Published on December 3, 2024.
