The quality of your customer service is one of those things that will make or break your brand. Without great customer service, the flywheel of your inbound strategy simply cannot spin the way you want it to—So regardless of whether you own a call center, or you are working with one, it’s extremely important to utilize call center monitoring best practices!
Call center monitoring allows you to keep tabs on how your customer service team is interacting with your customer. One of the best ways to do this is by reviewing as many calls as possible—But realistically, a human call center manager will only be able to manually review so many of them in a given period. This is why using AI-based speech analytics can be an invaluable asset! Not only can an AI listen to 100% of all customer service calls with extreme precision, but it frees your managers from the tedious task of having to manually audit a small sample size of calls (and as you know, a happy team means happier customers)!
Another way to maximize your call center monitoring is to make sure that you are looking for the proper metrics. This is to say, just because your agents have great AHT (Average Handling Time), does not necessarily mean that they are handling calls in a way that is completely accurate, or that satisfies your customer. The better metric to look for in your team is their First Call Resolution Rate (FCR). A high FCR score means that your customers’ issues are not only being resolved swiftly, but that the provided resolutions actually stick. Needless to say, customers become increasingly frustrated if they have to call for support over the same issue over and over again.
Last but not least, it’s incredibly important to make sure that your agents are fully educated on what they are being evaluated for in the first place! A great way to do this is to involve your customer service team in the creation of scoring/monitoring criteria. What makes for a quality customer service call, in alignment with your standards?
- Soft-skills and positioning?
- Adherence to a script?
- The handling of frustrated customers?
- How are calls escalated?
Remember, your customer service team is human too! So they aren’t necessarily to blame for making mistakes due to ignorance of protocol. Allowing them to take part in the monitoring process is not only an educational experience for them, but it allows them to provide the absolute best performance they can provide for both you, and your customer alike.
