How to Improve Quality in Your Call Center

Providing high-quality service is key to any call center’s success. Today when customer support channels go way beyond voice, creating a quality assurance (QA) strategy must include more than call monitoring.

To help you maintain the quality of your call center and meet your customers’ needs for great customer experience (CX), we’ve collected some proven ways of improving call center quality scores.

But before listing our best practices, let’s define what call center quality is and why it is more important today than ever before.

What Is Call Center Quality?

Contact center quality assurance programs are put in place to ensure excellent customer service, as well as compliance with both external regulations and internal processes. As a result, a well-designed quality program helps improve CX, increase customer loyalty, and enhance agent coaching.

But today call centers find themselves in the challenging situation of having to improve their services across various customer interaction channels without increasing operational costs.

Why Is Call Center Quality Assurance More Important Than Ever?

Customers are more vocal and impatient than ever. In our technologically advanced world, they really are just a click away from leaving negative reviews—or worse, turning to your competitors—if your services fall short of their high expectations. Their feedback can really make or break a brand.

No matter how amazing your product or service is, if you cannot seamlessly interact with your customers when they come to you, they’ll quickly turn away and never look back. In fact, the 2023 State of Digital Customer Experience report revealed that:

• 69 percent of consumers had switched brands after just one bad experience.
• 52 percent said multiple attempts to get an answer from a company negatively impacted their experience.
• 40 percent found it very frustrating if their communication channel of choice wasn’t an option.

Assuring quality is key to providing a positive customer experience, but there’s more to it. If your agent can efficiently and successfully solve a customer problem, that can easily turn your happy customer into a brand advocate. In addition, positive ratings can drive agents to keep up the good work.

When done right, call center quality assurance is a win-win for all. After putting an efficient quality assurance strategy in place using Verint Quality Bots, a global healthcare provider realized 5x ROI, 32 percent increase in supervisor time, $1.5 million savings through automation, and reduction in compliance fines.[1]

Proven Ways of Improving Call Center Quality

Using quality scores to be able to spot shortcomings in your contact center is one thing. However, merely knowing them won’t magically improve quality in your call center. That is where QA strategies come into the picture, helping you increase service quality and customer satisfaction, improve operational efficiency, and reduce pressure on your agents by automating repetitive tasks.

However, due to the many digital channels on which customers can reach brands, agents are required to do more complex tasks faster than before. Quality assurance today is simply not possible with yesterday’s methods that sampled just a few interactions per agent per month—and worked with an incomplete set of data, as well as incomplete view of agent and team compliance.

You must find a way to ramp up agents faster, while keeping your operational costs low. Scaling up your QA programs by implementing state-of-the-art quality assurance software and using  automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are your best bets for that.

Below we’ve listed some best practices our customers have shared with us about improving call center quality with QA software and AI—without breaking the bank.

1. Monitor Interactions Across All Channels

To be able to keep up your quality scores and improve CX, you must continuously track and assess multiple customer support channels, not just calls.

An omnichannel contact center approach is key to improving your call center quality. If you’re limiting your quality assurance to voice, while a huge number of interactions happen on different, digital channels, you can easily fail to see what’s going on in those interactions.

Monitoring and screening each conversation manually is not an option. Even if you had that many supervisors to spare, manual quality management would remain costly and ineffective.

Instead, you can use automated quality technologies to gain visibility into all your human and chatbot interactions, and pinpoint performance issues.

Verint Performance Scoring Bot can help you autoscore up to 100 percent of your interactions, track performance KPIs, and identify trends in performance. By automating these time-consuming tasks, you can optimize your resource allocation, allowing human employees to focus on more value-added tasks, such as coaching.

2. Monitor All Calls to Avoid Non-Compliant Interactions

Failing to comply with regulations can lead to poor CX, negative brand perception, hefty fines, and lost business. Automation can help you effectively mitigate risks.

Verint Compliance Scoring Bot can effortlessly help you achieve complete call coverage by monitoring and automating your compliance evaluations across all your voice and text-based interactions. The bot identifies compliance risks and sends notifications when a potential case of non-compliance is detected.

With it, you can better comply with external regulations, such as PCI-DSS, data privacy laws, or any industry-specific regulations—and easily adhere to your internal workflows and processes.

3. Uncover Coaching Opportunities for Your Agents

To provide quality customer service, you must ensure that each of your agents performs as your very best agent. That can be best achieved by making performance reviews timely and objective, providing your agents with personalized coaching, and keeping track of post-training performance trends.

To help you create an unbiased evaluation framework, Verint Quality Template Bot can set up scoring rules based on your manual evaluation forms. By simply examining a few examples of what an ideal agent response looks like for each question, the bot uses Generative AI to create a rule to refine the scoring model. Being able to create scoring rules quickly and effortlessly can significantly improve call center quality.

Once you’ve identified improvement opportunities in your employees’ performance, you can also achieve AI business outcomes on the agent coaching front. With Verint Coaching Bots, your agents can receive in-the-moment guidance when they most need it, helping you elevate their performance and delivering significant ROI.

Learn more about call center agent training and coaching here.

Improve Call Center Quality with Verint Automated Quality Management Solutions

Verint Quality Bots were designed to automate your quality program to deliver business outcomes quickly with AI-powered automation.

Learn more about Automated Quality Management with Verint Quality Bots here that can help improve call center quality.

Interested in our full selection of Verint Specialized Bots? Get to know them here.

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¹ Leading American health care company with 1,200 contact center agents.