Delivering excellent customer service is only possible when many business areas contribute in some way or the other. The organization’s website should be user-friendly and navigable, frontline staff should be friendly while interacting with customers, and agents in the call center should be extremely knowledgeable.
A key strategy to deliver consistent and superb customer service through a contact center is to regularly engage in systematic call calibration process. In these sessions, the agents of a contact center and their supervisors come together along with a vendor who is entrusted with monitoring quality.
The aim of such sessions is to discuss and rate how customer calls were handled by the agents. Thus, call calibration session is a critical strategy for ensuring that your quality assurance teams, supervisors, and managers can evaluate the call handling performance of agents, so that customer service can be improved.
All employees are entitled to rate a call prior to the commencement of a call calibration process. When a calibration process is underway, the vendor who has been hired for quality monitoring activities provides training to the agents, as well as, supervisors on certain key technical attributes such as procedural and compliance issues. The vendor may also conduct training on various soft skill parameters such as helpfulness, politeness, and empathy. There are various reasons why call calibration processes are so critical for a call center.
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Let us take a look at the four major purposes of call calibration process:-
- Improvements through Coaching
Certain tweaking or adjustments are required to be done if a call center agent faces difficulty with some technical behaviors. Examples of such cases can be as follows:
Forgot to conduct the process of identity verification. (technical behavior).
The customer is unable to understand as the agent speaks too fast for his or her comfort. (soft skills).
A call calibration session is an apt occasion while these issues can be well addressed. The process also makes sure that all the call center agents appreciate the proper policies and procedures so that the service calls for customers are successful.
- Various Parties are Rated Objectively and Consistently
Irrespective of the channel your customers choose to contact you, they should be treated with the same degree of process standardization, helpfulness, friendliness, and above all problem solving aptitude. Thus, one of the major objectives of a call calibration session is to make sure that there is proper consistency across channels, be with online, phone, chat, social media, or others.
- All Parties have Similar Understanding on How Calls are Rated
It is necessary that each employee should be on the same wavelength with respect to appreciating the company’s strategic goals and its service delivery. A good example of this scenario is that the customer service agents, who are operating online, should have the same level of knowledge as that of your in-store staff, as far as services and products are concerned. A calibration session makes sure that all are adhering to the same set of guidelines and training requirements.
- Reveal all Portions of a Company’s Guidelines
Every company has its own set of business process, procedures, and work instructions in place so that issues related to customer service can be properly addressed. Adequate quality checks are set up so that agents follow these procedures and guidelines to identify all such processes that are not enabling the best ever customer experience
Tips for an Excellent Call Calibration Process
- Ideally, the duration of a call calibration session is not more than an hour. However, when your team requires some extra time, it is important that you extend the time. If there are differences in the culture, it may have an impact on customer experience. Make sure to adapt the calibration session to accommodate changes.
- A call calibration session needs to be performed at least once in every month. However, if you host a greater number of calibrations when your program begins, it will make sure that everything is functioning without any hiccups. Conducting a weekly calibration session should be encouraged by the management.
- When call calibrations are done consistently, quality assurance team, trainers, and campaign leaders can review the quality of customer interaction, use the evaluation form for comparing quality scores, and can have productive discussions surrounding a campaign.
- It is a vital tool for making sure that there is an excellent customer experience irrespective of the channels used by the customers. When service delivery of a contact center is strong, customers become happy and as a result brand loyalty gets a huge boost.
Also Read: How Change in Call Center Culture can Root out Negativity