At the heart of any call center is customer service. Call monitoring is an effective method to evaluate and improve the efficiency of your customer service in your startup. The main objective of call monitoring is to detect and analyze calls that fail to provide satisfactory service. It also provides the means to identify and acknowledge practices that deliver positive results.
Considering the increasing volume of calls that startups have to handle on a daily basis, it has become essential to devise ways and adopt practices that can evaluate and analyze calls effectively.
We have covered some tips to improve your call monitoring practices in startups and small businesses.
- Monitor all Recorded Calls
The basic purpose of call quality monitoring is to gain a comprehensive view about the way customer-agent interactions unfold day in and day out. To be able to fully comprehend the service interactions, managers need to monitor each and every recorded call. A common practice is to monitor just a few random calls for the purpose of analyzing the interactions. This practice often leaves them with incomplete data, which is not sufficient to serve their purpose accurately. In order to get a complete idea about the performance of agents while interacting with customers, a manager must analyze all the calls using a speech analytics system. This practice will enable the managers to record every call and monitor their quality in real time.
- Consider Call Effectiveness when Looking at Metrics
There are certain metrics that call center managers look into, while monitoring calls. However, in their rush to analyze those metrics, managers must not give call quality a miss. By placing too much emphasis on the metrics, they often undermine measuring the aspects that customers place value on. For instance, the Average Handling Time (AHT) is a metric that is given much importance by the managers while conducting call monitoring.
Average handling time assumes significance as it reflects the average time required by an agent to get through the calls. While considering the average handling time, managers often ignore how effective the call was from the customer’s point of view. It is quite possible for an agent to clock in longer average handling time while making strong efforts to resolve customer issues. Managers must align the business objectives with customer’s needs, when monitoring the interactions of the agents with the customers.
- Involve Agents in the Monitoring Process
When monitoring calls for quality, managers must involve agents in the process. By asking agents to share their feedback or opinions about the calls, managers can gain a broad view of the practices that work well for the agents as well as the factors that impact their interactions with customers. Managers must provide agents with a clear idea, regarding the parameters involved in the monitoring process. By demonstrating examples of exceptional, average, and poor quality of calls, managers can help agents become aware of how they are being evaluated. This will enable agents to have a better idea about the performance expected from them and they will be in a better position to adjust their behaviour as per the requirement. By adopting such measures of monitoring practices, managers can get actionable insights and bring about real performance changes in the startup.
- Provide Proper Training to Agents
Agents need to be trained and coached suitably in order to improve their performance during customer call interactions. Managers must take the initiative to identify the areas where agents need to improve. They must train and equip agents with varied tools of success such as behavioural training, video tutorials, and call scripts for consistent quality, updated information regarding the services and products, etc.
Such efforts will help to improve the knowledge of the agents and increase their confidence so far as interacting with customers is concerned. If there is a recording of a specific call that can serve as an example of best customer interaction, managers must present the call during the training to help agents recognize and understand the skills needed to handle such calls. All these efforts will culminate into enabling agents to deliver improved customer service.
