Call Quality Score
What is a Call Quality Score?
Call quality scoring refers to the process of measuring the effectiveness of conversations between a customer service representative and a customer. Customer service calls are measured and analyzed to determine the efficacy of customer interactions and agent performance. This provides companies with customer insights that can be acted upon to improve interactions in the future.
The metrics used to calculate a call quality score are determined by the company. Common call quality KPIs include:
Call response time
Average waiting times
First call resolution
Audio Quality
Customer satisfaction surveys
Call quality scoring is an essential practice to increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, retention, and customer lifetime value.
The Benefits of Call Quality Scoring and Monitoring
Monitoring allows companies to pinpoint the aspects of service that need to be improved upon such as response times or first-call resolution levels. Processes such as staff training, new technology integration, or refined workflows can be introduced based on the issues identified.
Below are some key benefits associated with call quality scoring and monitoring:
Improved Employee Performance
Call quality scoring and monitoring allows supervisors to provide accurate and actionable feedback to customer service staff. Identifying areas for improvement enables supervisors to offer constructive coaching and allocate additional training when necessary. This helps customer service representatives to develop their skills and confidence. This leads to increases in both employee and customer satisfaction.
Increased Customer Satisfaction
Conversely, the monitoring of calls can help companies identify customer needs, pain points, and preferences. This deepened understanding of customer expectations and sentiments can be used to enhance the customer experience.
Process Refinement
The data gathered through call monitoring and scoring provides actionable data and insights. These insights can be used to identify operational inefficiencies, absent service features desired by customers, and further areas for improvement. For example, if collated insights indicate suboptimal first response times. Measures can then be taken to address the issue.
Training and Compliance
Call monitoring is a critical practice for companies operating in industries with strict compliance regulations. Call supervisors can monitor conversations to ensure employee adherence with predefined procedures and protocols. This aids to safeguard sensitive customer information and mitigates the risk of non-compliance penalties.
How to Improve Call Quality Scores
For many industries, call quality scoring and monitoring is a common characteristic across companies. For some industries, it’s an essential practice. When conducting call quality scoring and monitoring, there are several steps which can be taken to optimise its associated benefits. Below are some best practice examples:
- Establish a call quality analysis team: It’s important to outline a team of call quality analysts to measure call quality. The team can be comprised of internal employees with a strong understanding of customer service or a third party providing trained professional with deep call quality analysis expertise. The latter offers the additional benefit of unbiased analysis.
- Create scorecards: Once a team has been established, they should create scorecards to outline the criteria customer interactions will be evaluated on. Involving customer service staff in this process is an effective method to maintain best practice. Once the call QA team and customer service staff have a mutual understanding of expectations and goals, they’ll be more likely to achieve them.
- Differentiate scorecards based on scenarios: In many companies, the customer service department is segmented into teams with differing functions. For example, some employees may handle disgruntled customers while others may specialise in upselling to happy customers, both of which mandate separate scoring criteria.
- Celebrate successful interactions: While the core function of call monitoring is to identify and correct issues with customer calls, it’s important to recognize high-quality customer interactions. Focusing exclusively on the negatives can lead to decreases in employee morale. Recognize the positives and reward employees for their achievements.
- Archive high-quality calls for employee reference: Another best practice is the storage of very successful customer calls. These calls can be shown to new and existing employees to help them improve their own customer interactions. Clearly outline the specific actions taken to achieve such a successful call and how they created a highly positive experience for the customer.
- Make process adjustments when necessary: In some cases, an issue decreasing call quality scores may be due to an employee mistake. However, in other cases, QA teams will observe recurring issues across staff. This indicates a shortcoming in the process, not the employees. For example, if average waiting times are at a moderate level for a company before they enter a seasonal surge, these waiting times will increase significantly due to volume increases. Implementing customer service tools to automate parts of the support process or consulting third-party experts on how to improve efficiencies is an effective way to circumvent this type of problem.
- Offer feedback in person: Once call monitoring is complete, meet employees face-to-face to provide them with feedback. This is crucial to avoid the risk of misinterpretation of feedback by employees receiving written feedback. Furthermore, it’s easier to ensure employees fully understand the feedback they receive and act upon it when conversing in person.
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