30 Tips To Improve Your Call Quality Monitoring

30 tips to improve your call quality monitoring
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Monitoring isnt all about spotting problems and dealing with them.
Its also about identifying and amplifying positive messages. Even
in todays technologically sophisticated contact centres, a simple
thank you can work wonders. Here our panels of experts share
their tips with us.
1. Make good use of the information you gather
James Le Roth
Call quality monitoring is essential for any contact centre, providing

invaluable insight into how you are performing and what
consumers are really experiencing.
The most useful results often stem from measuring and
improvement processes that go beyond monitoring sample calls,
impinging on wider areas of the business, from the setting and
evaluating of standards, to advisor coaching, through to the training
and development of staff.
2. Get the small things right
Having said that, regular monitoring is a good way of maintaining
best practice, ensuring advisors get the details right: greeting
consumers appropriately, adhering to the laid-down call structure,
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and using agreed positive phases throughout the call.

With regular quality monitoring, you can prevent bad habits
creeping in, spreading from advisor to advisor, and contact centre
to contact centre. Regular monitoring, support, feedback and
training all help you maintain your high standards.
3. It doesnt have to be hi-tech
But you dont have to go hi-tech. Remember, some monitoring
even the most basic is better than no monitoring at all. You can
start with simple activities a spreadsheet with tick boxes filled in
manually and work your way up slowly. And if you set realistic
targets, achieving them will be motivating, paving the way to other
more ambitious goals.
4. Were not out to catch you out

Winning employee engagement and involvement from early on in
the monitoring process is essential.
When monitoring is first introduced, theres a tendency for some
people to think it will be critical. On the other hand, where a
monitoring system has been in place unchanged for a long time,
advisors may start to take it for granted.
Call quality monitoring is not or should not be a negative,
top-down activity, designed to trip advisors up. In the best contact
centres, it is an integral part of the skills programme, of benefit to
advisors as well as consumers.
Monitoring that is collaborative rather than prescriptive, inclusive
rather than authoritarian, is likely to lead to more acceptance and
co-operation. Most advisors find it helpful to know what the
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company expects of them and why their calls are important to the
business and its customers.
5. Feedback, support and training are fundamental
Feedback from the monitoring process should be objective, using a
method of scoring and evaluating that is fair and agreed by all in
advance, and it must be consistent and regular. Once milestones are
agreed and set, they must be kept to, built on and progressed.
Feedback can be delivered one-to-one, remotely, or via group
sessions where advisors share and spread best practice. Whatever
method is selected, the important thing is that there is an
opportunity for individual advisors to contribute to the discussion.
Not only does this encourage their buy-in to the process, their
comments and suggestions are often extremely insightful. But bear
in mind that advisors are sometimes harder on their own and
colleagues performances than supervisors would be.
Staff support should be provided through interventions such as
refresher and formal skills training, and development and action
plans to improve advisor performance, always with the aim of
improving the customer experience and achieving your business
objectives.
6. Quality people for quality monitoring
Quality evaluation is only as good as the person doing the
evaluating.
If possible, its worthwhile investing in a dedicated person or, in
the case of larger contact centres, a specialist team to monitor
quality in your contact centre. Supervisors are there to manage the
floor and plan campaigns, not to monitor quality. By giving that
role to a dedicated individual or team, you leave your operational
staff free to manage.
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Once you have identified someone to handle monitoring, evaluating

and training, give them the resources, training and skills they need
to carry out appraisals, coaching, training and development, either
by developing your own people or by recruiting in the required
expertise.
7. Time and effort spent on

monitoring is never wasted
Theres a direct correlation between call quality and the accuracy,
frequency and excellence of monitoring and coaching. The equation
is simple: the more time and effort you invest in monitoring and
coaching, the better the service to your customers will be, and the
bigger the benefits to sales and customer retention levels.
8. External benchmarking
As well as internal monitoring, its also helpful to compare your
performance with others, especially the competition. Internal
checks will give you a more subjective picture, which could be
misleading. For a truly objective result, you need external
benchmarking. Contact centres with no monitoring systems or
resources in place should consider outsourcing these functions to
an external agency. It can be a cost-effective option.
9. Reward best practice
Reward high-quality work through mechanisms such as advisor of
the month awards and staff excellence certificates, or highlight it in
your company newsletter and intranet site. And if consumers are
pleased with the service, pass on their messages. Integrate all these
positive points into the companys annual appraisal and benefits
schemes.
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James Le Roth, Eclipse Marketing

________________________________________________________
10. Save your Golden calls
Jonathan Evans
Identify and save examples of your best practice or Golden calls so

that they can be used as a training aid to help continually improve
the overall call handling process.
Jonathan Evans, Senior Business Systems Manager, TNT
Express (www.tnt.com)
________________________________________________________
11. Apply a well-thought-out quality management
procedure
I am amazed at the number of companies who purchase call
recording solutions in order to remain compliant with security or
FSA regulations, that do not have a structured call quality
monitoring policy in place. Its always one of those well get to it
sometime things that might not show itself as important, or
possibly there are other larger fires to fight in your business. Others
may baulk at the inordinate amount of time or effort to manage the
process as well.
If you want to see an uplift in the overall customer experience, a
well-thought-out quality management procedure can work
wonders. It gives your agents something to strive for. It gives you
insight into the core traits and skills that your agents need to
interact with your customers, and the customers themselves will
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also have a more positive experience when doing business with you,
giving your business that competitive advantage.
12. Get your contact centre involved in defining the
criteria
Gene Reynolds
Section the call into a number of points where you can create
criteria which would satisfy the majority of customers. It could be
something very tangible such as offering your name to the caller, or
something more intangible or subjective, such as showing empathy
on the call. People tend to have shied away from those criteria, but,
I can assure you, they are measurable, and there are methods and
tools to coach in those sort of skills.
Make sure you get your contact centre involved in defining the
criteria. The last thing they need is another rule or policy that has
been imposed on them. Having a team of people design the call
quality procedure makes them advocates and champions to the
cause.
13. Put the time into training and coaching
In my experience, the biggest issue where these quality monitoring
processes fall down is a lack of thought put to training and coaching
the skills the agents are going to need in order to succeed. Be sure
you have spent some time with some experts who can show you
how to coach these skills effectively into your operation when
required.
Also, dont underestimate the power of an application to assist your
agents and your team leaders through the procedures. Introducing
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a call quality process will also introduce another load of work on

your team leaders and agents. Be sure to look for applications which
will mitigate this. In some cases, the technology pays for itself in the
form of reclaimed time.
14. Include a feedback process
Lastly, make sure there is a feedback process in your operation to
gauge customer satisfaction when interacting with your operation.
Theres no point in assuming what your customers want in terms of
call quality. A simple yet effective customer advocacy survey will
help to validate the steps you are taking in your operation and will
help identify where to fine tune the process.
Gene Reynolds, Senior Consultant, Corporate
Communications (www.cc.net)
________________________________________________________
15. Define what good looks like
Janette Coulthard
Call monitoring will not be effective unless you fully understand the
reason for monitoring and what you are trying to measure or
discover. Identifying what good or unsatisfactory looks like is
essential for objective and effective call monitoring. Good will be
different depending on the reason for monitoring.
16. Get your scripts right
Ensure the wording in your scripts, or what your agents are
expected to say to be compliant, is identified in your call monitoring
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forms and that your scoring reflects the common understanding of

what would be classed as compliant or a breach.
17. Set up a call quality forum
An additional step of setting up a forum to reach a consensus on
what good looks like will pay dividends. Ensuring that all
stakeholders are agreed on what constitutes good and capturing
the criteria in your monitoring forms will support your call and
quality monitoring staff in achieving the objectivity that is so
essential. It is critical that measurement criteria are clearly defined
and agreed and there is consensus on what good looks like.
18. Set up call levelling sessions

The best way to do this is to set up call levelling sessions that are
held on an ongoing basis. Take a random selection of calls. Get all
stakeholders and, where possible, call monitoring staff, or
managers if this is not feasible, and listen to the calls together.
Score them as you go along.
After each call, discuss the scores for the criteria monitored and
where there is a wide variation, the reasons. If all scores are within
a narrow range youre in luck, but more often than not, there will be
a wide variation between the scores for many elements of the call,
especially when you first start this process. Through the session the
range of scores should narrow as the various stakeholders adjust
their scoring and reach consensus. Over time, opinion and
individuals involved will change so it is important to have regular
call levelling sessions in order to maintain the consensus.
19. Use an independent call monitoring facility
Objective call monitoring can be difficult to achieve and maintain
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when all monitoring activity is carried out internally using your own
people. There are companies who offer independent call monitoring
services and can provide you with a truly objective view of the
quality of your calls, whether they are compliant with the prevailing
industry guidelines and regulations and in some cases
benchmarking. To keep control of costs, look for companies who are
happy to give you a one-off report covering a batch of calls, perhaps
the same batch of calls used for your call levelling sessions.
Janette Coulthard
________________________________________________________
20. Assign quality ownership
Brent Bischoff
It sounds obvious, but if nobody wants to own the process, how can
it be audited and calibrated to ensure it is effective and continues to
improve and adapt to the businesss changing needs? Similarly,
there should be a clearly documented process for monitoring and
evaluating calls, and all agents and team managers should be
trained and familiar with all areas of quality monitoring and how to
get the most from the system they have in place.
21. Develop and maintain evaluation forms
Evaluation forms are at the heart of a good quality monitoring
programme and when compiling them you need to ask yourself:
Am I asking the right questions?
Am I getting the required results? i.e. output which leads to a
continuous coaching and development plan for my team
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Does the scoring mechanism allow agents to provide an

outstanding or Wow factor service not just an average or
satisfactory service?
22. Evaluation dispute process

Agents need to be given the opportunity to dispute their evaluation
if they feel they are not happy with any aspect of it. The dispute
process allows the agent the opportunity to have their evaluation
re-evaluated by another person if they are unhappy with the result.
This way, agents feel they have more control over their call
evaluation, thus further empowering them to take ownership of
their own quality
23. Agent synergy session
Synergy sessions involve groups of agents, team managers, CSMs
and trainers listening to calls together to discuss call-handling
techniques and evaluate the quality of the call. These sessions help
reinforce quality standards and allow new and experienced agents
to share experiences, best practice and provide a natural way to
cross-skill agents from different departments. Recent studies have
shown that agents attending regular synergy sessions achieve
anywhere from 5% to 20% higher quality scores than the overall
contact centre.
Brent Bischoff, Business Solutions Consultant, Business
Systems (UK) Ltd (www.businesssystemsuk.co.uk)
________________________________________________________
24. Keep your call monitoring standardised
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Cameron Ross
Keep your call monitoring standardised and consistent so you can

build a steady, reliable picture of performance within your business.
25. Dont waste time searching
Dont waste time searching through your database for suitable calls
use a tool which allows you to find and recall calls quickly and
easily.
26. Record calls in the background
Remove agents stress from call monitoring by using a solution
which records quietly in the background, without influencing the
behaviour of the individual under assessment. [In one call centre I
went to the agents knew they were being monitored when the
supervisor put her headset on editor]
27. Allow self assessment
Gain buy-in from your teams by allowing agents to self-assess
some of their work make them feel their input is valued and that
your team ethos is inclusive.
28. Make it a habit

Monitor calls on a regular basis to build a progressive picture of
your teams performance.
29. Assess the effectiveness of your training programmes
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Use call quality monitoring to assess the effectiveness of your

training programmes listen in to verify that points taught in
training sessions have been noted and put into practice. Call quality
monitoring is also an easy means of assessing where gaps in
knowledge or practice may exist use this learning to build training
solutions which close those gaps off.
Cameron Ross, Managing Director, Veritape
(www.veritape.com)
________________________________________________________
30. Define what constitutes a quality customer interaction
and what you are measuring
Craig Pumfrey
A typical example of best practise is a call answered in a timely and

appropriate manner, dealt with swiftly and to the customers
satisfaction, meeting service levels and KPIs.
The aim of quality monitoring from an operational point of view is
to identify the calls failing to meet pre-defined standards and get to
the root cause of why. You can then make informed decisions to
make the process better, faster and quicker, e.g. implement or
refine agent training and coaching initiatives to bridge skills gaps,
correct broken internal processes, improve workforce scheduling,
or perhaps alert other areas of the organisation that are having an
impact.
To achieve this you need to be able to evaluate a representative
sample of interactions. The smaller the sample, the less accurate
your benchmark scoring will be and you will run the risk of making
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the wrong decisions.

Using modern recording and quality monitoring tools it is possible
to capture not only the call itself but the activity that took place on
the agents screen and score 100% of the interactions, giving an
accurate and comprehensive view of agent, team, campaign and
overall contact centre performance.
Craig Pumfrey, Director of Marketing Communications
at NICE Systems (www.nice.com)
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30 tips to improve your call quality monitoring

Call quality monitoring is essential for any contact centre, providing