How Can Call Centre Software Improve Quality Assurance?

Dick Bourke of Scorebuddy discusses how you can use contact centre tools to improve quality assurance (QA).

Call centre QA is how you determine if your agents are meeting your goals. It’s your opportunity to identify the effectiveness of your customer service and improve the overall customer experience.

Typically, quality assurance is a detailed assessment that includes overarching call centre metrics such as NPS ratings, customer surveys, and productivity metrics. And on a more personal level, it assesses individual customer and agent interactions to assess professionalism, resolution, and satisfaction.

If you’re looking to provide an exemplary customer experience, call centre QA is essential for monitoring your performance and gaining insights. And one of the easiest and most effective ways to perform regular quality assurance is to use call centre software.

Choosing Your Call Centre QA Software

Call centre software is a vital productivity tool that can simplify your quality assurance process. The right software can help you:

• Maintain call quality standards
• Adhere to compliance
• Boost customer experience
• Reinforce customer retention
• Keep track of and improve quality assurance metrics

The key is choosing software that has the appropriate features to handle all of your call centre quality assurance needs. In particular, there are five key features you should keep in mind when choosing your call centre software.

1. Automatic Call Volume Distribution: The number of customer service calls is growing. In 2017, 64% of Americans contacted some form of customer service, according to Statista research. Software that offers automatic call distribution helps you manage customer calls methodically and smoothly, no matter how large the load.
2. Self-Help Tools: When you help your customer save time and effort in finding a resolution to their problem, the customer experience improves infinitely. The truth is that most US consumers prefer automated self-service for simple customer service tasks. Call centre software that provides easy-to-use self-help tools for customers reduces the pressure on your agents and satisfies your help-seeking customers.
3. Call Routing: Routing calls on the basis of agent skills expedites the customer service process. It saves time, reduces frustration, and improves your first call resolution rate.
4. Real-Time Reporting: Real-time reporting helps you measure productivity, effectiveness, and customer experience, so you can continually improve. Data and metrics are essential for making meaningful changes to your customer service.
5. Integration: Your call centre software should also integrate with all of your other customer-facing tools, including CRM. In this way, you can provide a cohesive experience for all of your customers.

Effectively Using Your Call Centre Software

Once you’ve chosen the appropriate call centre software, you then need to make sure that you can use it. If you don’t take advantage of its full capabilities, not only are you leaving money on the table, you’re missing out on all the ways you can improve call centre QA.

Feedback, Support, and Training

The first step to effectively using your call centre software is to provide early and regular training. From the moment you hire an agent, they should be coached on how best to use the software until they are confident in their knowledge and experience. Then, it’s essential to keep up with training on a monthly or quarterly basis to ensure that everyone is using the software as effectively as possible.

And don’t forget to get feedback from your agents on how best to use the software. Monitor and assess how your team uses the call centre software on a regular basis, so you can update best practices as applicable.

Updates and Innovation

The best call centre software solutions should continually provide updates and new innovations. Keep track of new features and monitor trends, so that you can implement any helpful updates as soon as they are released. Not only does this keep you on the cutting edge, but it also ensures you get the biggest bang for your buck.

Technical and Usability Issues

No software is perfect. Inevitably, there will be technical and usability issues that your team runs into. The key is to pay attention to any failures and then reach out to the call centre software team with your feedback. They should be able to implement quick fixes, updates, and workarounds, so you can get back to focusing on customer service.

Regularly Evaluate Your QA

Just remember, call centre quality assurance isn’t a process you can set up once and then ignore. Just as you should regularly check for updates and innovation in your call centre software, you should develop and maintain evaluation forms about your quality assurance process. These evaluation forms will become the gold standard against which your call centre QA will be measured.

To gain a comprehensive understanding of your QA process, these forms should:

• Identify important business and call centre goals.
• Map your goals to call centre KPIs.
• Include a performance scorecard that allows you to score agents against certain metrics.

The aim of your QA forms is to consistently improve your call centre QA process by monitoring what is working well and what isn’t.

External Benchmarking Is a Must

But regularly checking how you’re doing isn’t enough. It’s also crucial that you keep up with how your competition is performing. How you are measuring up to other call centres will help you home in on what you’re doing well and what you can do better.

To get started, focus on benchmarking based on KPIs. Then, take a look at the top performers in your industry to see how they stack up. From there, choose one QA area to improve before moving on. Benchmarking is a continuous loop that helps you reach and remain a leader in call centre customer service.

Solid call centre QA is essential to a positive customer experience, and call centre software is a vital tool in the process. Without the right software and knowing how to use it, you won’t be as effective at getting the job done.

Installing and using the right software is only half the battle. You have to continually work at improving the QA process and benchmarking against your competitors if you want to be a customer service leader.