Quality assurance isn’t just for Agents!

How investing in Quality Assurance Software benefits your operational efficiency, employee satisfaction and customer success. 

Quality assurance is the most effective way of improving your call centre’s performance and customer lifetime. Effective Quality Assurance Software enables managers to spot problems within their call centre by monitoring the interactions between the agents and customers. However, most businesses fail to maintain call quality standards and adhere to compliance due to neglecting quality assurance, investing in the wrong software and poor customer training. Investing in a Quality Assurance Solution will help your call centre achieve business goals, identify and eliminate agent’s mistakes, pinpoint common customer issues, and enhance overall communication for a more consistent customer experience.

What is quality assurance in a call centre? 

Quality assurance is monitoring an agent’s call and evaluating the performance and quality to ensure that every customer receives a positive customer support experience. Call centre managers use quality assurance to determine KPIs and if agents perform according to the standards and compliance of the company. Furthermore, quality assurance is the most effective way of maintaining consistency regarding the quality of support provided by agents. By monitoring the customer interactions, it is easier for the call centre managers to identify individual performances of agents, discover mistakes and provide additional training and methods to improve operational efficiency.

What is Quality Assurance Software?

The majority of call centre managers cannot discover performance issues within their team fast enough due to the volume of incoming calls. Especially in a high volume call centre, evaluating each customer interaction and agent performance takes too much time. It, therefore, leads to managers not being able to provide timely relevant department feedback or improve their call centre’s efficiency. Call centres that have not migrated to a quality assurance solution yet and are still attempting to manage it manually are predominantly failing to improve the quality of their customer service. However, most modern call centres migrate and rely on quality assurance software. This software is a digital tool that helps to provide a framework for taking action, tracking and monitoring interactions between agents and customers, customer surveys, call resolution, and storing performance data and overall metrics. Furthermore, to invest in the right quality assurance software, it is crucial to determine your call centre’s needs before selecting. This article aims to understand why quality assurance isn’t just for the agents and how it can help your business improve customer satisfaction and employee engagement.

Why should your business invest in Quality Assurance Software?

Businesses that have invested in Quality Assurance Software have shown a significant increase in efficiency, customer retention and satisfaction and a decrease in operational costs. However, most call centres struggle to provide a consistent experience and find difficulty adjusting their department’s goals to satisfy the customer’s needs and the company’s representation. However, Quality Assurance helps your business align its processes to customer expectations, determine what is essential to your business, and ensure compliance. Furthermore, the software can identify flaws and mistakes in the process, which is crucial for call centre managers to improve their team and overall the quality of the customer support. In addition, cloud-based quality assurance software provides real-time reporting and can store more customer data which benefits call centres in the long run. 

In short, the benefits of quality assurance are numerous. Investing in quality assurance software will be crucial for your company to adjust your business goals, improve your call centre’s productivity, get insight into your agent’s performance, and enhance employee experience. 

Benefits of Quality Assurance Software

One of the most significant benefits of cloud-based Quality Assurance Software is its ability to store and monitor every customer interaction whilst simultaneously collecting valuable real-time customer data. The software can capture data across calls, emails, and social media channels. The process of gathering and evaluating data is accessible as the software automates the entire process and provides real-time reporting and analytics, making the process quicker and less cost-effective. Data stored in the cloud is easily accessible to managers and agents. Intelligent data collection and analytics help your business determine its call centre metrics and better understand the customer’s preferences and needs. In short, data collection through quality assurance software will help your call centre collect and process customer data more efficiently and enable you to adjust your call centre’s objective and provide a better and more customer-tailored experience.

The main aim of quality assurance is constant improvement. A vital feature of a well structured Quality Assurance Software is the real-time reporting function of the dashboard. Instead of wasting time and money on manually creating reports, excel sheets and evaluation graphics, the software reduces hours spent on reporting through the automation of call centre analytics. With real-time reporting, your call centre will be able to determine new and more appropriate call quality metrics tailored to the customer’s needs and lead to an immediate increase in productivity and efficiency of your call centre. Furthermore, the dashboard gives managers insight into team performance and helps to better understand the objectives, strengths and weaknesses of your team, and common mistakes. This enables call centre managers to understand better their agent’s needs and the potential need for additional training.

Quality Assurance Software helps call centres identify flaws in their process and highlight agents’ most common mistakes. The software’s core feature is call monitoring and recording, which enables managers to evaluate individual agent performance and ensure that their performance aligns with compliance and the business objectives. Therefore, managers can discover mistakes quicker and pinpoint what areas require improvement and additional training. Investing in Quality Assurance Software usually results in reduced hours, improved operational efficiency and training, the quicker discovery of mistakes in the process, quicker resolution of operation mistakes and productivity and lowered operating cost. 

A neglected employee experience can heavily impact your call centre's productivity and overall motivation. In addition, call centres tend to have a high turnover rate. Not equipping your team with the right tools, technology, and training will result in frustrated agents, a stressed and unmotivated work environment, and decreased employee retention. The source of bad customer service and a poorly performing call centre is mainly an agent lacking the relevant training, skills and ability to handle a customer query accordingly. Quality assurance software helps managers identify the weaknesses of their team and therefore helps to adjust training more to the employee's needs rather than providing a too generic training session. Therefore, quality assurance is crucial and should be a continuous process to achieve a better experience for employees and customers. Quality Assurance helps equip your agents with new skills and improved training sessions, enabling them to be more confident in their abilities and more motivated at work. Personalising training sessions will make your employees feel more heard and seen at their workplace and contribute to happier and better performing employees.

When handling a large volume of calls, it can be challenging to ensure continuous quality support. Call centre managers struggle to find a way to ensure all agents are on the same page and abide by the team goals and company policy. However, quality assurance aims to determine metrics and analyse the department's overall success. It provides insight into your call centre's performance and collects customer data, which helps identify the customer needs and if the agents operate towards meeting those needs. Evaluating those customer and agent interactions with the help of the call monitoring feature of the software will help your business set clear objectives. Furthermore, agents aware of call monitoring and quality checks are more likely to perform better and maintain call quality standards as they know it could reflect on their individual and team performance. 

Quality Assurance Software gathers customer data and helps to identify the most common customer issues. By collecting and evaluating customer data, managers are more likely to pinpoint customer needs, adjust specific processes, and implement new guidelines. In addition, Quality Assurance Software helps your call centre to provide a more positive, practical and personalised customer experience. Personalising the customer experience with the gathered data from diverse channels will enhance the customer experience and make the customer feel more heard and valued, rather than getting frustrated when interacting with an unmotivated agent. Improving customer handling automatically increases customer lifetime, and customers are more likely to stay loyal to the business. 

One of the most challenging aspects of managing a call centre is to make sure your agents abide by compliance. With years of the industry-changing and evolving, data regulations and privacy policies have also changed. Nowadays, a large variety of global regulations a call centre must follow, such as consent to call monitoring and GDPR. These regulations must be taken seriously as violations against them can have drastic consequences on your business. However, you can integrate compliance checks into the quality assurance process and metrics. As the software can identify mistakes and flaws in agents' interactions with customers, it can also pinpoint potential security breaches and alert when an agent is handling sensitive customer data poorly. When the Quality Assurance Software alerts of a security breach from an agent, managers can provide additional training to ensure that the entire team is familiar with the guidelines and compliance of the business. Implementing security control measures to ensure your call centre is abiding by compliance is crucial to maintaining a trustworthy and professional company reputation.

Final thoughts

Quality Assurance Software enables your business to improve your customer support quality continuously. Investing in a Quality Assurance Solution has been shown to reduce operational costs, improve employee productivity and experience and enhance customer retention. Being able to provide tailored training to your employees and tailored and personalised support to your customers heavily impacts your business reputation and overall call centre success. Quality Assurance enables you to determine your business objectives and evaluate whether or not your company meets its customer needs and is heading in the right direction. The software collects valuable customer data that will help your call centre understand the needs of the customers better and tailor customer support procedures to the customer and benefit your business in the long run and enable a higher quality environment for employees and customers. Investing in a QAS benefits agents, call centre managers and customers. 

In short, Quality Assurance Software will be an essential tool to bring your company's customer and employee experience and company image to the next level.