Monitoring calls for training

Listening to customers and understanding how call center staff are dealing with customer calls can provide great staff support and training, and improve customer experience.

Measuring call quality by monitoring involves observing and listening to calls, both in real-time and after the fact (via call recordings). It also helps call center supervisors to better understand staff and customers and provides a way for them to step-in with additional training and support as needed.

What call center monitoring tools can you use?

There are several call monitoring solutions that you can use to get a better idea of your call center’s performance, your agents’ abilities, and your call quality. It’s typical for an organization to monitor a very small percentage of calls to assess quality, risk, and compliance but monitoring and analyzing every call as they happen, can really boost training and improve the quality of customer interactions at scale.

Call recording software

Recording every call made to your organization is important for training, compliance, and quality assurance purposes. Your team can filter them, search for specific interactions, and play back calls for evaluation or training.

Speech analytics

Speech analytics or conversational analytics, allows you to monitor every call and understand the emotion, intent, and sentiment of a customer. By monitoring in real-time, you can quickly understand trends, what might need to be fixed, and resolve issues before a customer decides to hang-up in frustration and take their business elsewhere.

Speech analytics also helps you to understand how your agents are feeling and performing – for example, do they sound friendly, knowledgeable, and empathetic? Are there any areas they need further coaching on? Conversation analytics can help your agents understand how to handle sensitive customer issues in the future and help you develop a best practice framework for agents to follow.

Automatic call scoring

With automatic call quality scoring, call center software is used to give a numerical value to the quality of the calls being made by your staff. These calls can be evaluated based on adherence to call scripts or to the number of upsells made etc, depending on your business goals.

This process can be completed manually, but with automatic scoring, you are able to consider every call rather than using a small percentage sample to evaluate.

Workforce management software

Ensuring that your call center teams have the information and the support they need to provide an excellent customer experience should form a large part of your monitoring and assurance process. If your team isn’t managed or supported properly, quality is likely to suffer. Workforce management software can help agents to improve, while helping managers identify weak links in the process and implement more training.

Benefits of call monitoring

Your agents are valuable assets to your business and the front-line voice of your brand. Your agents’ experience as employees is critical and call monitoring should improve their capacity to feel satisfied with a job well done.

Customers have high expectations when it comes to business interaction, and by exceeding these expectations you’re increasing your chances of them coming back. Call center monitoring software can help you identify customer sentiment and provide the best response in the moment in addition to anticipating future preferences.

Without in-depth analysis of the calls your customers make, and your agents receive, you can’t be sure whether you are meeting and exceeding service and quality expectations. Understanding how team members adapt to each call, defuse tension, demonstrate empathy, and turn around negative sentiment is key to maximizing agent effectiveness and making sure they’re being trained and coached in the right way, on the right things, at the right time.

Call monitoring can be the eyes and ears of your business, scanning calls in real time to get the most accurate understanding of how well your agents are performing. Better yet, it can provide insights for training to improve performance across the board – you can develop key performance indicators that reflect how you want customers to act and feel, instead of focusing all of your attention on first call resolution rates or average call times.