Streamline Your Call Center's QA Program With 4 Key Features

One of the biggest mistakes that businesses make with call center quality assurance (QA) programs is that they allow the mechanics to become far too complicated. At a certain point, you hit diminishing returns - meaning you're not getting nearly the level of insights that you'd hoped for despite collecting more data, or assigning out more tickets to grade.

Thankfully, there are a number of important features to look for in call center QA software that will help streamline - and improve - your program moving forward.

What is Call Center Quality Assurance?

The goal of any call center is to help an organization's customers. A call center quality assurance program is one that intends to make sure they're actually accomplishing that goal in the most efficient way possible by ensuring that customer interactions are on-point.

Obviously, team leaders want to make sure that all of their call center agents are operating at peak efficiency and that they're giving the right impression of the brand with each call that they take. But managers and business executives can benefit from a call center quality assurance process too.

Those organizational leaders can use quality assurance programs to keep track of the overall quality of their customer support interactions. They can use the data generated from them to make organizational improvements that increase customer loyalty and retention through a call center QA framework. They can even be important in terms of raising brand awareness - after all, a satisfied customer is likely to tell friends and family members about that business.

Regardless, the overall outcome desired from a call center quality assurance program is to improve the experience that an organization is able to offer its customers. That experience can and likely will form the basis of their own competitive advantage, which is why this is all so important to call center performance.

4 Features That Streamline Your QA Program

1. Automated Grading Assignments

Historically, grading has been the key action underlying call center QA programs - but it has always been time-consuming to sort assign out tickets to graders. Thankfully, technology has advanced to the point where a lot of these manual and repetitive tasks can be performed accurately and instantly, with tools such as Auto QA. This frees up the valuable time of QA specialists and managers so that they can focus on those matters that truly require their attention - like diving deep into improvements to CX.

Examples of this include things like automatic ticket assignments based on tags, ticket status, or other fields. 

2. Custom Scorecards

Custom scorecards are also an important way to improve the efficiency of your call center's QA program, as they better align the data that you're capturing with the organization's unique goals.

Agent performance of a customer service team is something that is crucial to monitor, but it's also a relative term. Depending on what your goals are, the definition of "quality performance" may change - meaning that what you're paying attention to needs to evolve just as quickly.

Thankfully, most modern QA tools allow you to customize your scorecards with a scorecard builder, according to your business' own goals and KPIs.

One important key performance indicator (KPI) is Average Handle Time or AHT. This helps you better understand how long it is taking to answer certain concerns that customers may have. Another might be Average Speed of Answering or ASA, for example. This helps make sure that call center agents are actually connecting with customers as quickly as possible. 

Another important quality metric is your customer satisfaction score (CSAT score), which measures how happy customers are with their current interaction with your company. Although this is just one factor to consider when evaluating call center performance, finding methods to improve your CSAT score can provide valuable insights to your customer journey. 

Improving quality metrics like these improves the quality of the user experience, which is really what this is all about.

3. Screen Capture

Screen capture is an important feature to look for when it comes to a solution that can streamline your call center's quality assurance process. This is especially true when it comes to evaluating and improving agent performance for future improvement down the road.

Screen capture helps team leaders better understand the exact journey that agents are having as they attempt to help customers. Ultimately, optimizations made from these insights speed up agents' response times and give customers a speedier experience.

4. A Centralized Platform

All of the above attributes are great - but ideally they all can function together to create a seamless QA program. Housing all of these capabilities in one centralized platform is key to saving time and money in your QA process - and to improving the customer experience! Call center quality assurance software is a solution that fills in that gap and provides a platform that includes tools for agent training, coaching sessions, and creating a strategic QA framework to improve call center performance.

Find a QA Platform That Drives CX and Agent Performance

Features like the ones outlined above are more than just an afterthought for your quality assurance program. They're ideal ways to mitigate a lot of the challenges that such programs face to begin with.

Oftentimes, ineffective quality assurance ultimately comes down to a lack of actionable information. You know you have an issue, but you don't know exactly what it is. These features allow you to see "the bigger picture," giving you as much data as possible so that you can make better and more accurate decisions moving forward.

Maestro's QA solution has all of these capabilities and more and is more than ready to take your call center to the next level. So to get additional information about how to streamline your call center's QA program, or to speak to someone about your own needs in a bit more detail, please feel free to contact us today.