What Is Call Quality, & How Do You Monitor It?

想想您上次打电话给customer service desk. Before the call started, you may have encountered a brief message saying, "This call may be monitored or recorded for quality assurance."

Likely, you moved past this message, only slightly concerned about the Big-Brother-esque privacy invasion. I never thought too much of it, either.

So, does the act of monitoring and recording calls between customers and customer service reps improve the experience? What actions can be taken based on the observed conversations?

Let's explore those questions, beginning with what call quality is and why it's important to customer service call centers.

客户服务销售代表增加的呼叫增加customer lifetime value因为，如果做得很好，它消除了客户正在经历的摩擦。知道这一点，代表应与客户互动，使他们印象深刻，清晰的解决方案，并知道他们可以采取什么措施来防止复发。

但是，除非您专注于提高呼叫质量，否则您无法确保结果，因为每个代表都有不同的技能，并且监视呼叫质量可以帮助确定需要解决的差距。

质量监控

Quality monitoring enables organizations to analyze and capture information derived from customer interactions. Any type of interactions that your business can record could be used for quality monitoring, such as:

• Call recordings
• Customer email exchanges
• Social media interactions
• 客户满意度调查

这些都可以提供洞察力，使公司能够看到更多客户在想什么，但是为什么要付出更多的时间来分析所有信息呢？

Why Quality Monitoring is Important

According to Forbes,96％of customers will leave if they receive poor service. While most are willing to endure a few less-than-ideal interactions, they won’t stick around and keep making purchases if service is consistently poor.

Quality monitoring helps identify areas of improvement in your business — such as customer response, order processing, and第一个通话分辨率— and then create policies and processes that help deliver a repeatable, high-quality experience for customers.

We also asked a HubSpot Customer Support Manager,里维拉·约翰逊, for her take on why quality monitoring matters for a different perspective.

Quality monitoring and its importance extends beyond business, often helping employees make strides for personal improvement, too.

Benefits of Quality Monitoring

Effective call quality monitoring offers three substantive benefits for businesses:

Pinpointing Problems

Reps are people — which means they have strengths and weaknesses when it comes to handling calls. Some may excel at talking down frustrated customers, while others may have great skills in creating new customer connections. On the flip side, some may struggle to deal with angry callers and others may have issues responding to unexpected requests.

Robust call quality monitoring helps managers pinpoint problem areas and offerspecific training推动整体改进。监视还可以确定员工脱颖而出的领域，并确保他们为自己的辛勤工作获得奖励。

Improving Feedback

As noted above, quality monitoring is an ongoing process. Regular coaching sessions are critical to delivering actionable feedback that staff can use to improve call outcomes and boost customer satisfaction.

We asked one of HubSpot’s very own Customer Support Managers,史蒂夫·里兹（Steve Rizzi）, for his perspective on quality monitoring, and he shared, "Being able to listen in to a live call or replay a call with a member of your team is one of the best coaching exercises out there. It’s similar to football teams watching film before an upcoming game. We are able to hear how we approach certain situations and what verbiage we use. Having an individual listen to themselves on a call creates a lightbulb moment so we are able to solve for the customer even better."

Call quality monitoring provides specific details you can’t get from conversations with staff. They may have forgotten details or may choose to omit certain information. By combining call recordings with quantitative data on handling times and overall satisfaction, managers can provide detailed and targeted feedback to team members.

Setting Specific Goals

Goal-setting helps reps achieve measurable success. Call monitoring makes this possible by identifying areas for improvement and providing a path to achieve these goals. Consider the goal of reducing overall handling time. By reviewing recordings, agents and managers can identify areas where conversational flow could be improved or different questions could be asked to facilitate faster handling without compromising service. Regular feedback meetings can then help track the progress of this goal.

These benefits will improve quality assurance processes at a departmental level. Now if you're not getting these results just yet, here are some steps you can take to monitor and improve your team's call quality.

1.雇用团队监视呼叫质量。

First, select people who are most qualified to measure call quality. You may even consider selecting a team of internal employees. This team should include customer service managers or senior agents who thoroughly understand customer service. These people know your company the best and have more experience with your customers.

You can also hire a third-party team to handle call center quality assurance. These services provide trained professionals to measure your call center's call quality. The benefit of this approach is unbiased analysis.

2. Develop scorecards.

Once you have a team in place, they should create scorecards highlighting the factors agents will be evaluated on. You might test for how long the call lasts, how well the agent listens to the customer's problem, and how the agent handles an upset customer.

This is a great opportunity to involve your agents in the quality assurance process. Ask for their input and consider their experiences when developing your benchmarks. By including your call center agents, they'll better understand what they're being scored on and will be prepared to commit to those benchmarks.

3. Differentiate monitoring based on types of calls.

It may make sense to create one quality assurance scorecard to measure all of your calls. However, this raises some red flags. After all, does every agent have the exact same job? Is every phone call identical?

Some customer service calls are proactive, like those made by a customer success agent to offer new products and services. Others are reactive, such as support calls initiated by the customer. In some cases, the customer might have a simple problem and is happy to work with your team. Other times, customers might start the call frustrated without giving your rep a chance to salvage the situation.

One quality assurance scorecard can't accurately measure every type of customer service call. A few scorecards should be made to ensure agents aren't receiving poor scores just because they have to deliver bad news.

4.认识到成功behaviors.

When monitoring for quality assurance, it's easy to get wrapped up in the mistakes and shortcomings of customer calls. These are important to mention to your agents when offering them feedback.

However, focusing solely on the negatives may hinder your team's long-term success. Make sure you also recognize the positives, so your agents know their strengths as well as their weaknesses. Balancing the good with the bad is the best way to both reward employees and present them with opportunities for improvement.

5. Save prime phone calls as future examples.

一些电话接近完美。代理商勾选了所有盒子，让客户感到高兴。致电处理时间是理想的，建立的融洽关系是自然而容易的。

These are the kinds of calls you want to save and show to other agents as part of quality assurance training. Note the specific choices the representative made and how these choices created a more positive experience for the customer. Sometimes, seeing an example of high-quality customer service helps employees get a better grasp on what's being asked of them.

6. Improve processes, not just employees.

It's important for quality assurance teams to know not every shortcoming is the fault of a customer service rep. Mistakes are made, and most employees will own up to them. However, sometimes a recurring problem that emerges across multiple agents means an internal process needs to be revamped.

For instance, you might notice that your support team needs to reduce your customer's time on hold. Start by reminding your reps that all customers need help and sometimes it's acceptable to follow up with them if the case is more complex. This might motivate your reps to pick up the pace, but as customer demand increases, your team will struggle to handle the pressure. By investing incustomer service tools, you can automate your support process and improve your team's overall efficiency.

7. Hold in-person reviews.

完成呼叫监视后，向代理提供了您观察到的内容以及如何得分的反馈。您的员工应该了解并实施您的反馈。

与员工亲自见面以讨论他们的表现至关重要。在线评论或电子邮件是不够的，因为员工可能会错过反馈，误解您在说什么，或者感到困惑，并且需要进一步的解释。最好建立一段关系，让代理商感到自在地向您开放，这是通过面对面的环境最好成就的。

To ensure quality monitoring delivers actionable results, we have some tips your reps can use to improve customer interactions over the phone.

Call Quality Monitoring Best Practices

1. Listen in.

首先，实施监视解决方案，使您可以聆听客户/代理交互。确保代理商和客户都知道他们正在受到监控，并且除非必要，否则不会积极参与。

这里的目标是倾听并了解当前电话的处理方式。代理商问什么类型的问题？它们与组织目标有关吗？客户服务互动会导致积极的销售驱动成果吗？在聆听中，您可以为当前呼叫过程创建一个基线 - 它们在哪里工作？他们在哪里失败？需要改进什么？

2. Capture feedback.

Next, it’s critical tocapture feedbackacross all of your customer service channels. This includes phone calls, emails, social media,questionnaires, and any other customer interactions. This feedback data provides the foundation for service change, so long as it is regularly collected and reliably sourced.

3. Ask questions.

The ultimate goal of quality monitoring is to improve the customer experience — so it only makes sense to ask customers what they think. When calls are complete, ask customers to take a short survey or have agents ask customers directly how they felt about the service they received, if there was anything they would have changed, and how likely they are to reach out again if they have questions or concerns.

4.Improve skills.

然后可以使用从聆听，捕获反馈和提出问题的数据中收集的数据，然后可以用来提高员工技能和调用结果。例如，如果您发现在通话过程中没有提出特定问题，则可以创建一个新的呼叫过程，以优先考虑这些查询。在此过程中，值得与您的代理商进行咨询，以确保所要求的内容与他们的工作流程一起使用。

5. Track impact.

一旦制定了新的流程，请跟踪对客户服务互动的影响。使用诸如平均处理时间and overall customer satisfaction to evaluate the efficacy of your new processes. If something isn’t working, try again until you find a better fit.

6.不断发展。

Quality monitoring is a continual process. As customer preferences and company priorities change, so too will expectations around quality and satisfaction. In practice, this means creating sustainable monitoring frameworks that allow you to continually evaluate performance, compare outcomes to current metrics, and make changes as needed.

And we know that not all businesses are the same, and that many have designated call center teams. We want to highlight just how important quality assurance is to a call center team’s goals.

Call Center Quality Assurance

Call center quality assurance is the process of observing and analyzing customer service calls. It tests for a variety of factors: employee attitude, the effectiveness of problem-solving, customer satisfaction, and more. This process assures every customer is treated with respect and offered a positive, competent, and timely brand experience.

Quality assurance optimizes the financial return of a call center. If customer service reps are too slow or get distracted too frequently, the company loses money from paying employees who aren't doing their job. And, if reps induce negative experiences, this can increase客户流失and lose potential business.

打电话

通话质量监控可以帮助您的公司制定政策和流程，以最大程度地提高客户满意度并最大bob全站app程度地减少浪费时间。通过定期审查电话，可以确定特定代理需要更多培训并确定无法辜负的框架的区域

提供动力的变化和可以帮助your business build a call handling procedure that helps callers feel heard and gives agents the tools they need to deliver a superb customer experience.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in May 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.