subject: How Call Centers Are Monitored [print this page] Businesses invest a lot of money in hiring call centers to handle their business processes therefore; it is only natural that they will want the best quality of services from them. But how will they ascertain that the quality of services is always premium?
Well one of the best ways to ensure that operations in call centers proceed as smoothly as possible is through the use of call center monitoring systems. A call center monitoring system helps a company to review its agents performance to provide timely feedback in order to improve its services.
Because call centers represent the image of the company, therefore businesses investing in call center outsourcing find this system to be very valuable. Most call centers use automated software to track key indicators that point to service quality.
Among the indicators that are tracked in a call center monitoring software are availability numbers to determine agent utilization, average handling time, idle time, one call resolution rate (refers to the number of calls that did not require a follow-up from the customer), time in queue, wrap-up time, number of contacts handled per hour, customer satisfaction level, errors and rework, and a subjective indicator known as quality of service rendered.
All of these indicators are easily built into software that monitors every single move of a call center agent in order to comprehensively assess performance in the context of call center monitoring.
A deeper and more rigorous tool used by call centers is to target the exchange between a customer and an agent. These tools use a variety of techniques to assess performance such as analysis of key words used, voice inflection, adherence to pre-set scripting, as well as other techniques like the number of times an agent calls the customer by name to drive a feeling of personal service during the call. These systems automatically quantify phone answering services using a set of established criteria.
Presence of such criteria is of immense help when businesses invest in call center outsourcing as it helps business owners to ensure that the quality of phone answering services is always the best.
Agents are required to stay above a certain average score for all calls accepted or made; when the indicator level for an agent starts to go down, supervisors and managers all spring into action to provide valuable feedback to help the agent boost his scores. All of these are done quick and fast to be able to adequately check all agents at the floor on any given shift, which in most cases can run up to 1,000.
To wrap-up the call center monitoring process, a team of quality monitors randomly sift through recorded calls, re-run and review it thoroughly to provide an exhaustive assessment of an agents performance. It is reports like this that are used to quantify how well an agent is doing and oftentimes serve as basis for a salary increase or a promotion. Contrast this to online in-call monitoring systems that are only designed to provide quick feedback but are not reliable enough to carry the burden of evaluating an agent through automated means.
While call centers employ a high degree of automation for call center monitoring activities, the burden still falls on people to actually make informed decisions on performance assessment. Call center managers and supervisors use the information and data retrieved from such software to decide which agents must stay, get appraisals or be asked to leave.
