3rd Party Remote Call Monitoring Feature

Agents are usually the first point of contact that a customer has with a business, so these agents effectively represent the face of the company. Poor agent performance also can make a big difference in terms of effectiveness, not to mention added costs from needing to have more agents on the floor.

When it comes to ensuring that agents are performing their best, it of course is important to monitor agent interactions. Really that’s the only way to see how agents are performing. But contact centers have two options: Do they monitor agent interactions in-house, or outsource the monitoring to a third-party provider?

While the first impulse often is to monitor agents internally, there are several reasons why contact centers would be wise to engage a third-party call monitoring service. Specifically, third-party monitoring services offer lower total cost, require less hands-on involvement, and eliminate bias.

That third-party monitoring services can save contact centers money might come as a surprise. But it shouldn’t.

Third-party monitoring services have the expertise and systems in place to quickly and efficiently monitor agents. Contact centers can, of course, develop their own programs, but this often is a large time and resource drain, and it doesn’t make sense to reinvent the wheel. By creating an internal monitoring program, contact centers might appear to be saving money but in fact they are costing the business more in the long run. Expertise has its benefits.

Third-party call monitoring services also require less involvement, so management can focus on other areas. A third-party call monitoring provider has the knowledge, expertise and agility to not only provide best-practice consulting, but also expertise at implementing solutions in quick succession.

Then there is bias.

By using a third-party call monitoring service, contact centers can reduce the possibility of bias creeping into reports. If the responsibility of recording employee performances is left to on-site employees, there's a chance that personal and political relationships will be involved and slant the view of the report. This is not the case with a third-party call monitoring service, of course. This arguably is the strongest reason to choose a third-party provider: monitoring requires an unbiased view of the facts, and this is something that internal monitoring programs just cannot do as effectively as a third-party service.

So in the end, contact centers might lean toward internal monitoring programs. But that is a mistake; third-party call monitoring is better call monitoring, and contact centers can ill-afford to slouch on something as important as ensuring agents are performing their jobs properly and with efficiency.