3rd Party Remote Call Monitoring Feature

When “this call may be monitored for quality and training purposes” precedes a customer support call, there’s a possibility that it may be listened to in the future. Given how often the average company evaluates customer support calls, however, chances are good that it’s being neither recorded nor evaluated. The typical model in years past was to sample just a tiny handful of calls for each agent so managers and supervisors could use the recordings to turn in a report about an agent’s performance.

Fast-forward to today, and companies are realizing that sampling just a few calls may not be a great way to evaluate quality. Every agent has an uncharacteristic bad day (or good day), and traditional methods probably aren’t painting a robust picture of what’s actually going on with the customer experience. According to a recent blog post by BPA Quality, most companies aren’t sampling often enough for the results to be statistically significant.

“If you are looking for the typical 95/5 percent confidence level and interval, you simply need to know how many calls your agents take in a month’s time to derive a ‘statistically valid’ sample,” according to the blogger. “For instance, if your agents take 1000 calls a month, you’d need to sample 278 calls in a month’s time for it to be significant for that specific month. Time is the key variable in determining this…over what time period is it relevant to you.”

That said, there are no “right” answers. Companies need to sample as many calls as it takes to improve performance while still keeping costs under control. For the average contact center, BPA Quality recommends no less than two monitors per week per agent.

Technology can help improve the amount of monitoring a company can do while keeping costs under control. Many quality monitoring solutions now use speech analytics to “listen” in to calls and spot problematic calls, flagging them for extra attention from managers. They can also spot trends, and send notifications when something unusual happens: an uptick in calls mentioning a competitor, for example, or the phrase “close my account.”

Of course “quality” doesn’t have the same definition for every company and every industry, so third-party call monitoring service providers are a good bet for a company that needs more customization in its quality monitoring program. Working together with these service providers, companies can establish the four basic parts of a quality call interaction: the opening/welcoming, the customer connection, the problem resolution and the closing. They can determine if these elements are meeting the standards, and put a company’s customer support performance into measurable terms. If you can’t measure performance (to paraphrase an old business adage), you can’t manage it.

In its blog post, BPA noted that agents will perform better if they are being monitored. Do it too seldom and you’ll risk that agents are ignoring quality standards because they believe no one’s listening. Do it too often and you’ll break the bank. Finding a quality schedule that’s effective and regular is the first step toward using quality monitoring to make noticeable improvements in performance.