Call Center Management

Call Center Management Feature Article

January 04, 2013

Call Monitoring Helps You Pinpoint Where Bad Calls Take a Wrong Turn

By Tracey E. Schelmetic, TMCnet Contributor

While it’s easy to think of phone-based call center operations as a homogenous thing – customers call and agents answers their questions – the truth is much more complex than that. Each call is a separate element of the contact center’s broader operations, as well as of the ongoing customer relationship. All calls begin with a greeting, but where they go from there is depending on a nearly limitless set of factors. This makes all calls different, and they should be treated as such.

Understanding where bad calls go wrong and where good calls go right is a critical element in improving call center operations and perfecting agent training practices. The only way to understand how these calls work is to record them and listen to them: repeatedly, if necessary.

“By monitoring each customer engagement, it is easy to find out how your call center is fulfilling its most critical purpose,” wrote workforce optimization solutions provider Monet Software’s Chuck Ciarlo in a recent blog post.

If too many calls are turning negative, call monitoring allows you to determine at what point the calls are souring, identify the reason and change agent behaviors to eliminate this flare-up point. If the goals of the goal – increasing revenue from the call – are failing as well, monitoring will help you understand why. Is the agent being too aggressive and putting the callers off? Is the agent being too timid and underselling the point? Is the customer interested up until the point price comes up? Perhaps it’s too high. Is it the terms that make the customer lose interest? Perhaps there are features or benefits missing.

Writes Ciarlo, “While no call center will ever succeed in eliminating [negative calls] entirely, call monitoring offers a chance to learn from each customer interaction, to help avoid such actions as involving a supervisor in a dispute, or transferring a customer multiple times to achieve a resolution.”

Obviously, there is no magic trick to making all calls turn positive every day. But by listening to negative calls, you can begin to see patterns emerge that will help you adjust both your pitch and your operations to improve your win rates and hit your goals.

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