Call Center Management Featured Article
Consider Using Call Scoring to Get the Most Out of Call Recording
Many contact centers today record their calls, either for liability or evaluation purposes. In many cases, these calls are stored (and later discarded), and a few may be used for the agent evaluation process, or to settle disputes. But recorded calls contain a plethora of valuable information, and most companies aren’t making the most out of it. This is a shame, because they already largely have the technologies in place to do so.
Call scoring, or evaluating calls on a pre-determined set of criteria (such as maintaining call control, keeping a courteous tone, hitting the right script elements and keeping the customer informed of actions during the call), can be a great way to review and analyze recorded calls for information that can benefit customers, agents and company sales and marketing plans, according to a recent blog post by Chuck Ciarlo, CEO of workforce optimization solutions provider Monet Software. Agents are given a score for each element, either on a 1 to 10 scale or with A to F “school” scores.
“Scoring furnishes a means to identify the weakest areas of agent performance and, combined with a review of call recordings, paints a more precise picture of where agents need to improve, and the steps necessary to get there,” he wrote.
Some quality monitoring solutions include call scoring templates that companies can customize, and it this make it easier to make the most out of recorded calls. The first step is determining what the most important elements are to your organization, and building a scorecard. These can be changed for different employees (with different strengths and weaknesses) or different product/service teams. Next, the questions are often broken out into different subcategories, according to Ciarlo.
“Most scorecard elements are fairly standard, and are derived from dividing a call into segments,” he wrote. “Many contact centers use a basic open-middle-close format (how is the customer greeted, how is the problem or question resolved, how does the call end). Of course, most of the action takes place in the middle segment, so additional scrutiny here may be helpful – was the agent able to answer all questions? Was the agent friendly when the caller was hostile? Were any upsell opportunities missed?”
It’s a great way to keep track of what each employee is doing well, and where that employee has some challenges to overcome. It can help you target training more precisely, and have a ready-made collection of information relevant to the agent’s performance when it comes to evaluation and review time.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi