Call Center Management Featured Article
Technology Makes Monitoring Every Call Possible
Customers by now are accustomed to messages that their calls may be monitored. Most people who work in the customer support industry know, however, that traditional practices meant that very few calls were actually recorded and monitored.
Monitoring has a noble business purpose. When managers can listen to what agents are saying during interactions with customers, they can more easily identify problems with individual agents, teams and training practices. Monitoring helps the contact center maintain quality standards and compliance, improve the customer experience, and improve nearly all contact center metrics.
The problem with monitoring, however, is that is has traditionally been expensive. Recorded calls had to be stored and analyzed, and busy managers were stretched to monitor even a few calls per agent per month. This meant that a bad agent having a good day, or a good agent having a bad day, could be erroneously reviewed based on one call. One hundred percent call monitoring – meaning recording and analyzing every call – was outside the reach of most companies and their limited resources.
Technology to the Rescue
In today’s call monitoring solutions, all calls can be recorded, analyzed and summarized, thanks to technologies such as speech analysis and artificial intelligence. Speech analytics-based systems evaluate 100 percent of calls automatically and can raise red flags for call center management in real time. Managers are able to receive an alert when a problem call is underway, and managers jobs of reviewing employees and refocusing training efforts become much easier.
Analyze from Your Customers’ Perspective
Let’s face it…a quality call by the contact center’s standards (short) may not be a quality call from the customer’s perspective. Customers want their problems solved, and they don’t care how long it takes. Old-fashioned monitoring was able to focus on only a small percentage of calls, so it was hard to determine a real picture of how well the customers’ needs were being met. With real-time call analysis, contact centers are better able to track metrics and averages with more accuracy, which leaves them better able to see the real customer experience.
Help Agents Help Themselves
Many of today’s call monitoring solutions have options to keep agents themselves apprised of how they’re doing (rather than finding out in a bi-monthly review). When agents can see their statistics in real-time on their desktops, they’re more likely to take steps to improve their own performance -- particularly if there’s a little competition involved from fellow agents.