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The call center is the primary division an organization can leverage to improve customer interactions and service delivery. As a result, call center supervisors and managers are under intense pressure to identify effective ways to consistently improve performance among the agent base. To gather insight, Contact Babel launched a survey.

The survey results were featured in this recent Contactual (News - Alert) blog, highlighting that recording calls, monitoring, and performance dashboards are the most important and effective ways call center supervisors and managers can improve customer service levels.

Call recording in the call center topped the list in this survey as supervisors indicated the ability to record calls was by far the most effective tool used to improve customer service. Call recording for the call center gets more sophisticated every day, offering more features and functionality, as well as the ability to record calls according to varying criteria, to enable more efficient resolution to customer issues.

When calls are recorded, call center managers and supervisors can more readily track agents’ calls by skill-sets, inbound/outbound activity, or agent ID. They can also review and enhance agent-customer interactions to drive significant improvements. Training sessions become more effective as interactions rely on real-world examples captured by the call center application. Compliance standards and regulations can also improve as calls are archived and retrieved more effectively.

Call center call monitoring was also ranked among the tools to drive effective performance improvements. Managers are seeking real-time monitoring capabilities to gain complete visibility into the operations of the call center. Call monitoring is easily combined with statistics to provide information about service levels versus goals, number of calls in the queue, number of calls in progress, and the longest waiting interaction per skill or queue.

Call center managers will also do well to communicate to the agent base that monitoring is in place to improve the quality of the call center, not to monitor every single activity throughout the day.

Finally, performance management is viewed as an important tool to improve quality customer care in the call center. Managers and supervisors prefer performance dashboards to gain an overview of an agent’s performance. At the same time, the dashboard provides the ability to zoom in and focus on the details of their work. This visibility creates a transparent process that allows call center supervisors to provide feedback and comments on their agent assessments.

When call recording, monitoring and performance management through dashboards are in place, the call center is better equipped to drive improved performance.