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A recent survey of call center supervisors and managers by UK analyst firm ContactBabel (News - Alert) had participants rate "the most important and effective ways to improve the customer service levels their call center agents provide."

Would it totally shock you to learn that call recording and call monitoring came in at #1 and #2? We didn't think so.

Call center supervisors said the ability to record calls is "their most effective tool in improving customer service." Call recording "gets more sophisticated every day," the study noted, adding that there are more features and functionality the call center technology offers its supervisors, such as the ability to record calls based on varying criteria, so "the more efficient resolving customer issues becomes."

When supervisors are able to track agents' calls by varying criteria, the study found, their ability to review and enhance agent-customer interactions "improves multifold." Likewise, training sessions become "more effective because the interactions used are real-world examples captured by the call center application."

Even compliance standards and regulations improve, because calls can be archived and retrieved more efficiently: "All these improvements combined with agile training methods have a direct effect on key call center metrics such as AHT, ASA, and first-call resolutions."

A ContactBabel study found that 53 percent of respondents think quality measurement is internal (defined and measured by the contact center's own targets) rather than an externally-focused metric (defined by the customer's own experience), pointing up the importance of recording even more.

This internal focus, ContactBabel found, is "far more likely to be the case within large contact centers, where 64 percent of respondents say that 'quality' is decided and measured from an internal perspective (against 45 percent of small contact centers and 54 percent of medium operations).

And as far as call monitoring's effectiveness goes, monitoring calls in real-time gives the management team complete visibility into call center operations at any given time. Combining call monitoring with statistics that a robust call center software application can provide, such as service levels versus goals, number of calls in progress, number of calls in the queue, and the longest-waiting interaction per queue or skill, provide supervisors "the type of insight they need," the study found.

Behind those two, performance management came in third. As the study explained, a typical supervisor is in charge of multiple call center agents: "As this ratio increases, the complexity of managing data increases exponentially. A performance dashboard-an overview of agents' performance allows call center supervisors to zoom in and focus on the nitty-gritty details of their work-ranked almost as high as call monitoring."