By , Call Center Management Contributing Editor

Call monitoring has long been an effective tool in the contact and call center as a way for managers to capture interactions to measure performance, identify training opportunities and evaluate processes. Such monitoring is also finding demand in other industries as well as organizations are beginning to understand the value of this type of monitoring. And, while great benefits can be gained from such practices, relying on the right vendor is essential.

 

BPA International is one provider that has extensive experience in this area and bases its approach to call monitoring on detailed research conducted over the last 20 years. While the company does offer such remote call monitoring and call analysis as scoring, objective measurement, feedback, real-time data, and more, the company also provides benchmarking and training. All are designed around the needs of the organization and all can be customized according to specific requirements.

 

BPA has built its success by grounding its practices on the premise that basic monitoring is not enough to produce results. Instead, an organization must monitor while also receiving and providing feedback that is relevant, unbiased, practical and objective. The same can be said for the training portion of the company’s offerings as they focus on delivering what can be only observed as tangible results.

 

The demand for solutions such as those offered by BPA International is increasing, especially in the call center environment. Call center leaders are constantly trying to improve customer service deliverables while also maintaining cost control. Quality monitoring has been proven to be the most effective way to identify weak areas and make improvements, while also capturing consumer desires and training opportunities.

 

Call center leaders most often are monitoring live interactions, according to ICMI’s 2007 Quality Monitoring Report. Of those centers that are actively monitoring, 95.8 percent of them monitor live contacts. However, the report also identified several areas of improvement where monitoring is concerned, such as IVR, e-mail, Web chat and Web self-service. 

 

Roughly one in four contact centers is monitoring customers’ interactions with the center’s IVR system. Only 64 percent of centers are monitoring e-mail contacts. While only 12.8 percent of centers handle chat sessions, these are monitored 70 percent of the time. When consumers engage in Web self-service, these interactions are monitored only 27.4 percent of the time.

 

Monitoring is definitely gaining traction and as a result, BPA International faces an industry full of opportunities. The company will also face challenges, however as only 55.8 percent of centers believe that they monitors are given the time and/or resources necessary to lead an effective quality program. At the same time, only 52 percent of centers share customer feedback with other departments within the enterprise.

 

It is up to companies like BPA International to educate these organizations and centers on what should be the focus for proper monitoring, how to gain feedback and the best way to disperse the information throughout the enterprise. After all, unless each of these elements is a priority in the monitoring process, the organization is gaining little benefit from monitoring in the first place.

 

 

 

Tweet