We’ve all heard that recording while we’re waiting for an agent to pick up our call: “This call will be recorded for quality control.” Sure, the call will be recorded, but is anyone ever going to play it back and actually use it for anything other than troubleshooting some unfortunate incident that soured some customer — when it’s already too late?

So playing back telephone transactions is one after-the-fact way to do call center quality monitoring, but there has to be a better way to manage your call center employees’ performance. The better approach in handling people needs to involve two parts positive motivation with only one part negative.

Motivating top performance

Everyone knows the negative—bad performance leads to sanctions on a sliding scale. But how do you actually empower your call center employees to maintain the level of performance that will give them both job security as well as the tools that will keep your operation humming along at your business portal? That would be the more difficult, but far more productive, positive element of call center quality control.

The software scorecard for analytics

You need an automatic scorecard. As they say at the ballpark, you can’t tell the players without a scorecard. As applied to monitoring call center performance, the scorecard not only tells you how your players are doing, but also how the overall game is going.  Specifically, call center-monitoring software with a built-in agent scorecard:

• tracks how faithfully the employee adheres to the assigned work schedule.
• measures productivity in terms of goals vs. performance.
• empowers employees to continually improve their performance through relentless and objective measurements.
• helps instill healthy competition and allows your star performers to rise and shine.

How management benefits

While the employees become a part of the process, with call center quality monitoring, managers and supervisors review, evaluate and focus on the analytics that are accumulating as each new customer transaction occurs.

Individual and group productivity also become quantifiable elements of the call center scheduling process. What was previously a “best estimate” (or a “guestimate”) now becomes a finely tuned method involving overlapping agent schedules to accommodate both busy and slack periods.

Call center quality monitoring saves time and money—the time of gathering external data for forecasting schedules; the money involved in over-staffing when incoming calls are typically slower.

Your bottom line is first, last and always the customer

So call center quality monitoring really comes back to giving your customers the best experience possible so they’ll come back and possibly bring a friend. You might even want to change that recorded message to, “We monitor every call and hold ourselves accountable for giving you the very best we have.” Contact us and we’ll do our best to help you make that promise good.