3 Call Center Monitoring Best Practices You Must Know

The pursuit of retaining customers has become an obsession for all new-age businesses. However, many of them are guilty of forgetting the most important aspect of customer retention. As we continue obsessing over R&D and marketing efforts to capture customers’ attention, we often overlook the importance of monitoring and improving the output of customer service teams – the most important link between a business and the customer. This is where call center monitoring comes into the picture.

A study by Cisco suggests that call center recording can improve the first-call resolution rates by more than 12%. This can lead to an increase in customer satisfaction levels by about 48%. With efficient call center quality monitoring, you can effectively evaluate conversations between your agents and the customers for positive outcomes. With call recording and monitoring in place, you can identify areas where your teams are doing well and examine areas where you need improvement. This can result in a more specific evaluation of each agent’s performance, helping you set benchmarks for training and best performance management practices. Not to forget, introducing measurable insights into the customer service framework always improves both top-line and bottom-line outcomes by driving additional business revenue.

Other benefits of call center monitoring

Your efforts to delight your customers are often limited by your guesswork in the absence of actionable insights generated by a call recording platform such as SonicView. Chances are that your competitors are already using a call monitoring software and gathering intelligence not just on their agent’s performance but also what customers think of their competitors (including you). The opportunity cost of missing out on this important data is just too high for a business to ignore. At the same time, isn’t always right to think that your existing customer service is performing at optimal levels when you don’t have any data to back your claim. By recording agent-customer conversations and monitoring them for quality, you can get visibility into the front-line action at your call center which can help you in decision making for positive outcomes.

Having listed all benefits above, call recording and monitoring is not a one-time effort but a continuous cycle of virtuous optimization. A few best practices that can help you get the most out of your efforts include:

1. Follow the 100% coverage rule

One of the biggest mistakes companies often makes (after deploying a call recording system) is recording only a part of their total call volumes and randomly deciding which calls to record and review. This not only defeats the purpose of call center recording and monitoring but also makes training more expensive and cumbersome in the absence of specific insights about each executive’s performance.

Hence, as a thumb rule, record 100% of your customer calls and analyze all of them to unearth actionable insights, visibility on problem areas, and effective training goals. This will also help you avoid designing the same training modules over and over again.

2. Sample ideal conversations with customers

Successful businesses use their call monitoring data to unlock important insights for improving their agents’ performance. These insights not just help you serve customers better but improve your overall compliance score especially if you operate in a heavily regulated industry.

If a specific customer service team is regularly failing to retain customers, use call recordings from their interactions to find out if the messaging by agents is too passive for a customer. Use call recordings to also sample those agents’ calls that are able to retain the customer’s business by using best practices. These samples can always be used during re-training the set of agents who aren’t performing at their optimum capabilities.

Sample ideal

3. Use call monitoring data mindfully

Call quality monitoring process can’t just be a top-down process. It also requires a front-line effort and managers’ inputs on the monitoring program. So, as a best practice, get in touch with your call center monitoring provider to get mentoring dashboards built for managers. These dashboards should empower them to see call center insights in real-time and on the go for timely interventions.

The same data can also be used for prototyping new customer service practices or can even be passed on to the product and sales team to address any enduring customer pain points before pitching a prospect.

Final Thoughts

In today’s competitive business landscape, running a call center operation utilizing technology to monitor and improve the quality of customer services is like shooting in the dark. Call center recording and monitoring solves this particular problem by providing you with actionable data on key customer pain points, agent performance as well as technical issues that could be driving existing customers away. SonicView is a robust and scalable call recording software and a top-notch call quality monitoring platform that can help you transform your business. It comes with features such as automated report delivery, sharing capabilities, and interoperability with various phone systems. If you’re ready to invest in call recording technology, we encourage you to schedule a demo today!