10 Ways to Improve Your Call Quality

00:00Hi, guys. Tom Laird here. You've heard me break down contact center technology on the podcast time and time again. Now, it's time for me to help you with your challenges. As your contact center technology advisor through our new company, Expivia Digital, I can help you with things like CCaaS selection, any type of AI implementation, and nice studio and integration services. It's the same honest advice you hear on the geek applied specifically to your operation. Visit ExpiviaDigital.com to get started. That's ExpiviaDigital.com. This is advice from a call center geek, a weekly podcast with a focus on all things call center. We'll cover it all from call center operations, hiring, culture, technology, and education. We're here to give you actionable items to improve the quality of yours and your customer's experience. This is an evolving industry with creative minds and ambitious people like this guy. Not only is his passion call center operations, but he's our host.

00:54He's the CEO of Expivia Interaction Marketing Group and the call center geek himself, Tom Laird, what is up, everybody? Welcome back to another episode of advice from a call center geek. My name is Tom Laird. I am the CEO here at Expivia. Expivia is a six hundred seat call center outsourcer located here in Northwestern PA. Hope everybody is doing well. Want to attack this first first day. It's a Tuesday as I record this right after Memorial Day. So it is June 1st, 2021. And what better way to get the week started after the long Memorial Day weekend than let's do a podcast. Let's talk about some stuff that I've been putting some notes together over the weekend. And I wanna talk about your quality monitoring in your call center. You know, what is quality monitoring? And I know we've kind of touched on this on some other episodes, but I wanna kind of give you 10 steps to master your call center quality.

01:59and things to really look on to improve. So again, this is a huge piece of where I know a lot of you guys are at. I've had a lot of questions come in too, even on software, right? From QMA software and QA software of, you know, what tools, how should we score calls? Those types of things. So it's really cool to see that, you know, I don't know, we're getting away a little bit, at least from the questions coming in to me on, you know, how do we push these things to self-service? How do we save money in our call center? And I'm starting to see kind of a resurgence, I think, in quality, which is pretty cool. And hopefully that's industry-wide. I mean, obviously, I just have a kind of a small snapshot, but still, I think it's kind of relative to where things are at.

02:43So let's kind of dive into this right away, you know, and really, what is call quality? What are some of the things that, you know, we need to measure to say, hey, you know, we do have positive calls. Like our calls are efficient, we're getting the customer what they need, they're getting a good experience. It's not just the customer experience, but really, to have a quality call, we got to hit a bunch of different KPIs because it's got to be efficient for the organization. We have to be able to, quote unquote, make money or not spend a ton of time and a ton of money on calls, depending on our culture. But still, we need to make sure that we're check marking the things that the customer So again, I think the elements that lead to success, and a lot of this is probably self-explanatory, but I think it bears to mind some of these things to make sure that we understand what we're trying to measure when we're talking about really high-quality calls. So, number one is nothing to do with the actual rep, but it's short wait times. It's very difficult to have quality calls and to give your reps even a chance if you're not staffed appropriately.

03:52So short wait times are really important. You guys always hear me talk about the tone is the message. And I think that that resonates really, really, really heavy into all of this. So proper tone of voice is huge. And again, it's not really what you say, it's how you say it. And that needs to be educated with all your reps through and through their training process. Skilled or active listening is really important, especially with reps that hear the same things over and over and over, right? So, you know, maybe there is, you know, the top five or six things that come in, and that's 70% of your calls. So they just, a lot of times reps will just assume what the issue is and kind of tone the customer out. When sometimes there's, or a lot of times there's some nuance to everybody's call. So really to be active listening, it's a skill, making sure that we understand, you know, what's the real issue and not just kind of assuming it.

04:46Appropriate speaking speed I think is important and this goes to whether it's the different places of the country, whether it is somebody who's maybe, I don't want to stereotype but maybe they're a little bit older or need you to explain a little bit more and not every customer is the same. I guess that's the bottom line with this without me maybe getting into trouble. But just understanding where the customer's coming from, what type of individual are you speaking with and making sure that your voice and the tone and the things that you're talking to them kind of resonates well with them. Using the right language for your culture or for the culture of the customer that you're maybe for us being a BPO that we're answering calls for. So if you're a high end retailer that kind of caters to skateboarders and teens, you're you're probably gonna have a different tone than if you're dealing with a Fortune 100 bank, right?

05:48And I think that that's something that we all miss upon, and some of the, I don't wanna say cooler call centers or cooler customers or cooler companies kinda get that, right, so there is a language, right, that matches the culture of your customer. And I think that needs to be really relayed to the reps too, of what they can say, Can they say, no, cool, cool, that's awesome. Or can they say, yes, ma'am, no, ma'am, right? How is that language of the customer, the language of the culture of your organization being transferred to those reps? And that's kind of a big deal. And a lot of times we all fall kind of short of doing some of those things. I think, you know, demonstrating emotional intelligence is really, really important and really understanding where the customer is coming from and maybe reading between the lines, right?

06:37And the really high-end reps can kind of do that. And with that, they can ask pointed questions where they kind of know maybe where the customer's going. Maybe there's something that's embarrassing or there's something that maybe the customer is kind of hiding, but they want to make sure that we try to get out and you kind of understand that emotional IQ with it. And I think we just need to manage the customer expectations as well. [QA coverage remark omitted] So I think if you kind of tie all those in that's a nice snapshot of what will give you real high quality calls in your call center.

07:40If you're doing a lot of these different things in training, especially if you're educating the proper tone, if you're educating active listening and skilled listening, if you're talking about the appropriate speech patterns and speed of speech and also using kind of the right cultural language, I think is a really huge way that you can kind of build a lot of rapport with customers and kind of, I don't know, build that trust with the brand, that you have their best interest, that the customer's best interest at heart. So having said that, let's talk about 10 steps that I think we can, I don't wanna say master call quality monitoring, but can definitely get you on the right path. Some of these are tools and things that we can purchase. Other of these are kind of tactics and processes that we can do. So here's kind of 10 steps to master call quality monitoring.

08:40And number one, and some of you guys are gonna probably turn this off right now, but don't just let me get through number one, is invest in speech analytics. I know I am the biggest speech analytics person ever. I don't think it's very expensive. I think it's an invaluable tool for your call center. And I don't even care if you're using it to track trending keywords, but just to get sentiment scores on your agents and on your customers, I think is a huge piece of today's monitoring. Having said that, just not the speech analytics, but when you're talking about QA now, it's kind of turned into QMA, right? Which is quality monitoring with analytics. And these new tools that most of the cloud providers have and the analytics platforms have allow you to take your scoring to a whole different level, right? So you're not just trying to kind of find that needle in a haystack of a rep, maybe doing something wrong or coaching opportunity, but really putting things in so that the computer, the system, the platform is listening for a ton of different things and then scoring things appropriately as well.

09:44So it's not just the human being, but it's kind of the tie-in with the human and the machine. So I think your platform is a huge piece, but even worst case scenario, make sure that you have some scorecard set up in those types of things, which we're gonna get into. Now, you know, number two, believe it or not, I know a lot of you do, most of you do, but there's a lot of you who do not have a QA team, right? A dedicated team just listening to quality. A lot of you are just using supervisors and I think you're missing the boat on that. Even if it's a small percentage and what we like to do is I like to double my ratio from my supervisors to my QA. So, you know, if we have a 15 to one ratio from a supervisor, what I like to do from a QA standpoint is have it like 30 to 40 to one.

10:31And I think that, especially with the tools that we have now available, get us to where we need to be so we can, you know, we still can monitor and get through, you know, about, you know, three calls per agent per week. And if you add the supervisors in there, you're getting a little bit more as well. So I think that that's, that's huge. And the bigger you get, the more important QA really, really becomes. Number three is make sure that you have your quality standards that are set, right? So consider what's the most important things, what are the most important KPIs that you want your agents to follow? Are you a sales call center where there's upsell and cross-sell and products that are coming in through the website that you need to try to sell, right? If that's what you are, then let's make sure that that is weighted a little bit more for our quality.

11:19We're gonna make sure that you're educating your reps, again, not just on what to click, but how to talk to your customers as well, which I think is really important. And I like, again, I like to break up, and we did a whole episode on kind of setting up a scorecard, right? So I like to break things up like an intro, kind of a greeting, I'm kind of getting into the body of it. [QA coverage remark omitted] Make sure that you set those up and that you're waiting whatever you think is the most important piece of those heavier and not just scoring everything the same. I think that's where a huge mistake happens in QA. Our number four is I think pretty obvious.

12:10Make sure that you guys have scorecards, right? And I don't care if a scorecard is, this call is a one, two, three, an A, B, a C to an F to a, you know, in-depth, you know, one through 100, I'm really drilling down on each piece of the call, making sure that every rep kind of gets it, right? Sorry about that, somebody hit me up on LinkedIn. I think that's important. The other thing that I think is important too is we always have the conversation of when to do live calls and when to do recorded calls. And, you know, I think, again, monitoring live calls helps you win the game today, right? That's like in-game coaching. and I use my basketball coaching references here. And monitoring recorded calls, helps you kind of have a good season. That's kind of your practice. I think, that's a really important kind of dichotomy or ways to utilize both of them.

12:59So, if it's important, I think it's more important to be listening to real time calls, right? And then if you are spotting trends with reps or some trends with your calls to go back and listen to recorded calls from that aspect. If I had to choose, I'm choosing live calls over recorded calls all day, every day. But I think there is a place and a time for a mixture of both. So again, when it comes to recorded calls, you're really looking at overall quality, you're looking at overall trends. This is where analytics really comes into play as well. And I think that's a big piece of it. Number six, I think that you should make the agents part of the evaluation process, right? So, you know, when you are scoring a, getting back to the recorded calls, this is another great use for them, is if you do have a rep that's a little bit lower, you know, just pull some random calls and let's score them together, right?

13:56And I think that they'll start to see, wow, you know what, that's a good point. I see why they're doing that, right? And again, this isn't a beat up Susie or Janie or Jimmy, but this is just a, hey, let's do this together so you can kind of see where I'm coming from. So they know you're not picking on them, you're not doing anything that's just for their detriment, but you're actually trying to help them. So I think that's a really cool thing to do is to score calls together. And when we do our client monitoring sessions, so we'll have our clients on and it's normally once a week, we'll actually pull the agents, not all the time, but for a lot of them to sit in on these sessions too, so that they kind of feel the pain if there is a rough call or if they didn't handle it well, but they also, you know, the clients are awesome and ecstatic when they do something, you know, really good or go above and beyond.

14:45So it's plus and minuses there as well. All right, number seven, you know, and I think that this kind of goes with, again, the recorded calls and also, well, I guess the live calls too, but, you know, identify your pain points. You know, if you can use QA or QMA, right? And you can use analytics and you're finding trending keywords and you're finding things that just keep coming up. You know, it's really important to start to put a plan in for everyone with that. That's the cool thing about analytics as well is you can find these trends much quicker than if you just have people kind of listening to them as well. You know, I think that you need to document the results of call quality as well, right? So, you know, data really drives a lot of this QA process. So, you know, we'll notice, you know, trends in customer satisfaction and agent performance.

15:37And I think you can use some of those tools as well when it comes to not just your monitoring, but having those surveys and those types of things. You guys know where I feel about them. I think that there's a time and place. Again, I'm taking sentiment scores all day over CSAT and NPS. But I think that there still is a place for those, especially if you're looking for some specific trends. Also, I like to use QA as a management teaching tool. So we I think that there's a way that you learn so much by doing and that's a huge piece. So instead of just saying, hey, supervisor Janie, or I'm gonna keep using that name, but monitor these calls and tell me what you think. To actually train them, to have them go through a process, especially with us, it's really cool because it's different clients, right?

16:42So we'll have retail clients and financial services clients and tech support and upsell, cross-sell, and just hardcore customer service. And so all these different types of channels that they're learning and seeing the nuances to each program. And I think that that really can benefit your management team as well when they do go out on the floor and they start to manage. And then the other thing is I think you need to commit to regular call quality monitoring, right? So we try to say, we try to score at least three calls per agent per week. For some of you that might be super low. For some of you that might be super high. But I think you need to at least start to benchmark everybody at three calls and come up with reasonable conclusions on all of them, make sure that you have that scoring system in place so that you can see trends with your agents as well so you know who's kind of struggling, who needs a little bit more love as well.

17:37So those are, I think, 10 things to kind of hopefully help you with your quality monitoring, at least get you to think down that path of what are some things that are important in our organization and how can we maybe change or nuance some of those things as well. So again, thank you guys very much. June 1st, it's almost summertime. We just had our mask mandate here in Pennsylvania, totally done as of today. So as long as you're vaccinated, you are free to not wear a mask, which is pretty, pretty awesome. So we're really trying to crawl out of this. Also have my management team coming back into the office today. Started this morning, it's 11 o'clock a.m. on the East Coast as I'm kind of recording this. So, you know, throughout the day as the supervisor come in with their teams, they're back in the office.

18:22So we'll start to have agents back into the office as well, starting probably in two weeks. Also, if you did not check it out, join the call center tips and tactic LinkedIn group. That's kind of, I guess, my personal LinkedIn group. I just posted the talk that I gave at Nice in Contact Interactions on our hopeful plan for bringing agents and our whole team back into the office and some of the things that we're going to be doing and what we've seen from a nuanced standpoint, from a workforce management standpoint, and how things have changed a little bit for us. So if you're planning on getting people back into the office, I think that's a pretty cool tool and thing to kind of check out. So again, thank you guys very much. I'll talk to everybody next week. Have an awesome, awesome week.