6 Ways to Improve Your Customer Service with Quality Audits
How to tap into the host of benefits contact evaluations and quality assurance monitoring offer for better customer service.
If you’re in the customer service industry, evaluating the quality of your agents interactions is a critical success factor. You have agents whose job it is to represent not only your contact centre, but also your company as a whole. In addition, you have numerous customers who want only the best, most responsive support team tending to their needs. How can you encourage maximum performance in the contact centre without needlessly increasing overhead?
Call evaluations to the rescue! Contact centre companies have increasingly turned to contact scoring evaluation forms to amp up agent performance, encourage regular customer feedback, and facilitate agent development. Here are six ways contact evaluations can help improve the quality of your contact centre’s customer service.
1. Let Customers Know You Care
Feedback evaluation forms ask customers to rate their customer service experience immediately following their call. By proactively seeking customer feedback and thanking customers who take the time to complete the form, you show customers that you care about their experience with your brand and encourage a two-way relationship.
2. Coaching
Effective agent training requires more than just an initial new employee orientation. Developing quality customer service representatives means engaging in regular coaching sessions aimed at nurturing agent strengths and drawing attention to areas for improvement. Contact evaluations and monitoring ensures that contact centre managers are informed about how their agents handle various situations with customers and provide concrete evidence for pointing out strengths and weaknesses.
3. Contact Type Segmentation
Since contact evaluations and monitoring provide you with better knowledge about individual agents’ strengths and weaknesses, you can segment calls or emails using skills-based routing applications to connect them with the most qualified agents. For instance, you might have an agent who struggles when dealing with refunds, or an agent who becomes particularly tense when speaking with callers complaining about product quality. Understanding where your agents truly shine allows you to streamline contacts directly to the most appropriate agent for their needs.
4. Assist in Setting Concrete Goals
Contact evaluations also assist contact centre managers and agents alike in setting concrete goals for customer service. If an agent is consistently rated by customers as lacking in friendliness or professionalism, see if you can encourage the agent to step up their performance until they receive more favourable ratings on their contact evaluation forms. You can apply this same principle to other elements of your contact centre’s protocol as well, such as using a customer’s name throughout the duration of a call, or apologizing for an issue.
5. Expedite Agent Skill Development
When combined with regular coaching and setting concrete goals, contact evaluations can expedite agent development by fostering the sense that each customer interaction matters. While no one likes the idea that their every move is being monitored, contact evaluations can have the positive effect of making it known to agents that their skills are being measured in concrete terms on a daily basis. Many agents experience great personal satisfaction at receiving positive feedback, encouraging them to strive to deliver the best customer experience they’re capable of.
6. Keep Track of Progress
Finally, contact quality audits provide a way to keep track of agent progress. Evidence from contact evaluation forms and contact monitoring can be used during employee reviews or coaching sessions to point out ways that agents have developed as customer service representatives. This helps foster a sense of progression in the contact centre, boosting agent morale to create a positive workplace culture.
Contact evaluations and monitoring can be excellent additions to a contact centre’s quality assurance practices. Contact evaluations not only lets your customers know you care about their experience with your company, but also keeps agents in the loop as to how they’re doing on a day-to-day basis and what they can do to improve. When you implement contact quality audits into your contact centre management, you provide a way for agents to receive regular, proactive feedback and a concrete system off of which they can base their goals.
Interested in learning more about what call scoring can do for the contact centre? Download our free white paper!
