10 Ideas to Improve Quality in Call Center Scores

Whether your contact center is at the top of its game or struggling to reach important KPIs, reevaluating the way you do things and implementing an action plan to improve quality scores is essential to building and maintaining an optimal workforce.

How Can You Improve Contact Center Quality Scores?

First, gather data. Lots of it.

Key performance indicators are the bread and butter of the contact center industry, and for good reason. Keep a record of every call, including statistics such as when it arrived, how long it takes to answer, how long it lasted, who answered it, how many times it was transferred and to whom, and what type of call it was (for example, sales or service). Use this information, along with feedback from customers, to set goals and monitor KPIs. 

Related: Using data mining to improve the customer experience in your call center

Here are 10 steps to implement your action plan to improve your quality scores:

1. Monitor All Channels

The first step to improving quality scores in your contact center is to monitor every channel. If the customer support provided by your contact center is omnichannel, then so should your monitoring system and practices. Too often, contact centers focus their QA attention on voice calls, but how agents interact via email, live chat, and SMS are equally important.

2. Make Feedback and Coaching a Consistent Routine

When it comes to contact center improvement ideas, feedback and coaching should always be a top priority. Rather than giving agents feedback sporadically, why not make it part of your daily or weekly operations? Identify low volume times at your contact center and put this time to good use. Remember that feedback can be positive or negative and can come in many forms (for example, survey, scorecard or KPIs).

Related: 7 Simple Steps to Give Quality Feedback in Your Call Center

3. Focus on Your Low Performers

Contact center agent performance is the key to success and overall customer satisfaction. Although it’s certainly important to have a goal-oriented mindset for all of your agents, those with low-performance stats especially benefit from continuous improvement. Boosting KPIs of low performers has the most visible impact on your contact center scores.

Related: Coaching Best Practices to Build Top Performers

4. Follow Up Coaching by Tracking Improvements

Agents who are told what they’re doing wrong and approached in a negative manner are likely to become resentful toward the QA system and its players. Their only goal quickly becomes  to stay off of your radar, which is unproductive when improving quality is your ultimate objective. Genuinely coaching an agent proves that they invest in you, boosting motivation and attrition.

Related: How to Overcome Common Call Center Problems that Lower Quality

5. Encourage Self-Monitoring

Many people are uncomfortable with the “big brother” feeling of being watched from the outside. If you’re looking for a new method for how to improve quality score in a contact center, consider investing in real-time data software, like Playvox, which allows agents to track their own stats and customer feedback in real time. Agents take ownership of their stats, and may even engage in a little friendly competition with themselves or one another to stay involved.

6. Motivate Your Agents

Contact center agents who have energy and focus toward their work deliver higher quality customer care. There are two types of motivation: Intrinsic (from within oneself) and extrinsic (external rewards).

External rewards in a contact center often include bonuses and a variety of perks, while intrinsic motivation is often stronger and more long-lasting.

A dynamic action plan to improve quality scores should include rewards that leverage both motivations. For example, gamification is becoming a popular means to motivate by taking the functions of a workplace and making them fun and even competitive. And employees who enjoy this gratification feel inspired to do their best.

7. Don’t Forget the Fun

Improving quality in a contact center and cultivating a workplace where employees enjoy being, means not neglecting the fun factor.

Provide regular breaks allowing agents to drop their headsets and unwind for a few minutes. Bring in a ping-pong table or beanbag toss for them to destress after a challenging call. Invest in a few comfy pieces of furniture and a good coffee machine. Organize a lunch potluck every few weeks and decorate the office so it feels like more than a white-walled dungeon.

Operating with a hybrid or remote contact center? Fun is still possible! Engage team members through virtual games, like trivia or digital scavenger hunts. You can also encourage contests and competition — invite team members to compete for the wackiest outfit or the funniest video call background! 

Employees feel loyalty toward a company that invests in keeping them happy, and this loyalty and happiness translates to calls that are upbeat and on point.

Related:  7 Games for Better Customer Service

8. Display Real-Time Statistics Prominently

Giving your agents real-time visibility into the entire contact center’s performance helps motivate individual agents to work  as a team and improve quality. Consider providing a projection area that is highly visible to everyone, displaying both customer satisfaction and agent productivity stats.  

9. Invest in Smart Software

Technology has the potential to streamline the customer experience, while simultaneously reducing the burden and stress on your agents. For example, routing calls directly from certain areas of the website or having a thoughtfully developed IVR system means your customers can move through your system to arrive at a solution quicker, and frees agents to work with more complicated customer needs.  

Related: 12 Signs Your Contact Center Needs a WEM Solution

10. Hire Selectively, Train Continuously

The hiring practices in your contact center are the foundation for ensuring your workforce delivers consistency, efficiency, and quality. Revisit your hiring techniques to ensure you’re looking at the best qualities for agent success.

Furthermore, don’t consider training as a one-and-done exercise. Although some contact centers are unwilling to invest too much in training due to costs and high attrition rates, others find this investment is worthwhile,  actually leading to decreased turnover, higher satisfaction and improved customer experience.

Finding ways to improve contact center quality is crucial in building success. Agents with a solid foundation of training and insights have the confidence and knowledge they need to perform no matter the circumstance. So, if you’re wondering how to improve contact center quality, broaden your scope to look beyond only KPIs. By investing in your agents and your QA process, your agents will win, and so will your customers. 

Request a demo to discover how Playvox can assist you in improving your contact center quality scores.