The purpose of quality assurance in a call center is to evaluate the performance of your agents. But while quality assurance is necessary for the customer service industry, it can seem cold and impersonal when done incorrectly—an “objective” look at quality may ignore personal circumstances.
This can make your service agents feel unappreciated and misunderstood. The result? Lowered morale and satisfaction in the workplace.
Still, a quality customer service center should have some form of quality assurance. And fortunately, there’s a way to do it to make it more agent-focused than result-oriented. Here are five tips for better, more personable call center quality assurance.
1. Let Managers Perform QA Checks
Some companies outsource their quality assurance to a QA department. In ClearSource’s experience, this approach is a mistake. By moving the process outside of the team, a disconnect is created between the agent and their reviewer.
It’s from this disconnect that a feeling of unfamiliarity can arise, seeing as the QA department won’t know about the day-to-day happenings in the agent’s life. This information is the only way to have context for the agent’s performance.
Thus, letting the agent’s direct manager oversee the QA process will help keep that personal element in the equation.
2. Speak with Agents Daily
Once a week, your managers should sit down for a formal conversation about the agent’s performance. During this, you can identify areas of strengths and weaknesses. You should also take the time to build a relationship with the agents.
Then, managers should speak with their agents every day, even if the interaction is brief. These check-ups can be a small training session or opportunities to follow up on goals previously set during the weekly check-in.
3. Focus on One Teaching Point
If you try to train too many qualities at once, your agents won’t retain anything. Instead, pick one teaching opportunity and stick to that for the week. If you and the agent are both focused on that one quality, you are much more likely to witness improvements.
If you combine this with weekly meetings, you can quickly go through a wide variety of qualities. You can even follow up on qualities you spoke about in the past, ensuring a quicker adoption of better customer service skills.
4. Establish Trust During Meetings
Without trust, everything falls apart. Managers must establish trust with their agents and show that they truly care about the agent’s success. As long as your agents know that you trust them and respect them, everything else will fall into place.
5. Be Consistent with Follow-Up
When your customer service agents commit to a specific improvement, it’d be a shame not to follow up with them on their progress. So ask them questions: how is their progress going? What roadblocks are they facing? What support do they need? It’s the manager’s job to help make their agents’ progress as easy and straightforward as possible.
A Path Towards Better Customer Service Agents
With these tips at your disposal, you can better understand how to improve quality assurance in a call center environment. If you want to learn more about what it takes to improve the QA process, don’t hesitate to give ClearSource BPO a call; we’re happy to talk shop about better customer service.
