Quality assurance isn’t an option for Call Centers, it’s essential for the success of the call center, customer and agent satisfaction, improving agent and supervisor productivity and effectiveness, and keeping management in touch with their staff’s performance. To achieve the best results and foster confidence in the program, managers must ensure that they are evaluating the right components of agent performance during customer interactions and using appropriate measurements and weights. Building an effective QA program is an iterative, multi-step process that requires senior management support, planning and input, and buy-in from all levels of contact center staff. Automation is helpful for formalizing, standardizing and institutionalizing the initiative, but QA a program will succeed only if the staff is on board and believes in its value.
1 is to 20 ratios or 1 per shift minimum; base your quality monitoring staff on workload, as you do with your agents to customer calls. First decide what percentage of calls you need to monitor on each agent to give you a fair perspective on how an individual is performing. Next using your ACD/AHT statistics, develop a baseline for the average call length.
Depending on how complicated your calls are and how detailed and lengthy your QA person thoroughly listen and evaluate an average agent. This gives you a baseline to determine how many reviews a given QA agent can perform in a given time frame. Now build in some realistic overhead (e.g., if a QA representative is scheduled to monitor/review calls for an eight-hour work day, you take out overhead of breaks/lunches, personal business, interruptions, other duties, etc., to get a realistic number of how many they can review in an eight-hour shift. Next is to think about your hours of operations. Do you need additional QA representatives to cover extended hours, or seven days vs. five days of operation? Any vacation or sick leave potential?
Settle for less, as we all do. At least you can make your case based on workload arguments, and if upper management wants to give you less, you then can show them the cost to them is a lower percentage of calls getting monitored and a reduced quality product. One successful strategy is where companies have put the majority of agent monitoring on the supervisor and QA is used as a secondary source. QA’s main objective in this strategy is to monitor events on an enterprise-wide basis. In addition to the contact center, they are monitoring back-office operations as well. They are identifying root-cause issues, process breakdowns and are now taking over the voice of the customer initiatives.