Call center quality monitoring: Best practices for effective QA

What area do you see as the biggest opportunity for improvement in your contact center? A McKinsey survey of leaders revealed customer experience (CX) improvement (19%), contact volume reduction (8%), and AI assistance deployment (5%) as top growth priorities.

With call center quality monitoring, you tackle all these priorities (and more). By listening to and analyzing a large volume of phone calls daily, you identify areas for development. Generative AI solutions track, review, and score real-time interactions, flagging what needs your attention. 

Let's review how AI-powered monitoring streamlines call center quality assurance (QA) best practices.

What is call center quality monitoring?

Call center quality monitoring is the step within the QA process where team leads or QA analysts track and evaluate conversations between customers and agents. It ensures interactions meet established quality standards and identifies any elements that might be impacting CX.

Why quality monitoring is important to your call center

A survey by HubSpot reports that 63% of companies are spending more time prioritizing CX. While customers crave qualified and personalized experiences, businesses diversify touchpoints to address these needs on their preferred channels. However, ensuring quality at scale requires constant monitoring. 

Quality monitoring brings these advantages to your call center:

• Team performance evaluation: Following up on your agents' QA scorecards, you verify how well they address customers' needs and meet compliance standards, to provide constructive feedback.

• Consistent and high-level interactions with customers: By tracking and analyzing 100% of your calls, your team learns from the best examples of script adherence, problem-solving, and customer satisfaction.

• Constant process improvement: Seeing call reviews as ongoing work empowers you to continuously pinpoint growth opportunities. It contributes not only to boosting efficiency but also to cutting significant cost savings across the board.

Top 5 practices for AI-driven contact center quality monitoring

Call center quality monitoring best practices help you identify areas for improvement in customer service. However, integrating gen AI tools into quality assurance processes unlocks a new level of intelligence and scalability in your business.

Here are five ways to upgrade your QA strategy:

1.Analyze customer sentiment to find the root of quality issues

Customer sentiment analysis extracts valuable information from interactions by analyzing customer behavior and emotions. With AI tools, you automatically:

• Process data about your customers' intentions, attitudes, and opinions, being able to understand what they need (or why they are frustrated)

• Generate insight reports that lead to potential causes for quality issues

• Turn insights into actions to trigger customers with retention and engagement campaigns

💡Echo AI tip: Forget about manually reviewing a sample of daily calls. Instead, use AI to transcribe and review 100% of your calls. With our platform, we also tag critical issues that demand your immediate attention.

2.Use an AutoQA scorecard to track team performance

A call center quality monitoring scorecard is a tool used to evaluate agents and interactions performance. AI-driven solutions track key metrics and identify areas for improvement in real time, generating what we call AutoQA scorecards.

The benefits of an AutoQA scorecard include:

• Alignment with business goals: Verify how your team is scoring in business KPIs

• Agents self-assessment: Allow your team to be responsible for their growing

• Ensured compliance: Easily check adherence to conformity standards

• Data-driven team: Promote an insights-driven culture by valuing great performers

3.Offer AI-personalized coaching based on data

Monitoring call center performance goes beyond tracking metrics. It also includes empowering call center agents with training, strong scripts, and coaching.

With AI-powered platforms like Echo AI, you identify patterns to improve agents' behavior and personalize evaluation based on QA scores. Your employees get helpful insights about their work while supervisors deal with high-priority tasks.

4.Integrate channels and tools in one place

Quality monitoring involves tracking interactions across multiple touchpoints simultaneously. That's why an integrated solution matters: it centralizes data from sources such as CRM platforms and customer surveys, offering a holistic view of your contact center operations.

The integration enables your team to have a comprehensive view of customer interactions, which contributes to:

• Reducing average handle time (AHT)

• Increasing call resolution and customer satisfaction rates (CSAT)

• Eliminating disruptions in communication with customers

• Streamlining workflows, improving agents efficiency

5.Leverage quality management driven by AI tools

A call center quality management system is a powerful tool that leverages AI to optimize QA. It includes automating tasks, such as:

• Speech-to-text transcription: Instantly convert audio from calls into text

• Sentiment analysis: In-depth analysis of every conversation with your customers

• Keyword detection: Identify phrases or words that match with QA parameters

• Categorization: Classify calls based on established criteria (e.g., subject, issue type)

• Performance tracking: Score and monitor agents' performance metrics

IBM reported that 78% of global executives have a plan to expand gen AI into customer and employee experiences (EX). Embracing AI in quality assurance unlocks a data-driven approach for both CX and EX.

Upgrade QA with the best call center quality monitoring software

When it comes to monitoring quality, a strong AI-driven strategy starts with simple prompts, requiring no special training for your team. 

Using Echo AI as your call center quality monitoring software, you get a real-time overview of your QA practices. You focus on making strategic decisions, while Echo AI handles the extra work.

Here are the top QA benefits of using Echo AI:

• Identify persistent and emergent issues: Conversation intelligence transforms patterns into interactive dashboards and reports, analyzing common customer issues.

• Gather real-time actionable insights: Turn AI-generated insights into automatic actions that engage, convert, and retain customers.

• Customize QA scorecards your way: Create scorecards with your own questions, context, and scoring guidelines to align with your business goals.

• Start deep manual reviews in one click: Ensure that every interaction needing review receives it.

• Integrate with over 30 tools: Access thousands of insights to optimize your QA practices.

Let your call center quality monitoring best practices reach their full potential. Get a demo now.