Call Center Quality Management Best Practice Guide

Mrigya Kochar
Mrigya Kochar
Lead Researcher - Customer Experience
Call Center Quality Management Best Practice Guide

Call center quality management best practices are the foundation upon which exceptional customer service, unwavering brand loyalty, and operational efficiency are built.

The right quality management strategy will help your call center to:

  • Enhance customer satisfaction
  • Boost call center productivity
  • Maintain compliance and standards
  • Reduce operational costs

In this article, we’ll discuss best practices for quality management, covering the definition, differences, benefits, challenges, and specialized software that supports these efforts.

We'll be covering:

The Definition of Call Center Quality Management

Call center quality management (QM) is a high level systematic process that combines quality assurance and quality control for evaluating, monitoring, and improving a call center's performance and service delivery.
definition of call center quality management
Definition of Call Center Quality Management

The concept of quality management has evolved from handling a high volume of calls to customer satisfaction and high-quality interactions.

Quality management in a call center is implementing best practices and tools to ensure that interactions between call center agents and customers meet predefined quality standards. The goal is to have happy customers, and ensure regulatory compliance.

What's the Difference Between Quality Management, Quality Assurance, and Quality Control?

differences between quality management quality control and quality assurance

The main difference between Quality Assurance (QA), Quality Control (QC), and Quality Management (QM) is the distinct role they play in customer service.

Quality Assurance (QA): ensures that service delivery processes are followed correctly to prevent issues.

Quality Control (QC): focuses on identifying and correcting defects in the product or services provided.

Quality Management (QM): integrates both QA and QC within a broader strategic context to achieve ongoing organizational quality driven goals.

Call Center Quality Management (QM)

Call Center Quality Management integrates both QA and QC practices to govern and improve the quality of service delivery at a strategic level in call centers.

Aspects of Quality Management (QM)

  • Strategic Oversight
    Setting overarching quality goals and policies that align with your organization's long-term objectives for customer service.
  • Integration of QA and QC
    Harmonizes quality assurance and control to form a comprehensive quality management strategy that supports continuous improvement.
  • Continuous Monitoring
    Focuses on ongoing assessment and refinement of quality processes to adapt to industry challenges and customer expectations.
Quality management example
QM strategy might be to set goals for annual improvements in customer satisfaction scores through customer survey's related to product, and use high level call center analytics to track performance metrics surrounding quality assurance processes.

Call Center Quality Assurance (QA)

Call Center Quality Assurance focuses on the prevention of issues during service delivery by ensuring that all processes adhere to predefined standards.

Aspects of Quality Assurance (QA)

  • Process-oriented
    Emphasizes the correct procedures and steps to deliver services, ensuring every part of the customer service process is executed correctly.
  • Standards and Guidelines
    Develops detailed standards and checklists to measure agent performance consistently across various metrics such as call handling, adherence to scripts, and customer interaction quality.
  • Prevention
    Proactively prevents errors by maintaining stringent adherence to established service delivery protocols.
Quality assurance example
QA might include employing digital monitoring tools to ensure agents follow the correct call scripts and handle customer queries as per the training guidelines.

Call Center Quality Control (QC)

Call Center Quality Control involves identifying and correcting defects in the services provided, focusing on the output of the service delivery process.

Aspects of Quality Control (QC)

  • Product-oriented
    Focuses on the end result of a service process, identifying and addressing any deviations from the desired service quality.
  • Evaluation and Correction
    Regular assessments of agent interactions through call monitoring and feedback sessions to rectify any deviations from the established standards.
  • Reactive Measures
    Implements corrective actions post-assessment to amend service faults, ensuring service quality meets the desired standards.
Quality control example
QC measures could involve supervisors conducting random product audits, product survey's, examining the top issues in the contact center related to product.

Benefits of a Call Center Quality Management Strategy

A call center quality management strategy is the framework you will be using to increase customer satisfaction, reduce operational costs, boost efficiency, and monitor compliance.

benefits of call center quality management strategy

Here are the top benefits of a call center quality management strategy:

1. Increase customer satisfaction and brand loyalty

Call center quality management helps customers enhance their experience by discovering and resolving any bottlenecks that can hinder it. Timely, accurate, and personalized support to customers can help call centers:

  • Improve customer experience: Quality management ensures timely, accurate, personalized customer support. Call centers can meet or exceed customer expectations by consistently delivering high-quality interactions.
  • Enhance KPIs: Improved service quality leads to higher first-call resolution rates, shorter call handling times, and increased customer satisfaction scores.
  • Boost brand reputation: High-quality customer service transforms a brand's overall perception. Satisfied customers are likelier to share their positive experiences, developing a favorable brand reputation.
  • Build trust and loyalty: Consistent positive interactions boost customer’s confidence, leading to higher customer loyalty and increasing the probability of repeat buyers and positive word-of-mouth referrals.

2. Optimize agent training and retention

When you analyze customer interactions, you gain insights into customers' mindsets and observe how your contact center agents perform. Call center QM best practices help identify agent performance gaps, enabling organizations to provide necessary feedback, training, and coaching.

This leads to:

  • Skill Improvement: Targeted training programs help agents improve their skills, leading to better performance and service delivery.
  • Employee Satisfaction: Regular interventions and coaching boost agent morale and engagement.
  • Increased Retention: Satisfied and well-supported agents are likelier to stay loyal to an organization, reducing turnover rates and associated recruitment and training costs.

3. Maintain compliance with regulations and standards

Having call center quality management best practices in place guarantees that call centers abide by industry standards and policies.

  • Adherence to industry regulations: Call centers often operate in highly regulated environments. With proper quality management (QM), you can ensure all interactions comply with relevant laws and industry standards, minimizing non-compliance risk and associated penalties.
  • Mitigation of risks: Compliance with regulations and standards can avoid legal issues and the financial and reputational damage resulting from non-compliance.
  • Maintain standards: Ensuring compliance with ethical guidelines is fundamental to fostering the trust of your stakeholders, customers, and developing an environment of integrity within your organization.

4. Get valuable customer-related insights

When you analyze customer interactions and feedback, you get meaningful insights that will help you improve your quality management strategies.

With these insights, you will understand: 

  • Customer preferences: Understanding customers' likes and dislikes helps tailor your services and products to meet their evolving needs and preferences.
  • Pain points: Identifying common customer issues enables your organization to address and resolve these problems proactively.
  • Customer behavior: Insights into customer behavior trends and patterns can inform strategic decisions, leading to improved products and services and optimized customer experiences.

5. Reducing operational costs and increasing efficiency

Since agents adhere to all regulations and standards and have processes in place, the chances of errors have also been reduced.

This helps reduce operational costs and boost your call center productivity.

  • Optimize processes: Quality management continuously monitors and evaluates call center processes. Identifying inefficiencies and areas for improvement to streamline operations and reduce call-handling times.
  • Enhance agent performance: QM helps agents perform better by providing regular feedback and targeted training. Well-trained agents handle calls more efficiently, resolve issues faster, and require less supervision.
  • Minimize errors and rework: Effective quality management reduces errors and the need for rework. By addressing issues proactively, call centers can avoid the costs of correcting mistakes and handling repeat calls.

7 Common Challenges in Call Center Quality Management

common challenges of call center quality management

Despite the significant benefits of implementing a quality management strategy in your contact center, several challenges will hinder your success.

1. Too much data to analyze

The sheer volume of data generated by call centers is overwhelming, particularly when data is siloed across multiple systems.

How to solve this: A platform that integrates all call center technologies will ensure smooth data ingestion from cloud systems to on-premise applications.

2. Inconsistent evaluation of agent performance

Inconsistent evaluation of agent performance can undermine the effectiveness of the QA process. It’s important to maintain consistency in monitoring your agent's progress or skill gaps.

How to solve this

Train evaluators regularly to ensure consistency and accuracy. To make coaching effective, opt for a performance enablement tool that will help you plan, prepare, and summarize your coaching sessions to keep track of them.

3. Maintaining QA is not a high-priority

Quality management sometimes falls low on the priority list if customer experience is not the main priority of the contact center.

How to solve this

Prioritize customer experience, engage relevant stakeholders, and ensure comprehensive planning and execution.

4. Limited data evaluation

Many call centers only evaluate a small percentage of their calls, which can lead to a skewed understanding of overall performance.

Challenges of this are:

  • Insufficient coverage: To analyze agent performance and review their customer interactions comprehensively, team leaders cannot rely on more than one or two calls to review.
  • Limited insights: Infrequent evaluations and limited samples make it difficult to identify trends and areas for improvement.

How to solve this

Increase the frequency and coverage of call evaluations to obtain a more accurate and holistic view of overall performance intelligence.

5. Lack of effective coaching 

Finding time for consistent performance coaching and agent training is a challenge for call center managers and supervisors juggling multiple responsibilities. It's easy to get caught up in the data analysis leaving little time to execute coaching.

How to solve this

Allocate dedicated time for coaching and training. Use automated tools to streamline routine tasks, freeing up supervisors' time to focus on agent development.

6. Ensuring agent adherence to quality standards

Maintaining high standards across all interactions is challenging but critical for high customer service. Challenges include:

  • Consistency: Ensuring all agents follow quality, standards, protocols, and procedures consistently.
  • Monitoring: Continuous monitoring is needed to detect deviations from standards.

How to solve this

Use automated monitoring tools and regular audits to ensure adherence to quality standards and provide timely, and effective coaching feedback.

7. Managing remote or hybrid teams

Remote or hybrid work models present new challenges for quality management.

Challenges include:

  • Communication: Maintaining effective communication and collaboration among remote team members.
  • Monitoring and Support: Providing adequate support and monitoring for remote agents.

How to solve this: Implement robust communication tools and platforms and adapt quality management practices to suit remote or hybrid environments.

7 Best Practices for Call Center Quality Management

Following these 7 best practices for quality management in your contact center will enable you to optimize processes, improve customer satisfaction, and boost the overall performance of your entire team.

7 best practices call center quality management

1. Leverage call monitoring and recording 

Thousands of calls are being recorded; no contact center leader can listen to and review every call.

Tools that support real-time call monitoring, call calibration, and automated call recording are essential for assessing call quality and agent performance. With data, supervisors can review interactions and ensure adherence to quality standards.

Supervisors need to choose call center analytics tools that minimize their data mining efforts and allow them to focus on execution. These tools analyze live calls and recordings, transcribe interactions, and extract valuable insights.

By identifying patterns, trends, and performance issues, managers can make data-driven decisions to improve quality and compliance.

2. Handle customer queries from multiple channels

Customers seek smooth and quick interactions across all channels. Businesses must implement a multi-channel approach while ensuring quality standards, whether handling customer interactions via phone, email, chat, or social media.

This approach enhances customer satisfaction and streamlines the process of customer interactions across different platforms.

3. Train and coach agents to maintain high QA

For any contact center to meet high customer service standards, all agents must undergo continuous training and coaching, depending on their existing skill set.

Reviewing performance metrics regularly helps to identify agents' skill gaps, evaluate top performers' performance, and determine whether low-performing agents need additional coaching to improve their skills and adherence to quality standards.

Bridging the gap between QA and coaching is essential. It empowers supervisors to take immediate action through connected coaching conversations and integrated coaching actions. It is also necessary to keep them updated on new products, services, and customer service techniques that will help them improve at their jobs.

4. Monitor your call center quality management metrics

Listing clear metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) allows for measuring individual and overall call center performance.

Developing a quality scorecard to evaluate call center performance is an excellent way of tracking performance. Assign each KPI weight, set target values, and after regular intervals, review the scorecard results and provide feedback.

Regularly track agent performance measures, both quantitative and qualitative aspects of interactions.

Important metrics to be evaluated are: 

  • Average Call Duration 
  • Average Handle Time 
  • After-Call Work Time 
  • Call Transfer Rate 
  • Call Quality Score 
  • Agent Script Adherence 
  • Schedule Adherence 
  • Customer Satisfaction Score

5. Preach the motto of first contact resolution

We know that first-call resolution (FCR) can be complicated when customer queries are complex. FCR is one of the more important metrics impacting customer satisfaction CSAT.

Focusing on issue resolution during the first call reduces customer effort and increases overall customer experience.

Well-trained agents with access to the right tools and platforms are empowered to resolve issues on the first call.

Take a Deep Dive into Call Center Productivity Metrics

6. Continuously refine QA processes

A quality management system should be dynamic and adaptable. Review and modify your QA processes based on business goals, customer feedback, and identified inefficiencies.

Continuously improving your QA framework ensures that your contact center remains effective and aligned with industry best practices and evolving customer expectations.

7. Develop a customer issue resolution toolkit

Standardize policies and escalation routes to help agents handle dissatisfied customers effectively.

Agents should know the appropriate actions to take when dealing with recurring problems, technical glitches, and issues related to refunds, returns, and exchanges

Ensure that these policies align with the business's financial capabilities.

Call Center Quality Management Software

call center quality management software

Call center quality management is a holistic process that starts with the ability to see and action data from all of your contact center analytics.

Once able to see all of your data, the next and probably the most challenging step is knowing what the data means, and interpreting it into the right next best actions.

The good news? Call center quality management software like AmplifAI can ingest all types of call center analytics data, make sense of it based on your unique KPIs, identify high-performer behaviors, and recommend the right actions at the right time.

AmplifAI’s quality assurance software comes out of the box with these innovative features:

Comprehensive data utilization

AmplifAI ensures that your QA processes are powered by 100% of your data and that each customer interaction is appropriately analyzed, providing a complete picture of agent performance.

AmplifAI is a step ahead of other Auto QA tools, as its 360-degree performance insights include quality scores, CRM data, call transcripts, and other essential metrics. This holistic approach helps identify the root causes of customer satisfaction issues and highlights agent performance gaps.

Consistent and accurate evaluations

Eliminate subjective scoring with AmplifAI's calibration workflows by establishing clear guidelines and benchmarks, ensuring fair agent feedback.

Build trust with agents and make sure everyone is on the same page regarding their performance expectations.

Customizable and insightful reporting

AmplifAI offers customizable QA reporting, allowing you to analyze the most critical insights for your business.

These reports can be tailored by person, evaluator, score, question, and more, providing detailed insights into agent performance and areas needing improvement.

Quality-driven coaching

Seamlessly connects QA data with targeted coaching opportunities. Low scores and auto-fail flags automatically trigger coaching sessions, ensuring agents receive the focused guidance they need to improve.

This creates a perfect feedback loop where quality data fuels continuous improvement.

Recognition for high performance

Beyond addressing areas for improvement, AmplifAI extends its AI feedback loop to recognize high scores and wow interactions.

This targeted recognition for praiseworthy achievements motivates agents and fosters a positive work environment.

Scaled efficiency with auto QA

For fast-growing contact centers, managing QA manually can be overwhelming. AmplifAI's auto QA feature supercharges efficiency by analyzing every customer interaction.

Easy interactions are auto-scored, allowing your team to focus on more complex calls and coaching opportunities. This automation ensures that no interaction goes unreviewed, maintaining high standards across the board.

Get Started With Quality Management

We know how overloaded call centers are with call data, along with the constant stress of keeping customers happy. A well thought out quality management strategy like the one we've outline in this article can help you mitigate these challenges.

AmplifAI simplifies quality management by automating the compilation of data and actionable insights, significantly reducing the time and costs associated with these tasks. This advanced automation not only saves precious resources but also elevates the accuracy and effectiveness of your quality management strategy.

Quality management is just the beginning—AmplifAI is a complete call center performance management software that supports every aspect of your contact center operations.

Book your demo now

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Benefit
Result
💯
Improved Performance & Customer Experience
Month over month gains in Issue Resolution,
FCR and NPS;
Month over month reductions in Handle times,
ACW and Hold
👥
Winning additional client headcount
30% improvement in sales conversion
💪
Retaining talented people
8-point reduction in turnover
💰
Improving financial performance
10% increase in utilization

Summary

The future of success in your contact center is contingent on how you impact performance in ways that are both immediate and sustainable. And it doesn’t matter whether your agents are on-site, at-home, full-time, part-time, or temporary – you must deliver on performance.

Coaching is one of the most significant tools we can use to deliver on the engagement and performance of our people – but we must develop our processes, our people and leadership skills, and our technology tools, in order to overthrow the pervasive challenges to achieving greater coaching effectiveness and supercharging contact center performance!

Unlock the potential of your employees and skyrocket your ROI with cutting-edge coaching.

call center coaching cta@0.5x

Connect with the authors:

Melissa Pollock Customer Success at AmplifAI

Jim Rembach President at CX Media

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Mrigya Kochar

Mrigya Kochar

Lead Researcher - Customer Experience
AmplifAI on LinkedIntwitter x

With over half a decade of research experience and a passion for storytelling, Mrigya is an expert at transforming trend data into engaging content. Her past experience in consulting for retail and automotive brands has helped her develop a deep understanding of customer experience, and she brings those learnings and unique perspectives into her content. 

Mrigya has also worked with multiple CX and AI companies to develop well researched and engaging articles, ebooks, and white-papers. When not writing, Mrigya creates travel and lifestyle content for her Instagram page, which has more than 25,000 followers.

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