Do you know how your customers perceive your company? Are they happy when they call, or do they dread trying to get help from one of your call agents?
As a business grows, the owner may watch higher-level aspects more than day-to-day operations. But a business should understand what happens when a customer calls your company for support.
Call center monitoring lets you listen in on your company’s incoming call traffic to improve your company’s communications. You can help evaluate your customer service calls and improve call center agents’ performance. Monitoring can help you identify strengths and weaknesses to improve your company’s call operations.
The Basics
- Call monitoring also involves technology that can measure key metrics such as call quality, the agent’s use of protocols, and overall customer satisfaction.
- Quality customer service is essential to both obtain and retain customers. Call center monitoring can show where the company does well and where improvements are needed.
- Monitoring calls can also offer valuable insights into your customers’ behaviors and how their needs may change over time. With this information, your company can respond to those needs.
Why Should You Monitor Your Calls?
There are several reasons to monitor your call center’s activity:
- Training CSR agents: letting new agents listen to calls helps them learn the right—and wrong—way to handle customer calls.
- Performance evaluations: call monitoring can determine employees’ performance, identify top performers and those needing additional instruction, and offer accurate evaluation.
- Customer Churn: one of the biggest reasons customers leave a company is bad customer service. Many will pay more for a different vendor with better customer service. Monitoring calls to improve that customer service experience can help reduce that churn. The flip side is increased customer loyalty and retention.
- Customer Feedback: call monitoring can offer valuable insight into the needs and preferences of customers, helping to improve customer satisfaction.
- Quality assurance: Monitoring calls can ensure that call center agents handle calls professionally and provide accurate, up-to-date information. It also requires agents to be more aware of what they say on a call and reminds them not to disclose information they shouldn’t.
- Increased efficiency: Monitoring can also help identify areas that need improvement. Real-time call monitoring can help agents move through live calls and help clear calls waiting in the queue.
- Regulatory compliance: many companies are required to keep recordings of customer calls, such as healthcare, securities, or insurance. These recordings also protect a company in case of a customer dispute or inquest by a regulatory agency, such as FINRA (the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, which regulates brokers, investment advisors, and brokerages.)
- Back up what’s said by CSR: there’s nothing worse for a call center agent than an abusive caller. Whether the caller believes the agent promised something they didn’t receive or was not well-treated, the call recording will prove or disprove the agent’s claim.
Call monitoring can be done manually by supervisors or automatically by specially designed software. Successful customer relations are based on data collected by call center agents. The data and metrics from monitoring are helpful for several applications, such as decision-making based on the collected metrics and improving the call center’s operations.
Finding The Pain Points
After a while, you may feel like you know what your customer wants. But making changes without customer input may make things difficult for those customers. Call monitoring gives you the best and most accurate customer feedback without additional expenses.
Your customer calls will tell you what pain points your customer’s experience and how they react to new offerings. Use this feedback to make improvements in your products and services. You’ll learn what your customers are concerned about so you can fine-tune your message to their needs. Use this information to quell their fears quickly to lead to more conversions.
Identify Gaps In Training
What do your call center agents sound like when they speak with customers who are calling? Those employees who answer the phone are the lifeline between interested customers and your business. They give the caller the first impression of your business. Shouldn’t they show the business’ best side?
Scripts are fine, but customers don’t always stick to one. Agents must move off-script to continue the conversation and give the customer what they need. Are they able to do that well and still get the job done? What about calls after hours—are they helping or just telling the caller the business hours? You’ll know with call monitoring.
When customer service agent learns to listen to a caller, they can better assist them. Over time, someone may slip into their familiarity with your company’s offerings and forget that the caller may not understand everything. They may need to remember that not every caller understands the way they do.
Listening To Recorded Calls
Calls recorded in real time are excellent ways to express the right and wrong way to handle callers. New hires experience real-life calls and can better retain what they’ve learned. Learning opportunities are unavailable when an agent is on a call because there isn’t an opportunity to address problems at the time.
Agents should also listen to their own recorded calls. They have an opportunity to identify missed mistakes or habits they may want to change.
Getting a new customer costs five times as much as it does to retain one. Call monitoring can help your company retain current customers through optimal customer service and reducing churn.
Queue Metrics by Press8 Telecom – Best Call Monitoring Software
Press 8 Telecom’s Queue Metrics Call Monitoring Software lets you monitor your call center traffic in real-time and check your metrics from anywhere. Queue Metrics features a page for each agent and a customizable wall board for managers to see what they need. Combined with a state-of-the-art VoIP phone system, your call center can run smoothly and give your customers the right help at the right time. Call today for a free quote for your company. 800-349-VoIP(8647)
