Call Monitoring

Traditional v/s Real-time Call Monitoring

In traditional call monitoring, all calls are recorded, stored in a database, and assessed later. It helps call centers to quite an extent from a broader perspective. But it does not help when the agent is interacting with customers and trying to resolve their queries.

What is a real-time call monitoring feature?

Real-time call monitoring, as the name suggests, evaluates every call in the present moment. It provides managers with access to detailed call analytics and alerts. The latest software can track speech patterns to identify abusive language, escalation attempts, and customer sentiment.

How Real-time Call Monitoring Software Works?

Real-time monitoring uses AI-driven speech analytics to assess everything included in a call. The algorithm automatically generates a transcript of every call in real-time. Managers can listen to the calls and help the call center agent provide solutions to customers.

How real-time monitoring helps your call center?

1. Consistency in customer service

Real-time call monitoring can guide agents to take the best action when certain things occur on the call. For instance, take a look at the below image showing an unhappy telecom subscriber.

2. Track agents’ performance accurately

Real-time monitoring provides accurate scores for every call and also gives performance feedback to agents and managers during the call.

Post-call analytics helps call center managers to compare and contrast agents based on different parameters. They can then decide who is good and who needs more one-on-one training.

3. Real-time compliance

Real-time call monitoring software track every call for FDCPA violations, Mini Miranda language, right-party contact language, and the use of abusive language from either party. In case of any violations, the system alerts the managers to intervene immediately.

Benefits Of Call Center Monitoring Software

In a nutshell, right call monitoring software helps you ensure that your call center workforce is effective, compliant, and productive in providing excellent customer service.

Here are some of the key benefits of call monitoring

1. Identify deficits and proficiency in agent performance

Call monitoring helps you gain a comprehensive view of an agent’s performance, including his deficits and proficiency. Let’s say an agent struggles when a customer asks for a refund. By monitoring the calls, you can determine why the agent struggles with this type of caller and where he is going wrong.

2. Improve agent performance

Once you’ve identified the deficits in an agent’s performance, you can organize curated training sessions to address them. If your agent struggles to handle refund requests, you can train him to respond to such queries in a particular way. This way, your agent will be able to better manage the customers without ruining the customer experience.

3. Increased agent morale

Your agents may not show, but they want help. Working in a call center, especially outbound where agents need to make sales, can be difficult. The agents need to know what they’re doing wrong and how they can improve.

At the same time, they’d also like to hear what they’re doing right. Call monitoring allows you to pinpoint both areas of excellence as well as improvement.

4. Enhanced customer satisfaction

The ultimate goal of call monitoring is to increase customer satisfaction. If your agents are not performing as per requirement, it’ll translate to unhappy customers and lost business.

Call monitoring lets you train your agents to be customer-centric and focus on the customers’ satisfaction. Satisfied customers turn into recurring customers, which adds revenue to your business.

5. Boost sales

In outbound call centers, your goal is to generate sales and revenue. If your agents are not interacting efficiently with the customers, your sales will plunge, and business will dry up.

Call monitoring helps you run your outbound call center like a well-oiled machine. By tracking your agents’ calls, you can determine what exactly they’re doing wrong and how to maximize their potential to increase sales.

6. Increased overall revenue

The purpose of call monitoring is to generate greater revenue for your company. When you continuously monitor and improve your agents’ performance, you increase the chances of making your customers happy and encourage them to do business with you again.

How to Set Up an Efficient Call Monitoring System?

Now, that you understand the significance of call monitoring, you should also know how to deploy the system correctly in your call center.

First up, hire a team, which is dedicated wholly to keeping track of your calls. You can either gather a team of internal employees, comprising customer service managers and experienced agents. They should be able to thoroughly understand the various aspects of customer service. You may also think of hiring a third-party agency, consisting of trained professionals, who can offer unbiased and comprehensive feedback after analyzing your calls.

Next, have a system of creating scorecards in place. Scorecards maintain records of the factors around which agents will be evaluated. You can include waiting times, call durations, listening abilities, and handling of dissatisfied callers as some of the aspects to measure agent performance.

Of course, you should also take inputs from your agents as to what should be the set performance benchmarks. This will lead to enhanced commitment and increased dedication.

Now, if your call center attends to different categories of client issues, it is better to segregate the call monitoring process. You can have individual metrics for proactive and reactive calls. Since all agents do not handle the same type of calls, it is unfair to measure them through a universal scorecard.

Focus equally on both successful and unsuccessful calls and save prime phone calls as future reference. The latter examples can be used as a guide to train new agents. Finally, take measures to improve the whole process and not only the customer service reps. Sometimes, you might also need to overhaul outdated internal processes.

Last but not least, invest in premium-quality VOIP software that has all the latest call monitoring feature embedded in the system. “With CallHippo’s interactive interface, you can monitor your calls precisely. From the “Activity Feed” section, you can find all your call logs with details like Department, Caller Name, Client Number, Call Status, Date and Time, Total Call Duration, and Total Call Cost.”

“You can directly access all the call recordings and analyze each and every conversation. Analyzing call recordings in a virtual phone system is one of the proven tools for improving customer support. Apart from that, you can filter your call logs by applying various filters like Selecting a Specific User, Call Type – Incoming or Outgoing, Specific Time Period. You can identify the flow of calls by applying such filters. You can also find the total cost of acquisition for a particular customer. You can also download the entire call log.”

Why Call Monitoring Software is crucial for Call Centers?

We will discuss four ways call monitoring can help your virtual call center.

1. Quality assurance

Every business has its quality assurance (QA) department. Call monitoring is one of the QA best practices of call centers that help to serve customers in a better way. Customer service managers can record and playback calls and evaluate the agent’s performance. The software can also assess various qualitative aspects like the tone of voice, the pace of talking to customers, and the agent’s approach to solving problems.

Most of the best call monitoring software also comes with a customizable QA call monitoring form. In this form, you can assess agents based on predefined criteria like:

• Soft Skills
• Process
• Compliance
• Outcomes

You can see an example of a monitoring solution form below:

2. Ensure compliance and data security

Call centers across the globe have to comply with some strict rules and regulations. The call monitoring features helps organizations in the compliance process. It helps to identify sensitive data in voice calls and can automatically stop recording such interactions. Advanced call center software can also secure the recordings in a cloud server. Organizations can retrieve the data in the future if needed.

3. Workforce productivity

Based on the results of the call assessment, managers can recommend corrective training and improvement programs for call center agents. Call quality monitoring software is significant in large establishments having multiple departments and call centers. The team managers can share results across departments to boost the overall productivity of the company.

4. Improve business profitability

Monitoring functionality helps businesses identify the competition and differentiate themselves from their competitors. In-built analytics can assess customer perception of company products or services. Based on these insights, the business leaders can make better decisions and head towards profitability.

Now, you are aware of how call monitoring software can make a difference for your call center. We should also discuss the best practices of monitoring solutions used by successful organizations. But before that, let us understand the concept of real-time call monitoring.

5 Call Monitoring best practices you should never ignore

1. Record and monitor all calls

The call centers want to make monitoring tools processes faster. For this reason, some call centers take a shortcut. They analyze random calls. Unfortunately, it does not provide the complete picture. Instead of taking shortcuts, call centers should automate the entire process using the latest call center software. It will help them monitor and evaluate 100% of the calls.

2. Hold retro meetings

Retro meetings help top-performing agents to share their winning behaviors with fellow agents. For example, they can share the tactics and vocabulary they use to resolve calls. Remember, call center software can deliver excellent results only when you share the insights with everyone around you.

3. Document your call monitoring policy

If you own real-time call monitoring software, update your monitoring tool and evaluation documentation. Share this document across the organization. All agents and team managers should have clarity on evaluation areas. Include the monitoring software policy when training newly-recruited agents and managers.

4. Everyone should be a part of the process

Executive management must ensure that managers, supervisors, and agents play an active role in the call monitoring process. Interactive quality management dashboards combine all results and deliver insights in a few clicks. When everyone is aware of what the insights mean, it helps achieve key business objectives across all departments.

5. Compare data with industry benchmarks

You gain access to valuable internal data through real-time monitoring software but, you should also compare it with external industry data and statistics. Compare KPIs like average call abandonment rate, time to answer, queue time, and service level. It helps you get a realistic idea of the targets you should set for your agents.