Functions & Tasks of a QA Team in the Call Center

Call centers manage thousands of customer interactions every day. It is crucial for organizations to ensure consistent brand experience through all customer interactions. Building a top-notch call center quality monitoring strategy is a key to improve and sustain customer satisfaction. A quality assurance team is needed to ensure that these goals are met.

The key role of call center quality assurance is ensuring that the agents provide quality service in line with the organizational objectives. Optimized quality assurance increases agents’ efficiency through behavior modification, enhanced quality service to customers and improved close rates. It is important to have a robust quality assurance program, creating a team of analysts and understanding their roles and responsibilities.

Here are twelve essential functions and tasks of a quality assurance team:

1.   Developing Evaluation Programs

A vast number of QA analysts are former call center agents and have the knowledge of what makes a quality interaction. With that knowledge, the team can develop evaluation programs for analyzing critical performance behaviors and metrics.

Not all performance metrics are relevant to an organization. For example, an outbound call center will look more into an agent’s persuasiveness while an inbound call center will look into an agent’s product knowledge or problem resolution ability. The aim is to focus on what matters the most to an organization.

The quality assurance team should develop evaluation programs that maximizes the output and productivity of the contact center. It should provide root-causes of problems, possible solutions and provide actionable insights for performance improvements.

Working in partnership with the operations, they build an evaluation form, along with the process of sharing the information to ensure improvements are documented as part of an overall plan.

2. Keeping track of the key industry trends

The quality analyst team not only monitors the trends within their company but also what is trending across the industry. They’re a great source of information regarding campaign performance as well as industry trends that may impact their solutions.

Part of this process is capturing ‘voice of customer’ analytics that provides critical business insights. Once a competitor’s products, pricing, or service is mentioned, research can be conducted to verify the information obtained on the call. These insights empower the business teams to make strategic and well-informed decisions.

3. Monitoring Customer Interactions

QA roles and responsibilities include call monitoring and providing actionable insights. Through monitoring, a QA analyst gathers information to improve agent performance in the contact center. As the QA team monitors the customer interactions, they use evaluation forms to capture insights from these interactions.

Evaluation forms are living documents and should not be set in stone. As the call center quality assurance process matures, improvements will be identified and the forms will evolve.

4. Calibration Sessions

In order to ensure all key departments are aligned, routine calibration sessions are vital for monitoring the quality of the interactions. These sessions are an opportunity to discuss issues and trends as well as address the latest trends.

The quality assurance team conducts these calibration sessions and keeps every stakeholder aligned on the operational objectives.

5. Utilization of Technology

The quality assurance team monitors interactions across all platforms including speech and text. With the latest technologies, real-time quality monitoring also plays a key role in transforming the way contact centers operate. The other aspect of technology is a quality monitoring solution that not only evaluates, but also provides actionable analytics and real-time reports.

Call center quality monitoring provides valuable data that can help with optimizing agent behavior, enhancing sales performance, and improving the customer experience. A QA team utilizes technology for continuously optimizing their performance and increasing the effectiveness of quality monitoring in contact centers.

6. Training and Coaching

Agents need to be trained on quality policies and procedures. There are two approaches to this training, either as a group or individually. This should start in agent training so that all new hires understand the expectations of a quality call.

Operations Leaders must be trained on how to use the evaluation feedback tool to coach their agents to improve. A closed loop coaching process works best so that as agents are coached, the quality analyst team monitors them for improvement.

7. Compliance Monitoring’

In the recent times, adhering to the compliance measures is one of the most important parameters for any organization’s success. With the assistance from artificial intelligence, the quality assurance team identifies compliance opportunities. This ensures greater agent understanding of required scripting or fulfilment obligations and reducing business vulnerabilities.

8. Driving Innovation and Optimizing Processes

Digital transformation is disrupting the business process across industry verticals. The role of the quality assurance team also includes continuously optimizing the existing process leading to improved efficiency as well as reduced costs.

Adopting the latest quality monitoring software for call centers, a quality assurance team can leverage the power of AI powered speech analytics to automate boring tasks and perform real-time quality monitoring.

9. Competition Analysis

With the increasing competition in the marketplace, keeping an eye on the competitor’s activities is extremely vital. Customer conversations are filled with data often overlooked without the partnership between experience and technology.

Whenever a customer mentions any competition, QA teams can add triggers and listen to the voice of customers and take note of any information shared by the customer. This information can help when making key business decisions.

10. Agent Engagement

Change is inevitable! What worked for Generation X, may not work for Millennials or Generation Z. Therefore, contact centers need to evolve in order to improve their productivity. It is the responsibility of the quality team to engage agents and ensure they’re trained appropriately.

Part of this includes developing training & development methodologies, monitoring their KPIs, acknowledging them for their achievements and teaching them the organizational objective in order to deliver a consistent brand experience.

11. Revenue Growth

From scoring agent interactions to optimizing sales efficiency for improving team performance, quality monitoring has come a long way. Customer sentiments are not just a score.

QA teams apply analytics not only on what is said, but how it is said and what drives a positive customer experience. By customer churn analysis, the quality analyst team identifies opportunities that drives change throughout an organization, from agent coaching to product improvement to marketing opportunities.

12. Improving Overall Contact Center Efficiency

Traditional contact center management tools often provide data without context. By combining human intelligence and artificial intelligence, a QA team identifies not only when the call states change, but why they change and the drivers behind the behavior to look for service level improvements.

These are the twelve basic functions that are necessary to create and manage a QA team. The true value of this team will come when improvements in agent behavior, sales performance, and the customer experience are achieved.

Contact us now to explore how our Etech Insights team and Etech’s intelligent, customizable contact center quality monitoring solution and agent performance management tool, QEval, can help you deliver a remarkable customer experience all the time.