Call Center Monitoring Software - Assembled

Call Center Monitoring Software

The application and use of call center monitoring platforms should be multi-layered. The best call center monitoring software tools can help your operations meet quality standards and provide a better and more consistent customer experience. You will find different types of call monitoring solutions that only offer only a bare-bones approach to tracking your support calls.

The best call center management practices will allow supervisors to listen in to active calls in real-time without the customer or agent being alerted. These recordings can also be used to help train new call centers by offering real-life scenarios and how to deal with challenging situations. If your desire as call center manager is to elevate your call center teams through higher quality customer transactions, then you must invest in the tools and devices that take advantage of virtual technology and automated quality control tracking including:

• Cloud-based or browser-based call center software
• Call recording and/or call monitoring capabilities
• Customer relationship management software (CRM)
• High-speed internet and minimum computer system requirements
• Remote access for supervisory monitoring
• Powerful analytics to discover call center pain points
• Seamless integration of workflow and reporting
  

In addition to these different software types and features, you should also consider the customer service template or call center form that you will employ. The right call center monitoring template or form will ensure consistent customer interactions and help supervisors judge how well team members handle customer interactions. Some call center templates also provide example entrance messages for customers to hear when service agents are unavailable.

Your call center template will also outline typical call distribution methods, along with voice mail greetings, comfort messaging, and messages for holidays or after-hours. A good template is the best way to layout the flow of call center operations and will outline how important details should always be implemented.

Best Call Center Software

Choosing a call center software solution is an important decision that will impact your daily operations for years. Unlike your CRM or customer relationship management platform, the best call monitoring software will optimize voice communications, while directing and managing call routing between help center hierarchies. While your CRM systems will hold critical customer information and purchasing data, your call monitoring software will deliver expanded metrics in real-time, including:

• Tracking of First Contact Resolution (FCR)
• Agents Schedule Adherence
• Total call center performance
• Agent phone call stats
  

The best call center software will improve the productivity of your call center agents, without sacrificing customer support quality. And if your business is launching a new outbound call center campaign, your call center call monitoring can be a source for contact lists to enable automated call operations. The best call center software can play a vital role in making business operating decisions, by providing answers to questions such as, “what is the rate of calls answered and completed during first contact?"

When exploring your call center management options, check the reviews to see how well the software handles the call queue and call recording. These are the two main actions that your platform should excel at.

Call Center Quality Assurance

Companies must implement call center quality assurance guidelines to ensure their operating processes result in desirable customer service outcomes. If your goal is to provide exceptional customer service, then there must be a way to monitor agent performance. Additionally, your call center QA program must be supported by data collection, analysis, and reporting that will not only reflect good employee service but will also pinpoint issues that need to stop and workflows that result in good results.

Call center quality assurance can be measured in many ways. Here are some common call center QA methods:

• Benchmarking - regular checks to see how agents measure up to baseline standards
• Customer feedback - allowing customers to fill out surveys or questionnaires about service quality
• Real-time monitoring - giving supervisors the ability to field inspect the agent's work quality
• Software-enabled features - choose a platform with extras such as performance tracking and evaluation
  

Quality assurance is essential when onboarding new employees, especially with live chat and calls to ensure management can identify and correct flaws early in the training process. And finally, your quality assurance programs can be a great way to standardize and evaluate the overall effectiveness of your call center. This will require consistent and ongoing monitoring to ensure these operations are in line with corporate sales, marketing, and manufacturing goals.

Call Center Management System

Another aspect of running an efficient call center is having the right cloud-based call center software that can help managers implement scheduling, tracking, and other call monitoring activities. A call center management system is a workforce optimization tool that can help manage call center daily operations. 

Here are a few key items call center managers are concerned about and need to help better fulfill their roles:

• A call center employee call recording system for performance appraisals
• The ability to listen to calls between agents and customers incognito
• Cloud-based call center software to connect with a network of remote agents
• High call center functionality such as automatic call distribution and customizable options

Today's call center agents can be mobilized in one facility, working remotely from home, or operate out of national or international hubs. For management to successfully oversee daily operations, cloud-based capabilities are a must. Also, there should be systems in place for management to easily communicate with employees, no matter where they are. These may include internal forums, two-way voice, online chat, email, or instant messaging.

For outbound call center operations, management will depend on automated voice systems, predictive dialers, and the ability to integrate multiple platforms with the call center software, such as CRM databases or workforce management (WFM) tools.

Call Center Software

Call center software is a single solution to help manage all internal and external communications. This includes those easy real-time connections between employee and supervisor and communicating with customers with outbound calls. Today's call management software solutions can integrate email, telephone, live chat, SMS text, instant messaging, and social media communications all from one centralized location.

With this two-way calling and listening capability, managers can improve the quality of interactions between customers and call center agents. This allows for real performance oversight. Or, some businesses may choose automatic tracking and reporting of agent performance that is based on historical performance data. These are great call center software tools that can help implement improvements by identifying operational bottlenecks.

Consider call center software that will automatically generate scorecards for the supervisor to assess employee performance. Scorecards help keep track of agent performance metrics and are available in multiple formats or templates including for customer service, sales teams, inbound calls, and outbound marketing agents. When appraising call center agent performance, use a scorecard that has divided roles and responsibilities including:

• Customer service quality
• Account verification skills
• Contact information refresh
• Agent greeting skills
• Call wrap-up or follow-up
• Virtual Call Center Software
  

Virtual call center software is specifically geared towards those businesses that are dispersed regionally, nationally, or internationally. Instead of call center agents working from a central location, they may be organized in smaller, decentralized groups. But virtual call center services are most often used for remote employees that work from home, and they may have more flexible work hours.

These types of customer service operations can be the best solution for a virtual call center for small businesses. The virtual call center model removes much of the overhead costs and will often experience lower employee turnover, both of which can save operating and human resource costs for a small business.

The best virtual call center software will still allow for a personalized approach between agents and customers. The emphasis is on more productive telephone support to enhance the customer experience from purchasing decisions to product problem-solving. Choose virtual call center services that are easy to configure, learn, and manage to reduce the amount of supervision needed for remote workers.

Above all, make sure your virtual call center business is cloud-based. This removes any geographical limitations and will typically have lower upfront costs associated with set-up and management because most of your hardware needs such as storage -are eliminated.

Call Center Quality Monitoring Scorecard

A call center quality monitoring scorecard is the best way to assess your customer service agents' skills and measure their performance. They are especially useful when appraising new employees or when managers want to gain better control over call center quality Scorecards should be an integral part of call center quality monitoring software. Some examples of the types of metrics that are tracked and graded include:

• Agent's attitude and conversational tone
• Customer service resolution stats
• Responsiveness and efficiency ratings
• Product or service knowledge
• The number of tickets completed

Monitoring these elements allow managers to track the progress of call center agents and determine if further coaching or training is needed. Call center quality monitoring scorecards can also be used internally between call center groups as a catalyst for discussion and team collaboration. Scorecards allow all agents to share information about difficulties encountered while handling customers and share the different solutions that have worked in the past.

When you need contact center forecasting, scheduling, and analytics, use Assembled to discover how modern support teams can be run and managed more efficiently.