A Call Center Audit is a process of identifying what needs to be improved for your customer service team’s performance and output quality to match up with expectations. This guide provides insight into this specialized field, so we hope it helps.
What is a Call Center Audit?
A Call Center Audit is essential because it can point out areas in which improvement has been made. This will help your team members’ efficiency, effectiveness, and compliance levels.
Call Center Audits are a way to measure the performance of your company. They help identify areas where you can improve, as well as strengths and weaknesses that might not be obvious otherwise. The results from an audit should give insight into what needs work for any business looking at their operations or those around them.
Internal Call Center Audit is a way to make sure your team can always do their best work. It’s something that experienced agents, supervisors, or internal auditors would be able to conduct for you because they’ll get reports back with successful calls, which shows where there may need some improvement on quality standards.
Why is Call Center Audit important?
General auditing is the most common call type, covering a majority or all purposes. However, there are also specific audit calls where we specialize in looking at one particular thing for our clients and providing them with an accurate assessment of what needs to be done based on that information alone. So they don’t have any uncertainty about their progress anymore.
Specifically, Call Center Audit is done for the following purposes including:
- Performance improvement to identify service performance, effectiveness, and efficiency
- Formulating informed decisions in times of mergers and takeovers, changes in markets, and change strategies
- Determining compliance and quality opportunities
- Calculating risks in implementing new business initiatives, and
- Determining opportunities for upgrading technology and configuration
Call Center Audit Checklist
Call Center Performance
Calling call center metrics is an excellent way to measure the success of your goals.
- Calls until a conversion: You can tell a lot about your lead quality and the skills of any agents you work with by tracking how many calls it takes until conversion.
- Calls per hour: You can see how many calls each agent has completed in the past, which will give you an idea about their capability and help plan future goals.
- Call outcome: The call outcome is crucial for knowing which numbers aren’t good and indicates how successful your sales dialogue was with prospects.
- Follow-up Per Lead: The follow-ups are where over half of the sales come from, so it’s essential to know how many you need with any given lead.
- Voicemail returns: are a great way to measure how effective your company’s voicemail script is.
- Handle time: is when an agent keeps their customers on the phone longer than expected to answer any concerns they might have or gain more information from them. This way, you are helping out your client and gaining valuable insight into what’s going on at home.
- Agent Satisfaction: The agent satisfaction rating is a great way to measure how well you think each call went. The manager can use these numbers as teaching tools and see what areas need improvement, ultimately leading to increased performance.
- Cost per call: The cost per call is a standard measure of how much it costs to have one single conversation with someone from your company and can help you predict what might happen in future discussions.
- Number of Metrics You Are Tracking: Businesses can track many different metrics. Finding the correct number for your company is crucial, but make sure it’s not too much, or you’ll get overwhelmed with data.
- Call abandonment: As many as 20% of calls are abandoned within the first five minutes. This can lead to rapid sales decline and high customer churn rates because customers wait too long for an answer or disposition on their call, which leads them back with fewer numbers than desired by companies looking at improving processes rather than hiring new talent.
- Forecast accuracy has a lot to do with how well your company utilizes its resources. If the number of calls received by an agent falls short of what they expected, it means either you’re underworked or overworked, depending on whether there’s enough work for all employees involved in this area.
Agent Performance
For analyzing agent performance, a few metrics will be helpful:
- Follow a schedule: The secret to success for any company is precise execution. If you want your business or agency’s work done well, follow a plan and keep others on track with what needs doing so they can succeed too.
- To measure quality assurance, use a scoring tool to help you understand how successful an agent is with call handling and following the script/protocols.
- The number of calls assigned to an agent: The more calls an agent gets, the busier they will be. If you want your call answered quickly and efficiently, then fewer cases should be assigned to them so their staff can focus on what matters.
- Resolution rate: A high-resolution rate is vital because it helps the customer and agent save time. When an issue isn’t resolved during your first call, there’s still an opportunity for improvement by following up with them later on or getting more information about their problem so that you can resolve it quicker next time.
The difference in the metrics you use for calls coming into your call center versus those going out can be significant, depending on what kind of business it is. Call centers should report data that will help them achieve their goals and purposes – make sure to choose appropriate numbers or ratios to see success.
Call Center Scripts
When you are ready to give your staff a script to get all the necessary information, remember what kind of calling they’ll be doing. There’s an Inbound and Outbound version for each type so make sure these match up with how many people are being reached at once or whether there is only one switchboard operator who takes messages on behalf of other employees.
Getting the caller’s name and contact information is essential no matter what script you use. This will allow your team members to more efficiently help them with their needs so they don’t have any confusion about why or how we can assist in solving whatever issue has come up on this end.
When you need to call someone, you have a script that needs to happen. The outbound call center scripts will focus on giving information and solutions so the recipient can make an informed decision about which company best suits their needs.
Call Center Culture
Your call center’s culture is critical to handling customer feedback efficiently and with a smile on your face. Businesses often rely upon this as their primary point of contact with consumers; everything from ordering products to requesting information about how long it’ll take before receiving an order can be done via phone at any time throughout the day (or night). With such important responsibility in hand, there needs to be some serious attention paid so that these employees feel valued..
Building call center culture begins with looking at the current values and workplace environment to see whether everyone is working toward a common goal. Employees should seek management who upholds their beliefs, as this will create desired work conditions for them.
If organizations have committed to supporting each other’s success, they can build an effective team spirit through shared goals.
Customer Satisfaction
This is why it’s so important to take care of your employees. Without them, how can you expect customers to be satisfied?
Here are six tips on how to improve customer satisfaction by improving employee satisfaction:
- Offer continual training: Keeping your team up-to-date with activity and other forms of professional development will ensure that they are prepared for any challenges on the job.
- Hold call review meetings: Hold call review meetings to improve your agent’s skills and ensure they’re on the right track. Collations can go well, but sometimes some challenges need addressing for you all to succeed together.
- Boost daily morale: Gestures are essential for boosting day-to-day confidence. Expecting grand gestures is not necessary, but small, meaningful ones go a long way to keeping employees happy and productive.
- Create a collaborative environment: Collaboration is key to success. This can be achieved by having meetings, an open door policy, and online platforms for sharing ideas that will allow your agents to feel heard, leading them towards collaborating on solutions.
- Share experiences: Sharing experiences is essential in the agent industry because it allows new and experienced agents to learn from their mistakes. It can even help seasoned professionals handle difficult situations better if they’ve had a similar experience.
- Reward good performance: Rewards should be given to employees who perform well. Find out what motivates your staff, so you can give them rewards that encourage more excellent performance.
Conducting Call Center Audit in your team
The client and service provider should work on call auditing procedures to improve their team. Here are some best practices in conducting Call Center Audit in a call center team.
- Have proper guidelines: The team must have proper guidelines for Call Center Audit. These should include the company’s purpose and goals in this area and an entire procedure on how they plan to do it all. From the start (or end), point up until measuring success by metrics like total number called or percentage answered correctly each time someone dials into your line.
- Focus on the goal: Internal Call Center Audit should always be focused on what will impact your company’s performance for its goals; metrics that are more urgent depend on how much you want to improve certain aspects within call centers as well.
- Assign a point person: Having proper communication for a team conducting an audit process is crucial. Whether they’re working remotely or close by, the members must check up on their clients at every stage of the procedure so that nothing goes wrong. This can be done by designating one person (the point) who will act as a contact between all relevant parties.
- Keep call records and details: Remember to keep all records of each call so that you can audit them later. Call centers sometimes have their best calls and positive feedback saved for proof they had a high CSAT rating which is used in reports accordingly.
Call Center Audit software
One of the most critical aspects of auditing is knowing which areas need improvement. Call software can help with this by providing in-depth analytics and reports on performance, as well as tools for feedback sessions or coaching agents struggling during their shift.
- Talkdesk is a customer service and contact center platform. With its all-inclusive features, Talkdesk is one of the leading solutions for companies obsessed with their customers’ needs to provide top-notch support every time.
- Ameyo, you can see what your agents are doing in real-time and manage their calls with ease. This platform’s “agent self-monitoring” feature enables individual call insights and recording capabilities for those who need them back at headquarters when needed.
- Nice CXone provides a single contact center platform that integrates all your business needs into one easy-to-use system. The company offers industry-leading features for call routing and workforce automation to make auditing easier for you.
- Process Street is an app that can be used to create SOPs, manage workflows and organize monitoring processes. They even provide checklists that users can edit and utilize at their will.
There are many benefits to having an outsourcing partner that you can trust. You’ll be able to get expert help for all your Call Center Audit needs in any country, and they will also offer other services like data entry or project management, so don’t hesitate.
If you’re looking for ways to improve your call center and increase sales, we recommend conducting a Call Center Audit. This will help identify areas where your team can improve and increase efficiency. Contact us today to get started.
