Ensuring Quality in a Call Centre Setting

Quality and maintaining high standards should always be the desire in any line of work. For the call centre industry, where contact centre services are hired by companies outsourcing customer service processes, sales teams and other aspects of communication with customers and potential customers, it becomes an even more important process. There are a few ways in which you can ensure quality remains when managing a team in a call centre, especially if the customer is outsourcing to you and there can be no visible seams between the contact their in-house team has with customers and the contact that your team has, it must always appear the same.

There are a few ways in which you can begin to create metrics and measures that ensure a high standard at all times. The first is to create a workplace culture that has empathy at its core. This is a necessity for both the employee and the customer. Whenever a customer has an interaction with a call centre they want to be heard and know that the person on the other end of the phone is genuinely trying to help them with whatever they are going through. Empathy is the first step to creating a positive experience for the customer.

It is also important to insist that the call centre staff go above and beyond on every single call. There has to be consistency in every single call, and there are a few ways in which a call centre operative can measure whether they have gone above and beyond every single time. Ask if they have addressed the needs of the customer, even if the customer has not explicitly stated what those needs are. Did the customer thank them for their efforts, and did it provide an amazing experience that the customer will remember?

All of this comes from a robust network of communication, company tools, processes and procedures. Without this being devised and implemented carefully and effectively by management, the call centre team would be lost. Every single call centre agent must be properly inducted on the first day to be instructed on all company policy, and then fully trained in the processes that must be followed. Training should continue on a regular basis, as well as specific training about certain contracts in order to learn about the brand, services and products of a company that are being represented at any given time. If all of this is transmitted to the call centre team effectively, high standards can be achieved on a consistent basis.

Putting into practice the tips in this article will make a good start and lay a foundation for good practice in ensuring call quality remains high and consistent no matter what the contract is. Consistency and high performance are desired in every profession of course, but in call centres there is a real need for the same approach and performance to be delivered in every single interaction with a customer or potential customer. Even the most seasoned of call centre operatives will have a large number of rejections in any given day, and the best know how to ride it out, remain focused and start again with a smile and positivity.