Consistent, high-quality customer service is a key element of a high-performing call center.

The best way to ensure this is through call center quality monitoring. With it, you’ll gain insights into agent performance and improvement opportunities, thus helping you work toward a higher-quality bar overall.

Types of call center quality monitoring

It’s possible to measure call center quality at different points in the customer journey.

Each stage requires a unique strategy and comes with its own set of advantages and drawbacks. Here’s a closer look at what quality monitoring looks like through the different phases of your customer journey.

Real-time call center quality monitoring

As the name implies, real-time monitoring lets you listen in on calls while they’re in progress. It gives you full oversight of live interactions between agents and customers, offering a unique vantage point for assessing quality of service as it unfolds.

This is achieved through techniques like silent monitoring, which lets supervisors discreetly listen to live calls.

Managers can also play a more active role in real-time monitoring. For example, whisper coaching allows them to offer subtle guidance during calls. This type of monitoring also has barge-in capabilities, meaning they can take direct intervention if necessary.

The most significant advantage is instant feedback. Allowing agents to refine their approach in real time can lead to higher-quality customer service overall.

It’s also invaluable for addressing urgent issues during calls, safeguarding customer relationships, and enriching agent training.

For some agents, having a coach on the call can be comforting. It feels more like a team effort, and they know they have help in their back pocket if anything goes wrong.

That said, the intensity of real-time monitoring can be a resource drain, especially when it comes to a supervisor’s time. If your managers are already stretched thin, it’s not the most efficient route since it requires constant participation.

There’s another drawback — for every agent who likes being coached, there’s another who dreads the idea that their calls may be monitored at any time. This can put additional pressure on agents, who already have high stress and burnout risk.

The added pressure could potentially flow downhill into their day-to-day interactions.

Post-call quality monitoring

With post-call quality monitoring, you analyze customer interactions after they take place. This gives supervisors some added flexibility because they can select specific calls for review or look at a random sampling.

On top of that, post-call monitoring offers more room for detailed feedback. The process can be tailored to create focused sessions that address particular areas for improvement.

If one of your agents struggles to explain a complex billing issue to a frustrated customer, their supervisor could schedule training to teach them everything they need to know about billing and help them take a better approach next time.

Targeted coaching, unlike the broader feedback offered in real-time monitoring, allows for laser-focused improvement.

Post-call monitoring can also be great foundational training material for compliance and quality assurance. Say your agents need to gather specific information during every call — supervisors could compile a library of calls that demonstrate both compliant and noncompliant interactions.

These recordings can be used to train new agents and ensure everyone adheres to the latest protocols.

You’re essentially building a reference library of best practices and potential pitfalls, all readily available for future training.

The post-call approach isn’t without its drawbacks, though.

Time lag between the call and feedback session can hinder comprehension. If an agent is struggling, they ideally receive guidance as soon as possible. When feedback comes later, you run the risk of them speaking to additional customers before they know they did something wrong.

Depending on the size of your call center, the sheer volume of calls could also be overwhelming to sort through. Sifting through hours of recordings to identify valuable coaching opportunities requires dedicated resources and a systematic approach.

Automated call center monitoring

Automated call center quality monitoring leverages AI to assess call quality.

Using AI transcription, natural language processing (NLP), and sentiment analysis, this approach is the most scalable for analyzing high volumes.

Automated monitoring can be great for offering objective, data-driven insights across hundreds or even thousands of calls — something humans wouldn’t be able to do — for areas like:

• Customer sentiment.
• Agent adherence to scripts.
• Compliance with regulatory standards.

It also shows you high-level trends you’ll be hard pressed to get from manual reviews.

Say you want to understand how customers are generally feeling about a recent product launch. With automated monitoring, you can quickly scan through a large pool of calls and identify patterns in customer impressions.

Are they excited about new features? Are there any common pain points that keep cropping up? AI handles high-volume data gathering and analysis with ease.

However, this method often overlooks the human subtleties of communication.

Things like tone, nuances of your language, slang, emotional context, and other things a human would intuitively understand may be entirely lost with a fully automated approach.

Implementing sophisticated AI systems can also be a major challenge.

Integrating with existing call center infrastructure requires technical expertise and financial investment. Not all call centers have the resources to purchase expensive software or hire the IT staff needed to seamlessly integrate the systems.

When to use real-time call center monitoring

One approach isn’t necessarily any better than the others. It depends on your situation, resource constraints, and objectives. The best quality monitoring strategy leverages all three.

Think of real-time monitoring as on-the-job coaching. New agents can learn from real interactions, mimicking successful approaches and receiving instant guidance from supervisors. Real-time feedback accelerates the learning curve and ensures new agents have everything they need to deliver exceptional customer service from day one.

It also acts as a safety net for potential problems.

Supervisors are able to identify struggling interactions before they escalate and either intervene or provide live coaching to turn things around.

Recommended real-time call center monitoring platforms

Nice inContact

Nice inContact goes beyond basic monitoring. Whisper coaching and barge-in features empower supervisors to act as invisible real-time guides for agents. This makes it a perfect choice for call centers prioritizing hands-on training and immediate quality assurance.

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Five9

Renowned for their robust cloud contact center solutions, Five9 also offers real-time monitoring. Supervisors can monitor agent interactions, identify potential issues, and ensure a consistent level of high-quality customer service across the board. However, if you run a smaller contact center, Five9’s many features may be too expensive and overwhelming.

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When to use post-call monitoring

While real-time monitoring has its place, post-call monitoring offers a chance to take a deep breath and analyze the bigger picture.

It’s ideal for personalized evaluations and long-term improvement across your entire business.

Post-call monitoring allows supervisors to dissect calls, pinpoint areas for improvement, and use them as training tools in the future. This level of detail provides valuable insights that might be missed in the faster-paced environment of real-time monitoring.

It also goes beyond individual calls.

Supervisors can analyze trends over time to identify areas where the entire team might need additional training or where specific protocols need revisiting.

Recommended post-call monitoring platforms

CallMiner

CallMiner specializes in conversation analytics. Their post-call analysis tools are like a microscope for agent performance and customer satisfaction. CallMiner helps identify areas for improvement, recognize top performers, and track progress over time.

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Verint

Focused on workforce engagement, Verint’s post-call analysis suite helps supervisors identify coaching opportunities and operational improvements. By analyzing call recordings, they can pinpoint areas where agents might need additional support or where processes can be streamlined. Verint is very much a comprehensive solution. Their Experience Management for Contact Center™ allows you to collect, integrate, analyze, and act on experience data before, during, and after a call.

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When to use automated call center monitoring

If you handle a high volume of calls, there’s a lot to like about automated monitoring.

With it, you’ll be able to analyze and compile data from hundreds (or thousands) of calls in a matter of minutes.

Automated monitoring provides call centers with a comprehensive overview of quality trends, customer sentiment, and potential compliance issues. This allows your supervisors to identify areas that might require further investigation without getting bogged down in individual call reviews.

Automating repetitive tasks, like call review, also frees up valuable time. Managers can focus on more strategic initiatives like coaching, training, and process improvement.

Overall, automated monitoring strikes a balance between thoroughness and efficiency.

This lets your call center maintain high service standards while also optimizing quality assurance processes.

Which type is right for you?

Leveraging call center quality monitoring isn’t necessarily an either-or decision. Each strategy has its strengths and weaknesses.

The best monitoring approach leverages all three types for the use cases they’re best for.