Make call center number testing central to your quality assurance planning process

Call Quality

Call center number testing is a vital component of any quality assurance planning framework

The QA Mandate

The overall customer journey is a complex lattice of touchpoints, with your call center representing one of the most important. A quality assurance (QA) plan will help to ensure that your call center meets and hopefully exceeds the operational and customer experience (CX) standards you are hoping to achieve. The cornerstone of an effective call center QA plan is a dedicated, measurable, and repeatable call center number testing process, capable of replicating and measuring your call center customers’ true experience with your service. 

QA planning essentials

Properly devised and implemented quality assurance plans not only provide insights into the efficacy of your customer support team, but also reveal disparities between customer’s true experience with your service and your brand’s expectations, information that is hugely important to marketing, product, and sales teams. So, what should a QA plan look like? 

Anatomy of a QA

To understand what a good QA should comprise, we first must understand what it is we require of it.

A call center QA plan should reveal the following details:

• Agent performance
  • FCR levels 
  • Ability to cultivate empathy
  • Ability to conform to procedures and standards
  • Additional value added e.g. upgrades
• Training needs and what training has worked well for your team
• Operational efficiency
• Customer experience (CX)
• Alignment with business goals

Now that we know what we need, we can start to build our QA

1. Define Your Call Center Goals.
   • Align your goals with your overall business objectives
2. Determine Your Key Performance Indicators (KPI)/Metrics. 
   • Business critical metrics – focussed on overall business performance
   • Customer experience metrics – focussed on customer experience and the agent-customer relationship
   • Process analysis and feedback – Focussed on reviewing every customer interaction and the implications for the business
3. Outline the policies and procedures that will underpin your QA and ensure quality into the future. 
4. Implement a regular QA planning cadence.
5. Measure Results & Feedback.
6. Automate where possible.

Call QA-lity testing

At Spearline, we understand that call quality is a quality assurance imperative. Our on-demand/always-on, automated Voice Assure telecommunications assurance suite can provide the metrics you need to inform and direct your QA planning program, helping you to understand your customers’ true journey with your product. 

Test the limits

Our call center testing process originates calls from any USA or Canadian state, or from any of one of the more than 80 countries we support worldwide. These calls verify connection, voice quality, post-dial delay, DTMT functionality, latency, and more. 

Measure up

Our Voice Assure platform will help you to benchmark your audio against your own historical test scores and internal standards, along with objective PESQ audio quality scores. PESQ scores are definitive, ITU-recognized, scientific test results that can inform your QA testing process and outcomes, and help to direct future QA planning.   

Voice Assure call center testing metrics strengthen the QA objective of bolstering operational efficiencies by allowing you to hold carriers to SLAs, and make better routing and carrier-sourcing choices in the future.   

CX QA

Voice Assure helps you to shore up your communications defenses by eliminating blind-spots and revealing the true nature of your customers’ experience with your service. The customer-centric metrics provided by the Voice Assure testing process will guide and direct your QA plan, while the real-time alert and analysis functions ensure that issues that affect call quality and subsequently CX, are revealed and attended to immediately.     

Performance and infrastructure QA

Call center testing reveals areas where better systems and processes, and better and newer technologies are needed. When calls connect better, sound better, and are better distributed, your callers are happier. When your callers are happy, your agents are less likely to feel stressed and are better able to deal with the caller’s issue quickly and completely.  

That’s the plan

QA expert and author Phillip Crosby once said that ‘the system for causing quality is prevention, not appraisal’ and while this is the aspiration, the reality is that most modern call center variables are just that, variable. Automated, continuous call center testing is the only way we can wrest back some control over an otherwise uncontrollable communications environment.  

Call quality number testing must be both an element and an outcome of all quality assurance planning. The results of call center number testing enable the effective, comprehensive, continuous evolution of the quality assurance process and help to guarantee quality business outcomes into the future.