Calibrated Call Monitoring

Call monitoring is an essential tool for a client to hold a call center to a certain quality standard, but it is also a critical tool to help both parties view what those standards are in the same way.

Quality of a call is a subjective measure at best. Unlike a manufacturing process where you can precisely measure the size or strength of a component of the final product and each component is exactly the same each time, a call is a performance and each performance is slightly different each time. So you want to calibrate those subjective evaluations so they are as close as possible for all parties.

Calibration is the process where there is increasing alignment between the client and between the call center of the evaluation of a call.

A client tries to communicate their expectations of quality to the account manager. The account manager then has to make sure those expectations are accurately communicated to the training department, the operations team who manage the agents on the floor, and to the internal monitoring team. Sometimes there isn't a complete transfer of communication between the account manager and these other groups.

So, if a client can have a monitoring session that includes both live monitoring and taped monitoring, you can try to close that broken loop and make sure that the people responsible for call quality are on the same page as you.

We would have the clients listen to some taped calls at the same time we would have our training team, our monitoring team, our floor supervisors, and even sometimes, some of our agents. The client would complete a monitoring quality sheet at the same time we would have our monitoring team fill out the same sheet independently. Then we would compare scores and see where there was misalignment between how the calls were evaluated. Sometimes we would back the tape up and listen to it again. This allowed us to be very accurate in knowing and measuring quality in the same way the client measured quality.