How Call Listening Improves Customer Service Support

• Call listening or monitoring enhances your quality assurance process and improves the overall effectiveness of your customer service support team. It can be challenging for companies with a wide range of products to ensure their call center agents are performing as efficiently as possible. Customers’ questions need to be answered quickly and accurately while optimizing

like call handover rates, minutes spent on call and customer waiting time.

It’s a no-brainer that representatives more skilled at customer interaction provide better customer service, and that customer satisfaction increases as a result. It’s also an important way to gain customer feedback. Knowing what your customers want helps you address their needs and provides a positive customer service experience.

• Microsoft’s

noted that 61% of customers stopped transacting with a business after a lackluster service experience. Since customer service representatives are often considered the “face of the company,” call listening is critical to enhancing call center performance—and improving a company’s bottom line.

What is call listening?

Call listening or monitoring refers to the process of listening to an agent and caller in real time to ensure quality standards are being met. There are multiple ways to approach call listening. Manual call listening is the most common and is simply executed by staff.

For instance, the manager of a call center team might evaluate the recorded responses of call center agents. A manager sits next to a customer service representative and listens to them handling calls, then provides immediate feedback on how they handle customer queries.

Companies may also use specialized call monitoring software for their call listening. These tools let the manager of a team of call center agents select a single agent or a group of agents from a live monitoring observing link. The software then displays relevant information about the agent and the caller.

Calls can be saved and tags can be added for easy retrieval when needed. The software also lets managers know which calls might benefit from live call monitoring.

Why call listening empowers customer service teams

Call listening helps identify which skills or areas of knowledge need further improvement. The recordings and call data can help train agents, enhance coaching sessions, and spot lackluster performance.

New agents can listen to the calls of more experienced agents and learn the best ways to handle customers. Managers can then monitor the new agents’ performance and offer personalized feedback to reinforce customer service skills and benefit the entire team. By building skills and improving agent performance, call listening increases the overall efficiency of your customer service team and boosts employee morale.

• It also increases customer satisfaction and loyalty. A

shows 47% of consumers have switched brands due to bad customer service. It’s important that customers are satisfied with call resolution because those who experience poor service with your company may very well turn to the competition.

How to develop an effective call listening program

To develop an effective call listening program you have to understand the needs of your customers. Measure and monitor what your customers value to ensure your customer support agents address those issues and observe proper customer communication.

Good call listening also makes your operation more cost-effective. Call monitoring metrics provide critical customer feedback. This information paints a picture of overall call center performance and service level. You can use that information in a targeted way to improve processes and specific communication skills, continually making your calls more efficient.

Of course, it might be tricky to monitor your own company’s performance in an objective way. An internal team may be too close to the relevant issues to clearly see what needs fixing. Even if your company has its own quality department to support the customer service team, an external quality management team could provide valuable additional data. That’s why you may want to consider hiring an outside firm to monitor calls consistently and without biases influencing the outcome.

Essential tips for call monitoring success

Whether your internal team conducts call listening sessions or you’re looking for guidelines to evaluate an external team’s performance, here are some helpful tips for establishing a program that’ll provide insight into any underlying customer support issues:
• • Before you start monitoring calls, create a scorecard to measure metrics like customer courtesy. Get feedback from everyone on your team about this, including the support representatives themselves.
  • Record calls during the call listening process to reinforce training deficiencies. Your quality monitor can listen to calls in real time or after the fact.
  • Use call scoring to pinpoint deficits and proficiencies based on the scorecard you created at the start of the monitoring program. Analyze the scores to discover what’s working and where further training is needed. It can also reveal a need for improvement in sales scripts and service procedures.
  • Give call center agents specific examples of performance deficits during a coaching session.
  • Help your customer support representatives set goals and develop action plans for better issue resolution.
  • Track progress for the types of calls that scored low on the scorecard.
  • Make a remediation plan for representatives who aren’t adjusting in a timely manner.
  • Conduct customer service training for the entire team to address common pain points or areas of struggle.
  • Create an environment of learning by offering positive reinforcement as well as constructive criticism.

Your company can maximize the value of its call center and customer service representatives by monitoring calls, scoring those calls against a scorecard and making the data available to everyone involved.

Final takeaways

Call listening is one of the most effective ways call centers can improve their customer support. By monitoring service representatives during customer interactions, you can maintain higher quality standards, elevate your customer service experience and maximize call center performance. If you measure and monitor what customers value it becomes less about hitting certain numbers and more about meeting customer expectations.

• Having a single definitive knowledge base that holds product information can also get your customers the answers they need without having to wait for support agent assistance. The ideal system integrates with your existing help desk software, gathers all your PDFs, FAQs, videos and tutorials into a unified knowledge base, and uses natural language processing to scan your knowledge base for the best response material. Check out the PubHub solution, which does all of the above and delivers information directly to your help desk agents. You can

to see if it’s a good fit for your customer support team.