Measuring service desk metrics is not the only way to ensure quality on an IT support team. Of course, it's indispensable, but a good help desk manager doesn't draw the line there. Call quality monitoring is another technique to improve service desk quality.
And in order to do it right, Jason Turner – Associate Director of Customer Support at Princeton University – shared his tips and tricks on episode 39 of Ticket Volume, our IT podcast. With more than 20 years of experience in IT support, his focus on improving customer experience during interactions with service desk analysts is a refreshing take on measuring quality.
Keep reading for a quick written recap of the episode – and remember that you can register for our monthly live recordings and ask your questions live!
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The ABC of call quality monitoring
In a nutshell, call quality monitoring is evaluating and analyzing the performance of a support team's phone interactions with customers to ensure that they meet or exceed the expected quality standards.
The evaluation process involves listening to calls and identifying areas where the support team performed well and areas that need improvement. In particular, managers will evaluate various factors, such as the representative's tone of voice, communication skills, adherence to scripts or guidelines, the accuracy of information provided, problem-solving abilities, and overall customer experience.
Now, even though call monitoring can be done side-by-side, Turner explained that agents might feel stressed if someone's looking over their shoulder. For this reason, recording calls and evaluating them remotely can be a good alternative.
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Benefits and challenges of call recordings
As with everything in life, call recordings have multiple benefits, such as:
- Providing evidence when escalating issues.
- Providing more context than screenshots or written notes.
- Unique URLs make it easy to access recordings and embed them into incidents.
However, if you implement this approach in your organization, you need to also consider some possible challenges, such as:
- Listening to the audio right through its entirety might be time-consuming.
- Knowing what an agent does when they put customers on hold (since all you can hear is dead air).
To turn this last challenge around, Turner suggested video recordings.
How video recordings can improve call quality monitoring
Video recordings can help analyze dead air to understand what agents do while the customer waits. Analysts could be consulting knowledge bases or prior tickets for solutions. Moreover, they could be instant messaging peers to get advice on how to handle dead air.
Plus, video recordings have some other perks to speed up the help desk manager's analysis, like:
- They allow cutting out the small talk and fast-forwarding niceties.
- They convert speech to text, allowing them to read as well as listen to calls to analyze sentiment deeper and flag negative interactions.
This way, improved monitoring technology allows managers to focus on negative interactions since it's easier to spot long hold times, dead air, and negative sentiments.
Moreover, they can also become training opportunities. The guest exemplified that having the recording of a call that went south allowed him to share it with his support team to learn how to de-escalate situations and focus on resolving the problem.
The bottom line
This is just a short recap of the 39th episode of Ticket Volume with Jason Turner, but there's so much more to go through! So, catch up on the full chat with InvGate Product Specialist Matt Beran to learn more about leveraging call quality monitoring to improve your service desk team's performance.
You can find the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast platform. And remember to subscribe if you want to be a part of the monthly live recordings!
