Do you know how well your call center is doing?

Operational data like first-call resolution rates and call waiting times may provide some clues, and CSAT and NPS ratings may contribute a few more, but these metrics won’t always help you put two and two together to complete the picture.

To collect deeper customer insights and understand root causes, you will need to dig deeper with today’s topic: Call monitoring.

What is call monitoring?

Call monitoring refers to the act of listening to live or past phone conversations between customers and agents. Customer service teams typically monitor calls for training new agents, quality, service recovery and feedback collection. 

4 ways to monitor calls effectively

Depending on the situation and objective, you will need different forms of call monitoring. For monitoring past calls, you will need to review call recordings and transcripts. To monitor live calls in real-time, you can employ call listening, call whispering or call barging.

• • What is call listening?
    Listen to ongoing calls without the customer or agent knowing. Call listening is a realistic way to assess an agent’s day-to-day service quality and performance. However, as listeners are muted by default, they won’t be able to offer assistance if the situation calls for it.
  • What is call whispering?
    Speak to the agent without the customer hearing them, as if they were whispering. Call whispering is useful for offering quick answers or suggestions in real-time without disrupting the call, a less “invasive” option compared to call barging.
  • What is call barging?
    Join live calls directly as a third-party. Call barging is a great option (sometimes even necessary) for supervisors to intervene early, help answer any higher-order enquiries, and prevent further escalation.
  • What is call recording?
    Listen to recorded calls from the past. With FocalScope, you can record and transcribe calls automatically. When reviewing past calls, you can quickly scan transcripts for keywords of interest, skip forward to its corresponding timestamp, and listen to the specific audio segment.

Referencing call recordings and call logs

When a call ends, agents can convert it into a ticket and attach the actual call recording or transcript for follow-up action. Every call recording is stored and organised neatly in your call logs, so you can retrieve them quickly and easily—even years down the road.

Snapshot: Supervisors can listen, whisper or barge into an ongoing support session. 

Call monitoring for OJT call center training

With the various call monitoring options, it’s best to employ a mixed approach for coaching new call center agents across different scenarios and proficiency levels.

Here’s what we suggest:

• • Start by conducting mock calls with trainee agents, and provide live feedback
  • Progress to real customer calls with a supervisor on standby to whisper or barge into calls
  • When ready, graduate to just occasional call listening checks for service quality.

Call recordings are also valuable for promoting exposure to various scenarios and learning objectives. You can collect good and bad call recording examples, and use them as learning opportunities for the agent in question, as well as their fellow trainees.

Explore FocalScope’s call center features

To learn more about our call monitoring features and how it can help your business, please contact us for a guided demo today. 

Alternatively, read more about our call center features, or check out this article about how we help clients conduct customer service training effectively.