Traditional Call Quality Assurance Programs are Ineffective at Improving CSAT

While call quality assurance programs are part of every call center’s operations, there is some doubt as to their efficacy. Research conducted by SQM Group found that only 19 percent of call center managers strongly agree that their call center's quality assurance program helps improve customer satisfaction scores, or CSATs.

Part of the problem is that call monitoring and quality assurance generally involves a laborious human labor-intensive process that takes up enormous amounts of managers’ time. By necessity, only a few calls are ever randomly monitored for quality, which could delay the detection of problems. Increasingly, call centers are turning toward artificial intelligence-driven technologies to monitor quality. But it also helps to focus on the right metrics. It is common for QA programs to use the wrong metrics that have little or no impact on CSAT.

“Enlightened call center managers resist prioritizing QA metrics that have not been validated to improve CX outcome metrics such as CSAT,” noted SQM Group in a recent press release. “Instead, they focus on resolving a customer's inquiry or problem metric, which the SQM Group has validated to be the most important metric for positively impacting CSAT.”

AI is being used to automate QA and compliance processes so call centers can efficiently evaluate all calls, score calls more consistently, and reduce operating expenses. However, the bigger opportunity is to significantly fix the effectiveness of QA for improving CSAT and first-call resolution (FCR). Traditional QA metrics are determined based on biases, assumptions, and gut instincts. Furthermore, QA metrics are seldom validated to verify that they impact CSAT positively.

AI sentiment analysis can determine the emotional tone of customer interactions, providing insights into whether customers had a positive, neutral, or negative experience. However, the best practice for validating if QA metrics are positively impacting CSAT is the use of post-call surveying. It is important to emphasize that customers' opinions matter the most, and the best approach to gather their feedback is conducting post-call surveys, said SQM Group.