Mastering Your Monitoring- What To Look For In Your Call Center Rep's Calls

If you operate a call center you need to be monitoring the performance and calls of your customer service reps. It’s a critical way to know where your team can improve, how to adjust your training, and what kind of problems your customers are encountering.

Monitoring is at its most effective when you know what you’re looking out for. There are a few critical ways to ensure that your reps are on-point with their calls and that your valuable customers are getting the white-glove treatment.

A Sense Of Empathy

Your reps must have the ability to walk in your customer’s shoes. Poorly trained reps will jump into the queue and try to plow through as many calls as humanly possible while failing to see your customers as actual humans. This is especially true if the customer in question is difficult or angry on the phone.

Well-trained reps know that they can’t take it personally. More to the point, they understand that they need to see their customers as people. Empathetic reps will immediately develop a rapport with your customers, be more acutely aware of their needs, and work hard to solve their problems in a single call. Through careful monitoring, you can see which reps need to be reminded that being brusque on the phone is not helping the company reach its end goals. Work with your reps to cultivate a positive call center environment where empathy is prized above everything else. At (v)WeCare, empathy is the number one thing that we instill in our reps. They know that in order to be successful, they must show compassion and care to each and every customer.   

Comprehensive Company Knowledge

Monitoring is a fantastic way to make sure that your training is as effective as it can be. If you start to see gaps in your reps’ knowledge or misinformation being shared with customers, you know that it’s time to conduct another training session.

Your reps need to know the company inside and out, but most of them won’t want to admit that they fail to pick up on certain important concepts, product offerings or strategies. It’s very human to conceal that we don’t quite understand something, but monitoring will reveal all of the places where your reps are weak and allow you to fix them! It’s important to remember never to punish well-meaning reps who just don’t get it. Give them a chance to learn and invite them to ask as many questions as they need to. At Vcare all of our reps are given comprehensive and consistent training so they are fully up to speed. They can answer customer questions and address concerns with complete authority. Our project managers are also trained on multiple fronts, so customers get the best, and most accurate, information possible!

Minimal Transfering And Hold Times

Call centers have a bad reputation for transferring customers from one department to another and excessive hold times. Customers do not want to hopscotch around the company and have to explain their problem to multiple reps. You might be able to see when calls are in the queue for minutes on end, but unless you monitor your reps you won’t know how long they are putting customers on hold. You also won’t know how often calls are being transferred.

Many reps aren’t really thinking about their hold times. In their minds, they are simply trying to solve a problem and doing their best. Only by educating your reps about what is acceptable and what’s not will you eradicate the problems of excessive hold times and transferring. Reps also need to be empowered to make decisions and solve customer problems. At (v)WeCare, our reps are completely empowered and armed with all of the knowledge that they need to help out customers quickly and comprehensively. We discourage transferring to different departments and always try to keep our hold times to an absolute minimum. As a result, customers feel like they are being heard, attended to, and not given the runaround.  

If you know what to look for when you’re monitoring your call center rep’s calls you can easily spot problems coming up on the horizon, correct bad behavior, and engineer a much more positive experience for your clients!