Customer experience management is essential for all call centers. A customer-first call center strategy begins with adopting best practices for measurable improvements of the quality of your customer interactions. Quality scoring is one of the most important methods used to ensure adherence tocall center standards and metrics, which not only improves customer service, but identifies opportunities for training and development. Here are some tips for improving the quality score at your call center.

1. Provide Consistent Feedback to Agents

Consistent feedback to agents helps them to continuously improve and increase their overall contributions to the organization. When providing feedback, it’s a good idea to tie this feedback back to established goals and expectations. It’s important to provide tangible, objective, feedback. This way, your agents aren’t taken by surprise. Some examples of measurable goals are customer satisfaction ratings, call handle time, and first call resolution. Authority Software’s Quality Recording Manager helps call center managers monitor this critical data through interactive dashboards and configurable reports so they can provide helpful feedback to agents.

2. Don’t just focus on agents with low performance stats

Improving the key performance indicators of your lowest performing agents is one of the quickest ways to see improvement in your overall scores and improve customer experience. But there is valuable data to be mined from your high performers, which can be used to identify coaching opportunities as well as to help create best practices for the team.

3. Don’t let technology drive your business processes

Technology solutions need to meet you where you are. In a new call center, technology can be a great tool to help guide you through the development of processes, providing you with some organization and capabilities you may not even have considered. A mature call center with experience and well-established quality processes needs flexibility and a solution that can be used to increase efficiencies. Having a solution that is scalable, can easily integrate into your existing environment and can be completely tailored to enhance your processes without interfering with your production environment is critical.

4. Listen to Your Customers – invest in feedback surveys

No system or process can drive customer experience better than first hand feedback provided directly by your customers. Your customers are the best resource for learning both where you need to improve and where you are succeeding. And a CSAT survey doesn’t have to break the bank. It can be as simple as having your agents ask the customer how they would rate their transaction. But whether the feedback comes through an internal survey, an IVR or a third party CSAT survey provider, owning and incorporating this valuable and relevant data directly into your customer’s record will prove to be a key component in using the voice of your customer to improve the customer experience and create brand loyalists.

5. Refer to External Benchmarks

When evaluating your call center’s performance, it is important to look outside the call center as well. External benchmarking is a way to ensure your company is meeting industry standards and best practices. By comparing your call center against others, especially to industry leaders, you can better evaluate your strengths and weaknesses and use that information to improve. Continuous improvement is driven by an understanding your call center’s paint points. Is your wait time much longer than the industry norm? Are your customers calling you back more frequently than your competitors because their issues are not being resolved efficiently? Regular monitoring of competitive data can help drive performance and increase efficiencies.

Final Thoughts

If you are ready to take the next step towards improving your call center’s performance and exceeding your quality metrics, Authority Software is here to help. We can help implement the right tools to assist you to achieve this goal and guide you along the way with our years of experience in the creation, deployment and use of call center quality solutions that let you focus on improving the experiences of both your agents and your customers.

The industry sectors that now receive and process credit card information go beyond those in the financial and retail sectors. If you are engaged in a business that requires your customers to provide credit card information to your agents, you are subject to regulations that protect your business and your customers from pervasive data breaches.

The most comprehensive set of regulations has been put into place by the PCI Security Standards Council, which dictates that for a call center to be PCI compliant, it may not store sensitive authentication data in audio recordings.  This means having a method to avoid recording the audio altogether during the call or establishing an efficient PCI redaction solution that is used for removing credit card information from voice recordings once they have been created. Authority’s patented audio redaction technology guarantees the removal of credit card information from audio recordings, ensuring PCI compliance.

How Authority Software Ensures PCI Redaction

Credit card validation codes should not be stored on call recordings, whether they are stored for a short period, or indefinitely. The storage of validation codes in addition to unique customer information and card numbers, would open up a significant amount of risk for both the company and the customer.

Authority Software offers a PCI redaction system where validation codes and other sensitive data can be redacted from a recording, before it is submitted for storage in accordance with PCI regulations and company policy.

The process is simple and requires no participation from call center agents, which removes the burden of additional training and eliminates the possibility of human error. You do not need to replace your existing call recording solution.  Authority’s PCI redactor can be implemented in conjunction with any call recording application capable of sending audio files, and works with any audio file format.  Sensitive information can be automatically flagged for removal during the call as it is actively being recorded. If this information is not removed from a call before storage for any reason, the relevant portion of the recording can still be removed after the recording has been made.

Audio segments containing sensitive authentication data are not simply deleted, but instead go through a crypto shredding process to ensure that the data cannot be recovered.

This system provides a significant layer of protection to business operators, call center agents, and to credit card holders. The implementation of Authority Software’s PCI Redactor must be a consideration by any business that wants to maintain call center compliance.

Authority Software is a Trusted Leader in Call Center Technology

With Authority Software, you can gain benefits that improve the overall customer experience and service delivery processes. You can lower your costs with a more efficient system, and can promote organic growth through a leaner and better organized workflow. Authority Software helps you to manage customer relationships so that you can create brand loyalty and ongoing goodwill towards your brand.

Protect Your Business Interests and Your Clients in a Digital World

Advancements in technology have undoubtedly made commerce simpler and faster than ever before, however, some of the technologies that make it easier for consumers to do business sometimes raise concerns regarding the privacy of financial and personal information.

Protecting your own business, your staff, and your customers is your responsibility as a business, and the use of Authority Software’s PCI Redactor is one way that you can ensure you are meeting all regulatory requirements.