Contact Centre Monitoring Best Practices

Contact centre monitoring is a process that helps companies manage their contact centre operations. Using monitoring systems, centres can monitor the flow of inbound and outbound calls, live chats, emails, and more.

Contact centre monitoring helps companies stay up to date on their performance, provide better customer service, and make clearer decisions in the long term. In this article, you’ll find out why contact centre monitoring is crucial, followed by several practices that can help you optimise your monitoring strategy.

Why is contact centre monitoring important?

Contact centre monitoring provides time and cost savings, real-time support, and targeted training opportunities. It also helps improve customer satisfaction and increase revenue by ensuring employees are performing optimally.

Some other key benefits associated with contact centre monitoring include:

• Increased employee engagement.
• Improved customer satisfaction.
• Improved productivity.
• Better quality of service and reduced risk of downtime.

Below, we’ll highlight some key practices to help you get the most out of your contact centre monitoring operations.

Creating a monitoring strategy

The number one way to improve your call centre monitoring outcomes is to develop and implement a strong strategy.

One way to start building your strategy is to define a clear goal. Consider your sales, brand awareness, and growth targets, along with customer needs, like reduced wait times.

For example, maybe you’ve noticed an uptick in customer complaints recently. When devising your plan of attack, ask questions about why these complaints might occur—are customers left on hold for too long? Are wait times creeping up? 

With these questions in your strategy, you’ll know which KPIs to focus on when you begin the monitoring process.

Focusing on the right KPIs

Measuring KPIs is critical for success when it comes to call centres, but focusing on the wrong indicators can waste time and money.

The KPIs you choose to focus on will depend on your centre’s goals, but some common points to look out for include:

– Average Call Length

– Average Hold Time

– Average Handle Time (AHT)

– Customer Satisfaction Rating

– First Call Resolution (FCR)

– Calls Per Day

– Average Abandonment Rate

– Average Time to Answer

– Transfer Rate

Seek employee input

Employees are the backbone of any company. They can provide valuable insights about call centre operations from the ground level, including details like customer sentiment, workplace morale, and more. For an effective call centre monitoring system, this is a must!

Many centres use employee insights to determine which departments are doing well, where there are potential areas for improvement, which tasks contribute most to quality, and how well any changes or new systems have worked.

Conclusion

As contact centres are becoming more automated and managed remotely, monitoring their performance is crucial. Having the right tools and practices in place can provide instant insight into your centre’s performance across multiple channels.

By planning and following a well-devised plan, focusing on the right KPIs, and gathering useful insights from your employees, you can maintain an effective contact centre monitoring approach that guarantees a positive customer, employee, and stakeholder experience.