25 Call Center Quality Assurance Best Practices

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The humble contact center is a customer’s first port of call when they need help with goods or services. That’s why it’s so important that call center managers do all they can to help ensure their service runs smoothly, with each operator working efficiently and to a high standard. The best way of making this happen is by adhering to key call center quality assurance best practices.

In this article, we bring together twenty-five call center best practices that will help ensure excellent performance from your team. Compiling a call center best practices PDF file and sending it out to your operators can really make all the difference. If you’d like to find out how to create productive employees and happy customers, check out the best practices listed below!

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Call Center Management Best Practices

What Is a Call Center?

Before considering the best practices for call center management, it’s worth providing a definition. Put simply, call centers are responsible for managing phone calls for a company. They may place outgoing calls, field incoming ones, or do a combination of both.

Contact centers may be on-site or remote. These days, they are most often used for customer services and issue resolution; however, they may also be used for sales and market research.

Call Center Management Best Practices

Running a well-managed call center involves a lot more than just knowing how to pick up a phone. You need to know:

How to attract and retain the right call center agents, as well as what practices to employ to help them reach their full potential.
What call center technology to use and how to best implement it to help your agents perform at their best. For example, Selmo’s call center analytics can help you track important KPIs, ensuring your operators are working efficiently and effectively.
How to provide customers with a positive experience and help them get what they need from your service.

Following the call center workforce management best practices below will help you ensure that your call center runs smoothly.

Call Center Scripts for Dealing With Multiple Customers at Once

Take the time to properly evaluate each and every job applicant who comes in through your door. The ideal call center agent will have a friendly and helpful disposition, good communication skills, and enthusiasm for the job. This practice is essential for building a quality customer service team.

2. Provide Rigorous Training Programs

All agents should be clear on company service standards; you should clarify exactly what is expected of them and how they can deliver on that.

Training contact center agents on how to help with customer complaints is perhaps one of the most important call center practices. Especially for those with limited experience in customer service, dealing with frustrated or upset customers can be challenging. A rigorous training practice will help your customers feel more ready to deal with these situations.

3. Foster a Healthy Work Environment

As a manager, it is your job to cultivate a healthy work environment. Some ways in which you can do this include checking in regularly with employees, making sure they’re able to work in comfortable conditions, and facilitating learning opportunities at work.

Practice open communication with your customer service agents. Provide them with regular, actionable feedback to enable them to work at their best, perhaps through weekly status reports. Be careful to communicate your expectations clearly, while practicing tact.

Happy employees mean happy customers, so don’t underestimate the importance of this practice!

4. Offer Incentives to Agents
Making call center scripts with best practices in PDF format can significantly help with customer service quality control. Listening in to each and every phone conversation is highly impractical; the practice of writing scripts for your agents to follow is the best way of ensuring they offer a standardized level of customer service.
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5. Have an Accessible Knowledge Base
Offering omnichannel customer service is a must, as it provides customers with more flexibility and also makes your services more accessible. This practice makes it easier for customers to contact your customer service center so that you can provide them with the help they need.
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6. Be Approachable
When looking to scale up your business, VoIP services are indispensable. With this technology, you can let your agents work from anywhere, even from home. Selmo has offered quality VoIP services to call centers all over the world. To find out why our customers are so satisfied, reach out today!
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7. Practice Making Data-Driven Business Decisions
As the saying goes, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” That’s why it’s so important to make sure that your customer service agents blow clients away from the very first call. Impress upon them the importance of this practice.
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8. Take Employee Needs Into Account

Supporting your agents minimizes company turnover, saving you time and money. Even more importantly, adhering to this practice helps promote their mental health.

As an example, take employee schedules into consideration when planning rotas. Give them plenty of advanced notice so that they can arrange their work week.

9. Foster Healthy Habits and Attitudes in Agents

Encourage agents to familiarize themselves with your products and services, ensure they learn to stay on top of administrative tasks, and place a firm emphasis on practicing active listening. Call center workers who practice these things are far more likely to find success in the workplace.

This practice is also important for brand advocacy. If your company gains a reputation for being a good place to work, employees are more likely to promote it via word of mouth.

10. Use the Right Tools for the Job

To help ensure your team performs at its best and gives good customer service, you should provide team members with the necessary tools. Call monitoring, call recording, scripting, speech analytics—properly utilizing these key practices will help your team members perform at their best.

Take customer service to the next level with the Selmo predictive auto dialer software

11. Utilize Call Center Scripts
Making call center scripts with best practices in PDF format can significantly help with customer service quality control. Listening in to each and every phone conversation is highly impractical; the practice of writing scripts for your agents to follow is the best way of ensuring they offer a standardized level of customer service.
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12. Offer Omnichannel Customer Support
Offering omnichannel customer service is a must, as it provides customers with more flexibility and also makes your services more accessible. This practice makes it easier for customers to contact your customer service center so that you can provide them with the help they need.
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13. Scale Your Business Using VoIP Tech
When looking to scale up your business, VoIP services are indispensable. With this technology, you can let your agents work from anywhere, even from home. Selmo has offered quality VoIP services to call centers all over the world. To find out why our customers are so satisfied, reach out today!
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14. Create a Positive First Impression
As the saying goes, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” That’s why it’s so important to make sure that your customer service agents blow clients away from the very first call. Impress upon them the importance of this practice.
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15. Prioritize Personalization
Personalization is a key element of all forms of customer service and one of the most crucial best practices for call center agents. Encourage agents to utilize customer data to the fullest and to do their utmost to help their clients.
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16. Provide Helpful, Friendly Service
Agents should be committed to providing customers with friendly service, making sure to go that extra mile to give customers the help they need. This extra effort is always appreciated. That’s why, when it comes to customer service call center best practices, this step is one of the most crucial.
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17. Use Call Center Analytics to Improve KPIs

To help ensure high performance in your agents, you first need to identify important KPIs to improve upon them. Call center analytics help make this entire process easier. Call volume, average wait time, customer satisfaction—when such indicators are properly monitored and measured, you can ensure you take the appropriate actions to improve your quality of service.

18. Listen to Customer Feedback

The importance of this practice to running a successful call center cannot be overstated. After all, it’s the needs of the customer that come first in customer service. It would make no sense to run a call center without acting on their needs.

Reading reviews, interacting with customers over social media, including automated surveys at the end of a call—all these methods can help improve your service.

19. Avoid Negativity When Dealing With Customers

It’s easy and sometimes tempting to blame clients for whatever difficulties they’re having, but that will only escalate the situation. But agents should be encouraged to practice remaining positive, and focused on finding answers rather than assigning blame.

20. Make Time to Follow Up With Customers

Once a customer’s query has been resolved, contact center agents should send follow-up emails confirming that the situation has been resolved to the client’s satisfaction. If not, the agent can step in to offer their services without the client left waiting around. This practice will ensure the happiness of your customers.

21. Give Clear Advice to Customers

Contact center customer service agents should do their best to ensure that the help they give to clients is clear and comprehensive. Complicated jargon should be avoided, and agents should do their best to explain their reasoning behind taking certain actions. Call center agents should be advised to walk customers through solutions step-by-step.

On the other hand, if you are not able to help the customer for whatever reason, try to remain as empathetic as possible. Make sure that they know you are doing all that you can to assist them.

22. Use Call Monitoring

Call monitoring can be a useful practice to help ensure quality service. It can help you to identify weaknesses in an agent’s approach so that you’re able to give more targeted coaching sessions.

Additionally, if an agent seems to be struggling with a call, you can use live call monitoring to help them. If it comes to it, you can even take over the call, making sure your customer receives the service they need.

23. Train Agents Using Call Recordings

Not only can call recordings be used to monitor performance and keep track of KPIs, but you can also use particularly well-handled calls as training material. This is why call recording—one of the main services we offer our customers—is such an important practice.

24. Keep Customer Queries Organized

One of the most important inbound call center best practices is to be organized. You should ensure that customer service queries are recorded accurately and are in order. Call center agents should be able to check service ticket status at a glance and should have all the information needed to help customers in a timely fashion.

25. Always Be Improving

The final best practice we’d like to leave you with is this: always be improving, as there’s always room for improvement! No matter how well-organized your call center is, no matter how well your customer service agents perform, and no matter how high your KPIs are, there will always be something you can work on.

This may sound disheartening, but we like to think it’s just the opposite! While there’s room for improvement, there’s room for growth and evolution. And, at the end of the day, that’s exactly what the customer service business is all about.