Outsourcing Call Quality Assessment: A Strategic Move for Call Centres
Ensuring consistent and exceptional service delivery requires a robust call quality assessment framework.
As the leading industry association for call centres, we are proud to introduce our Call Quality Assessment Service—an unparalleled solution designed to elevate your operations through meticulous evaluation and actionable insights.
Based on over 50 years of call centre benchmarking experience in the Australian market, our service offers a cost-effective method for gaining independent, unbiased insights into the performance of your call centre operations, enabling targeted training and coaching to improve the performance of your employees.
We use the same Australian Call Centre Quality Standards used to produce the Australian Call Centre Rankings that are published each month, so you can gain insights into where the performance of your employees sits relative to industry best-practice, and we can also customise our call quality assessments to also capture moments that matter to your business such as ID verification checks, provision of reference numbers, correct greeting and so on.
In addition to providing you with high-quality insights, ACXPA also has the resources, training courses and support to help you improve performance when any performance gaps are identified, which should be the ultimate objective of any quality assessment program.
Common Scenarios where Call Centres Outsource Call QA Assessments
There are some common scenarios where call centres choose to outsource some or all of the call quality assessments to us, including.
- You’d like to supplement your internal program – commonly we are engaged to score 2 to 3 calls per agent per month, with the rest handled by internal resources such as team leaders or QA staff.
- You currently don’t have any quality frameworks in place but you’d like to receive independent assessments on your quality compared to industry best-practice.
- You don’t have the resources to complete any call quality assessments each month.
- You’d need to ensure there is unbiased and objective evaluations.
- You are experimenting with AI for Quality Assessments but still need human assessments to ensure accuracy.
Of course, there are a range of other scenarios – we’d love to talk to you about your specific requirements and design a solution that works best for you.
Picking up where Call Centre Mystery Shopping left
Our Mystery Shopping Benchmarking service can be a great way to gain valuable insights into the performance of your call centre and your competitors, but it has some limitations that can make it difficult to get a complete picture of your call centre performance:
- We are only able to test situations in which we can remain anonymous, which means calls from existing customers regarding complaints, orders, service enquiries, etc., are not able to be captured via Mystery Shopping.
- It does not enable us to assess all agents – we can only assess the agent who answers the mystery shopping call.
Our Call Quality Assessment enables us to overcome those obstacles as the service relies on YOU sending us the call recordings for assessment.
This enables a number of benefits, including:
- We can assess calls where account information, case numbers, etc are provided.
- We can assess calls for all agents or specific agents you want to increase the assessments for.
- We can assess all call types – customer service, technical support, upselling, connections and disconnections, etc.
Why Outsource Your Call Quality Assessment?
Outsourcing your call quality assessment to an independent and authoritative body offers a multitude of advantages:
1. Unbiased and Objective Evaluation
Internal assessments can often be influenced by biases and internal politics.
By outsourcing to an independent third party, you ensure that your call quality assessments are objective and impartial.
This guarantees an honest evaluation of your call centre’s performance, free from any internal bias.
2. Expertise and Proven Framework
Our Call Quality Assessment Service is built on over 50 years of industry experience (managing and optimising contact centres) and uses the same rigorous framework that underpins our monthly Australian call centre ranking results.
Quality is assessed over five core competencies and 18 individual behaviours, ensuring a comprehensive and detailed evaluation of your agents’ performance.
3. Enhanced Credibility and Trust
Engaging an independent third party for quality assessments enhances the credibility of the evaluation process.
Clients, stakeholders, and regulatory bodies are more likely to trust assessments conducted by a respected industry authority, thereby boosting your call centre’s reputation.
4. Identification of Blind Spots
An external perspective can uncover issues and areas for improvement that may be overlooked by internal teams.
Our expert assessors bring a fresh set of eyes, identifying blind spots and providing insights that can lead to significant operational improvements.
5. Benchmarking Against Industry Standards
Our assessments allow you to benchmark your performance against the Australian Call Centre Industry Quality Standards.
This comparison provides valuable context, helping you understand where your call centre stands relative to your peers and identifying opportunities for improvement.
6. Focus on Core Competencies
Outsourcing quality assessments allows your internal team to focus on core business activities and strategic initiatives.
It reduces the administrative burden and ensures that your team remains focused on delivering excellent customer service (often Team Leaders who could better spend the time coaching!).
7. Actionable Insights and Continuous Improvement
We provide detailed reports with actionable insights and recommendations tailored to your specific needs.
Our assessments are designed to foster a culture of continuous improvement, enabling your call centre to evolve and adapt to changing customer expectations and we also offer a range of training courses for frontline employees, team leaders and managers – all designed to positively shift the needle on performance.
Quality and Compliance Assessment
We promise to not go all technical on you, but there are a couple of key points worth nothing when it comes to call quality assessments in all centres.
You need to know what great looks like
If you’re going to assess calls for quality, you need to be clear on what excellent quality means to your business.
After all, there is no point scoring 100% on quality assessments if the calls are not delivering the kind of experience you want for your customers.
For example, if you were ringing a 5-star hotel, you might expect the customer to be referred to as sir or mam, but if you were calling JB Hifi, that would just be weird!
So knowing what a great call sounds like for your business is always a great starting point.
Our default assessment uses the Australian Call Centre Quality Standards which are applicable to all contact centres in Australia, and you are also able to add additional quality or compliance metrics (see below) that you would like us to assess.
The difference between compliance and quality
Compliance Metrics are things that all agents must do regardless of skill level, experience, etc., such as completing an ID Verification check.
They are black or white – the agent either did it or they didn’t, there is no variability in performance.
When we do Mystery Shopping, we are typically unaware of your compliance metrics. However, when you engage us to perform your call quality assessments, you can also confirm the compliance metrics you’d like us to assess.
Quality Metrics can be more subjective – building rapport, using a customer’s name appropriately, etc.
With decades of experience in contact centre benchmarking, we have refined the Australian Call Centre Quality Standards to enable us to score calls using a similar logic with very clear, well-defined standards that enable us to score over 19 different metrics using the same binary approach enabling you to hone in on coaching/training opportunities for each of your employees.
We also offer training for Team Leaders to help them embed the right behaviours in your frontline employees that is directly aligned to the standards we test against.
How much do call quality assessments cost?
We have a number of cost-effective packages that include a set number of calls per month or we can provide a customised solution based on your exact requirements.
Call Quality Assessments start from as low as $25 ex GST per call – like most things, the more assessments you require each month, the cheaper the rate we are able to offer you.
All our assessments are conducted here in Australia by specially trained employees – we do NOT use any AI in our assessments.
Would you like to speak to someone about your call quality assessments?
If you’d like to learn more about how ACXPA can assist with your call quality assessments in your call centre, contact us at 1800 0 ACXPA (or +61 39492 2871), email us at insights@acxpa.com.au or leave your details on the form below and we’ll contact you directly.
Our office is open Monday to Friday, 8:30 to 17:30 AEST/AEDT.
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