How to Use Call Monitoring to Improve Customer Service

Call monitoring has been used for decades so that companies can check the level of customer service offered by employees and then decide on changes and techniques to improve their connections with the public. Call monitoring is especially common in large companies that receive thousands of calls every week and need a way to measure how effective their workers are when dealing with everyday problems.

Instructions

1. Decide what type of call monitoring you should use. For smaller companies, it makes more sense to hire a consultant company to do the actual customer service monitoring. This is cheaper than installing in-house monitoring software and it also helps the employees feel more at ease, as there is no second-guessing among employees.

2. Choose in-house monitoring if you are running a large company or receive a large number of calls in any given day. This will require the setup and use of monitoring software. While this is more expensive to begin with, it eventually becomes more practical, as it allows for the continuous review of calls and recordings.

3. Decide how often calls will be monitored. If you have hundreds of customer service employees who handle dozens of calls a day, monitoring each one of them may be next to impossible. In this case, it may just be easier to use call monitoring software with random callers and then average the results at the end of the day or the week.

4. Use call monitoring to decide how to improve future dealings with the public. Rather than waiting until the results are in, decide in advance how you will deal with bad customer service and employees who are not stepping up to what is expected of them.

5. Be ready to take action after monitoring calls for a few days. Activities may vary from retraining employees to switching positions around to taking more drastic actions. In any case, the earlier you tackle the problem, the easier it will be to change the service level that is being provided by the company.

Tips & Warnings

• Be ready to spend quite a good deal of money. Both consultants and in-house software setup are expensive.

• To actually improve customer service, you will need to commit to call monitoring for at least a few weeks.

• Call monitoring can also be used to train new employees. After evaluating their dealings with customers, an employer can provide feedback and share ideas on how better represent the company while on the phone.