Having accurate and comprehensive data is a key factor to controlling any situation. Regardless if you are managing an army a pandemic or a call center comprehensive and accurate data is what you need to improve your performance. For example, to control a pandemic you need to have enough data about the spread of the virus, variant, possible treatments, load on the healthcare system, amount of available medicine etc. In this post we will discuss how an IT manager, specifically in call centers, can control and improve the quality of the calls.

The first question is why? Why do we need to control call quality in call centers? Call quality is a critical component of business operation in a call center – for example take a look at the following post discussing noise in outbound sales calls. The next question is to identify the critical data elements that should be gathered to allow controlling call quality. Following are the most important elements.

Volume

The volume of calls might be important to identify correlation to voice quality. For example, the infrastructure might have issues supporting high volume or the increasing crowding might be a factor as well.

Time

Call quality should be measured per date/time to identify potential correlation to call quality. For example more noise during lunch time.

Noise Map

Call quality should be correlated with physical location. It is not rare to find specific areas in the call center that are noisier than others may be due to physical conditions, type of calls, specific agents etc. Therefore, it is important to have an accurate noise-map of the call center.

Employees

Call quality should be correlated to individual employees as there might be issues that are more common when specific employees are working.

Equipment

Malfunction in equipment, like headset, can cause degradation in call quality. Therefore, the information on used equipment must be gathered as well.

MOS

All the above information should be correlated with automatic call quality measurement. Automatic call quality measurement is mandatory in this case.

Conclusion

When you are looking to monitor and improve call quality in your contact center – do not do is blindly in an auto-pilot mode. Make sure you collect all relevant data and make intelligent decisions based on this data.