Have you ever wondered how successful businesses are able to handle every customer call, with the same quality customer service, every single time? How they are able to train employees consistently and recognise problems at an early stage? One of the reasons for their success is likely a reliable phone system that has call monitoring and call scoring integrated. Here in the UK, small businesses, unlike big businesses which have dedicated quality assurance teams, can benefit from AI that is integrated into their VoIP phone systems.
What is Call Monitoring?
Call monitoring is the practice of listening to telephone calls to assess the quality of employee-customer interactions. Call monitoring has existed in the world of customer service and call centres for decades. Call monitoring in a VoIP telephone system refers to the practice of having the ability to review call recordings and assess the quality of calls. Many VoIP systems offer the capability of call monitoring in real time, allowing a manager to listen to a call as it is in progress.
What Call Monitoring Tells You
Monitoring gives you the raw material- the actual conversation. What it does not do, on its own, is tell you whether the call was good or bad, or compare it against any standard. That judgment call still falls to the person listening. In a small business, that person is usually the owner, who does not always have time to listen back to every call.
What Is Call Scoring?
Call scoring is the procedure for determining how good or bad a call is by listening to the call against a set of defined call scoring standards. Traditionally this was done the old fashioned way. Managers listened to calls and scored calls based on call opening and closings, tone, professionalism and how efficiently the the callers’ issues were resolved.
With call scoring powered by AI, we have an easier and simplified way of automatically scoring calls. Managers no longer need to score calls with the tedious method of listening to calls and manually filling in the criteria. AI call scoring systems do that automatically by analysing recorded or transcribed calls. Unlike the manual legacy call scoring systems, AI call scoring systems do this for all calls.
What Exactly Does Call Scoring Measure?
What metrics are examined depends on the exact system and your configuration, but some of the most common elements of call scoring are:
- Did the employee introduce themselves on the phone and did they do this in a professional manner?
- Did the employee actually answer the question or solve the problem for the customer?
- Did the employee use the appropriate script and/or legal verbiage and/or disclosures?
- Did the employee express a positive tone and was the employee patient and engaged?
- Did the employee answer the phone and properly close the call and ensure the customer was satisfied with the closure of the call?
- Did the employee acknowledge the customer’s frustration or concern?
How Does Call Scoring Work?
There are usually three steps to most of the AI call scoring systems. The first step is that the phone call is recorded and the speech is converted to a text file. The second step is that the text file (and in an AI system, the audio file) is analyzed to the scoring metrics. The final step is that the metrics are scored and a score is assigned with an explanation of how the phone call measured against several scoring metrics.
Differences Between Call Monitoring and Call Scoring
The main difference between call monitoring and call scoring is that call monitoring is an access tool, it lets you listen to calls and see what happened, whereas call scoring is an evaluative tool- it tells you how an employee handled a call and how well they did that in a broader context.
How Are They Done?
As for the traditional method of call monitoring, this method is only effective if the monitor takes the time to listen to the call themselves, whereas call scoring is done by an AI interface. This is why, for small business owners who only listen to a couple of calls a week, call scoring ensures that the quality of every call that the employee makes is being scored and not just the ones that the business owner has listened to.
Reactive vs. Proactive
Call monitoring is done after a training or performance issue has been identified. Call scoring, on the other hand, is done to assess calls that have not yet approached a performance concern and is done to identify areas for improvement and is done before a customer has the opportunity to voice a concern.
Scaling
As a small business owner, manually listening to and grading every call is not an option. AI call scoring grades and scores calls at the volume your business is operating and allows you to see results for every call coming in.
Reasons for Small Business Investments in AI Call Scoring
AI call scoring allows managers to offer stronger and more accurate feedback to staff members to improve customer service:
What Gets Measured Gets Improved
Small business owners may understand how their employees handle calls to a certain extent, but they usually don’t have a detailed or systematic perspective. AI call scoring provides that detailed picture without you having to spend all your time listening to call recordings.
Training Made Easier
Being able to score all calls makes training conversations easier. For example, instead of saying ‘I think you need to work on your tone’, the conversation can say ‘on Thursday’s 11am call, your tone score was a 4 and your average score for the week was a 6.2. Let’s listen to that call together’. The specificity in the feedback provides more good and fair feedback.
Your Reputation Is At Stake
Small business owners know that every calling customer is an interaction that can impact your business’ reputation. One employee mishandling a call or one employee who makes a customer feel as though they are being dismissed can negatively impact your business through bad reviews and a loss in referral. Call scoring helps manage and understand where negative customer service responses are coming from and how to improve them.
Retention of Records For Regulatory Compliance
There are som industries that need to uphold strong regulatory compliance, such as healthcare and legal industries, scoring customer calls makes record-keeping for customer compliance easier. Scoring a call and scoring the transcript is more helpful in a customer call dispute than an unclear recollection.
Recognising Strengths As Well As Weaknesses
AI call scoring goes beyond identifying weaknesses in a staff member or team. By identifying strengths in staff members or teams, a benchmark can be set for high performance and utilised in training and developing lower performing staff members or teams.
- Objective, consistent quality measurement across every call
- Evidence-based staff training and development
- Early detection of problems before they reach the customer review stage
- Compliance record-keeping for regulated industries
- Visibility into team performance without listening to every call yourself
bOnline VoIP Systems with AI Call Scoring
bOnline is a small business focused VoIP provider based in the UK. Call recording comes standard with the phone systems and AI driven call scoring is a part of the advanced features offered with the systems. Automated quality analysis makes scoring call recording a time saving and efficient process for businesses of any size without having a quality assurance team.