The benefits of real-time monitoring in call centers

Just focusing on analyzing high-level statistics in your call center may not be sufficient to fully understand where areas for improvement actually exist. For this, analyzing individual calls may be necessary.

From my personal experience and my discussions with contact center professionals, I learned that there are times when data alone cannot help you understand what really is going on during conversations. And in particular, there may be in-call situations where immediate supervisor interactions are necessary.

It is for these reasons that you should consider utilizing real-time monitoring, a powerful tool that allows you to listen in to ongoing conversations, supervise your agent’s input as needed, and join a call if necessary. Let’s review a few ways in which real-time monitoring can benefit your contact center.

What is real-time monitoring?

In call center solutions, real-time monitoring refers to features and tools that enable supervisors to track and oversee conversations that take place between agents and customers during a call. By using real-time monitoring, you can get an insight into your call center’s daily operations, such as your agent status figures or your inbound and outbound activities. Utilizing real-time monitoring provides a number of benefits for your business, including helping to boost your company performance, customer satisfaction and employee workflow effectiveness.

Improve your agents’ quality of work

By listening to agent calls, you can identify areas of knowledge or skills that may need further improvement. In VCC Live’s solution, you even have the possibility of talking to your agent without the customer on the other end of the line hearing a word of what you are saying (call whispering). This is a very effective way of providing continuous feedback to your agents in a live environment.

Real-time monitoring can also come in handy when handling sudden changes in a project. It can, for example, immediately let your agents know what new issues they need to pay attention to, be they updates to a certain script or special information regarding specific customers.

Moreover, it can help you improve your agents’ performance, by helping you reorganize your teams or transfer agents to other projects where they can work more efficiently based on their skills and expertise. By carrying out real-time prioritization, you can make both the workflow of your company more customer-oriented and your agents more productive.

Acquire useful insights for your business

Complementing your post-call evaluation procedures with real-time monitoring can provide another level of insight to help improve your business strategies. By listening in to conversations you can see which agents are performing the best, allowing you to work out what types of conversational styles and techniques should be implemented by other agents, and which employees could benefit from more one-on-one coaching. Focusing on improving your agent performance will result in lowering idle time, which will benefit your business in terms of profit and efficiency.

Another way to gain insights into your call center’s performance is to focus on real-time metrics data, such as SLA, waiting time or number of calls with different statuses in a given timeframe. With this information at hand, you can capture and analyze your processes to help detect issues and leverage effectiveness in order to improve your business performance.

Provide better customer experience

Listening to your agents’ calls in real-time will immediately show you whether they are using the right tone, structure, language and protocol when representing the company. Some might wonder if it is really necessary to check agent performance as they work, but the benefit is clear: it is not about stressing out your employees but rather about trying to provide a better customer experience and improve satisfaction rates from your clients in the long run.

Furthermore, customers come in all shapes and sizes, and while most of the time discussions about a complaint, issue or inquiry can be carried out without a problem, there are occasions when an agent simply will not be able to satisfy the needs of a customer. At such times it is crucial for a supervisor to have the opportunity to join a conversation before things get out of hand. With the help of real-time monitoring, managers can provide appropriate guidance and high-quality assistance to their agents, ensuring that customers have their issues taken seriously as well as successfully resolved.

In conclusion

Utilizing a real-time monitoring solution in your call center environment will result in a number of benefits. Using real-time monitoring will help you identify your top agents and thus let you plan training strategies and reward structures, while also allowing you to aim for the best quality customer experience your business can offer.

Interested in call monitoring?

VCC Live’s call monitoring features help you ensure the highest level of agent efficiency and customer satisfaction. Contact us for a chat and demo, and let’s discuss your contact center’s real-time monitoring needs.