6 steps to creating your call center listening grid
A call center evaluation grid is an essential tool for assessing advisor performance and improving the quality of customer relations. By setting up an evaluation grid, you can easily analyze and improve the interactions between your advisors and your customers.
By mastering this tool, you can ensure that your team remains efficient and aligned with your company's objectives. Find out how to create and implement an effective listening grid in your contact center.
Step 1: Select the most relevant evaluation criteria
To build an effective listening grid, you need to choose the evaluation criteria carefully.
These criteria must align with your call center's objectives in terms of brand image, quality standards and sales. Avoid confusion and misinterpretation by choosing criteria that are specific, measurable and relevant to your team and the customer experience you want to deliver.
For example, you can define the following criteria to ensure customer satisfaction:
- Quality of customer service: Does the agent respect regulatory compliance processes?
- Active listening: Does the teleoperator understand and respond effectively to the customer's needs?
- First contact resolution: How often is a customer problem resolved without the need for follow-up calls?
Use key indicators to help you quantify and track performance. This not only allows you to monitor your agents' progress, but also to act on identified needs. For example:
- Customer satisfaction: Use surveys or satisfaction scores (CSAT).
- Average processing time: Calculate how much time an advisor spends per call and per customer request.
- Conversion rate: Monitor how many interactions lead to desired results, such as sales.
Step 2: Co-constructing with stakeholders
It's important to involve different stakeholders from the outset to ensure the relevance, transparency and effectiveness of your listening grid.
Call center consultants and supervisors are the main users of this tool. Their involvement in the development of the grid ensures that they understand and accept the evaluation criteria, which facilitates buy-in and reduces the risk of rejection of periodic evaluations. By incorporating their perspectives, you ensure that the grid meets real needs and situations encountered on a daily basis.
To work effectively with them, you can organize collaborative workshops where advisors and managers can define evaluation criteria together. This participative approach gathers ideas and suggestions directly from those on the front line, strengthening their commitment and sense of ownership.
What's more, asking the teams to draw up a detailed reference framework for ratings helps to clarify expectations and standardize evaluations. By repeating this procedure regularly, you can adapt and continually improve the listening grid, ensuring that it remains a relevant and universally accepted tool.
Step 3: Define a clear, precise evaluation grid
To build an effective listening grid in a call center, it is essential to define an evaluation reference framework to guarantee a coherent and universally understandable evaluation process.
Divide your grid according to each call phase (answering the call, identifying the customer, understanding the need and overall call) and call type (incoming call, outgoing call, follow-up call, etc.). This will serve as a basis for determining all the criteria to be evaluated for each type and phase of customer interaction.
Next, create a detailed structure with, for example :
- A clear description of each criterion
- Instructions for filling them in
- Examples of expected behavior
- A uniform rating system
A clear listening grid not only optimizes performance monitoring, but also ensures continuous improvement by precisely identifying individual strengths and weaknesses.
Step 4: Weight the criteria at fair value
Not all elements of the listening grid are equally important. Some criteria may have a more significant impact on the center's objectives than others. For example, the first contact resolution rate is an essential indicator for assessing service quality and customer satisfaction.
Here's how you can weight the criteria:
- Identify key criteria: Decide which aspects have the greatest impact on the customer promise, such as responsiveness or courtesy.
- Assign specific values: Assign a weight based on the importance of each criterion.
With the right weighting, you stay focused on the most critical aspects, so you can prioritize the improvement of your consultants' performance.
Step 5: Test and update the listening grid regularly
In theory, your listening grid should work. But it's in practice that you can really judge its effectiveness and relevance. Put it to the test in real-life situations by supervisors or by teleconsultants in self-assessment, to identify strengths and areas for improvement.
Be sure to conduct debriefings with the supervisor and the call center agent after each test evaluation session. These discussions will enable you to gather detailed feedback and define concrete actions to improve the listening grid.
Your double listening chart is not something to be taken for granted once it's completed. Your business needs and customer expectations evolve over time. But with a continuous updating process, you can ensure that the evaluation criteria remain relevant over time.
Step 6: Automate agent evaluation with Speech Analytics
Only 1% of calls are listened to on average in contact centers. To address this problem, automating agent evaluation can transform your quality management by giving you a clearer, more detailed perspective on every telephone interaction. This automation phase is a critical step that can be optimized by using a Speech Analytics solution.
With voice analysis technologies such as Batvoice AI, you can analyze every call automatically and let your supervisors listen only to the most relevant calls. Our customers have also optimized their productivity, with an average of 30% less time spent on evaluation, and 25 times more calls listened to.
It's crucial to use specialized AI such as Speech Analytics, as generative AIs are not yet reliable enough to ensure relevant call evaluation. Specialized AIs are designed for specific tasks such as speech analytics, offering assessments of superior accuracy and consistency. This gives you a more reliable and representative view of your agents' performance, enabling you to offer them coaching and training tailored to their real needs.
