As a call center manager, you know that monitoring how your agents are doing during calls is a big part of winning the game. It’s like being a coach—you analyze the plays and figure out how to improve your team.
For instance, if you found out that you weren’t using the best call center service available, you’d do what you could to change that.
Similarly, call center quality monitoring involves identifying areas of improvement, mostly by listening to calls and evaluating how agents handle them. But that’s not all.
In fact, the best call center managers will also keep an eye on what happens after a call ends, because that’s when agents can reflect on what they felt went right and wrong—and it’s often the best time to work with them on how to improve.
At the end of the day, monitoring calls for quality is only worthwhile if you do something with what you learn, so it’s important to know the playbook of post-call practices that can help your team’s performance.
Create a Quality Monitoring Scorecard to Organize Feedback
The last thing you want to do is listen to a bunch of calls, write down an assortment of haphazard thoughts, and drown yourself in a sea of unorganized notes.
You can avoid this by putting together a quality monitoring scorecard that you can apply to each call that you listen to, including a list of factors that can assess an agent’s strengths and weaknesses.
This offers a clear structure for evaluating agents in a uniform way, making it easy to organize your thoughts and turn them into speaking points for the in-person review. With a scorecard in hand, you’ll clearly see where an agent needs more training and then be able to turn that into actionable feedback to help the agent improve.
Remember, you’ll probably need different scorecards for specific call types. A good practice is to identify three or four of your most common types of calls and craft specialized scorecards for each one. When you get the hang of things, you’ll figure out if you need to make changes to any existing scorecards, or if you are ready to add more.
Set a Next Call Goal and a Next Review Goal
Feedback is great—but without a solid improvement plan, it’s just noise.
Your call center director wants measurable success, so you should strive to give clear, actionable, and prioritized feedback. Conversely, leaving agents with too many goals after a monitoring session can overwhelm them and be counterproductive.
To keep things simple, a good practice is to give your agents the following two kinds of goals to focus on.
A Next Call Goal: This is the lowest-hanging fruit from your evaluation, something tangible and immediate that an agent can change right away on their next call. For example, it could be to shorten their handle time by 30 seconds, or to change something about the way they leave a call.
A Next Review Goal: This one is all about making a long-term improvement, so think about a habit you want the agent to form before their next in-person review. It could be something like getting at least half of their callers to do a customer satisfaction survey at the end of conversations.
Start by Letting Agents Tell You What They Think Went Well and What Didn’t
When giving feedback, it can be easy to slip into a mode where you’re doing all the talking—and there’s nothing like lecturing someone to make them shut down and not want to listen.
Instead, whenever you’re discussing feedback with agents, remember to let them take the wheel first. This will empower them to share what they think went well and what didn’t.
If done well, you can turn these meetings into conversations rather than top-down performance reviews. In turn, your agents will often be more receptive to feedback and thus more committed to improvement.
Host Group Training Workshops
It’s not always feasible to conduct one-on-one training sessions with every agent, and at the same time, personalized training might even be intimidating for some agents.
That said, if you want your call monitoring to lead to improvements, then you must use what you learn to train your agents.
A good solution here can be to conduct group training workshops. By bringing agents together for group training, you can save time and create a more relaxed learning environment that relieves some of the pressure agents feel during one-on-one training.
Keep in mind that planning group training should start when you’re doing feedback sessions. You can group agents by the skills or processes they need to work on, but be careful that you’re not singling anybody out or being insensitive.
It’s also a good idea to choose the right size of groups. Small group training sessions with three or four agents will allow for more personalized individual attention, whereas larger group sessions with ten or more people will let you make the most of your training time.
Lastly, remember that you don’t have to do all of the training yourself. Instead, having a team around you can make group training more effective and efficient.
Listen to the Call That Comes Immediately After Training
The sign of successful training is if an agent can take what they learned and put it to work right away.
One way to see if your agents are truly absorbing the knowledge is to monitor a call right after training.
Note that the call should be directly related to what they just learned. When listening, observe if the agent used anything they picked up in training—and how they used it.
A quick post-call meeting with the agent can also be helpful for reviewing and assessing their learning. You can go over how the call went and why they did or didn’t use what they supposedly just learned in training.
Save Their Worst Call and Compare it to Their Most Recent in the Next Review Session
The point of post-call reviews is to help agents grow and improve. You need to know that your training and feedback efforts are working so you can show measurable success.
Saving an agent’s worst call and comparing it to their most recent call in a review session lets you both see a bigger picture of the progress as it’s happening.
Remember, the agent’s worst call might be embarrassing for the agent to relive. That said, let them know that it’s not about pointing fingers but assessing growth. Note any improvements and discuss the areas that still need work.
Final Thoughts
Monitoring calls is, of course, essential. But the real game-changer happens post-call, where providing structured feedback and actionable goals can lead to continuous improvement.
Remember, as a call center manager, your job isn’t just about catching mistakes—it’s also about developing the skills of your agents so they can improve their own capabilities, hit their targets more consistently, and ultimately make your inbound call center service better.
