Hidden Costs of Manual Call Monitoring

Call quality monitoring and assurance in the call center are essential in today’s business environment. Accessing and analyzing the voice of the customer is standard practice in order to meet the growing needs of the customer base.

But if your contact center managers are still manually monitoring calls, you’re not really monitoring your agents or the customer experience. You’re missing out on the metrics that measure those difficult to interpret, subjective behaviors that impact customer satisfaction.

You’re also wasting a lot of money on hidden costs. In this post, we’ll look at just a few of those hidden costs and how automated quality monitoring can improve your bottom line.

Let’s break down the cost of manual call monitoring in terms of visibility into agent performance. First, manually listening to a random selection of calls will never offer a solid understanding of how you’re agents are doing. Pinpointing which agents need help or the areas they need more training in without automated reporting isn’t just time-consuming. It’s expensive on many levels.

Let’s say you have a call center that receives 21,000 inbound calls per month. And each call lasts an average of 5 minutes. As the illustration below demonstrates, you would need ten times as many managers to listen to every call.

An automated solution consolidates agent performance metrics into individual agent scorecards or custom reports. This is the only way to achieve accuracy when assessing agent performance. Plus, complete visibility and transparency in the contact center is the most cost-effective way to reach business performance goals.

According to CustomerThink, the average cost to replace an agent in the U.S. is $8,780. Even if you lose one agent per month, you’re looking at tens of thousands of dollars per year in agent attrition costs. While agent monitoring may not seem like the most direct solution to high attrition rates, there are many ways to use automated tools to boost morale.

Agent dashboards and scorecards keep your agents focused and engaged in their work because they can see tangible results from their efforts. This also provides them with a sense of value within the company, as well as opportunities to compete and receive rewards. For visual learners, sentiment dashboards are a great way to show agents how customers react during conversations.

Manually listening to calls is undeniably prone to human error. This is especially true when monitoring script compliance. You can put your business at risk if you operate in a regulated world. And risk compliance is a big one in terms of unnecessary costs.

Disregarding a single non-compliant event on just one call with a customer can lead to expensive litigation, penalties, fees, and a multitude of other costs. Managers can create scorecards based on whether or not the agent followed mandatory script guidelines. This eliminates the need to listen to every call for script compliance, as well as unnecessary legal expenses.

Agents, team leaders, managers, and executives should monitor agent performance on a regular basis. This enables every team and individual to focus on the same organizational KPIs no matter what. In this way, businesses can maintain close, consistent connections with both employees and customers and drive continued excellence.

However, manual monitoring will never provide that consistency. An automated QM solution offers objective insights into agent behavior immediately, accurately, with no bias, and little human effort. Managed SaaS solutions are ideal because they offer ongoing support and help with setting up scorecards to meet business goals.

Your business needs well-trained, high-performing contact center agents who are adept at handling customer interactions with professionalism and expertise. But you don’t want to break the bank to get there. Investing some money upfront for an automated QM solution will save you a lot more money in the long run.

Our powerful and affordable cloud-based speech analytics solution will get you there with automated agent performance monitoring, automated call scoring, sentiment analysis, and easily accessible analytics reporting. Contact us to learn more about our contact center solutions. Or request your no-obligation demo today!

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