What is Call Monitoring?

Call monitoring is the act of listening to an agent’s call, whether it is live or recorded. It is usually a call with the cardholder, but it can also be with a third party if you want to evaluate how your agents locate difficult-to-contact clients. Call monitoring is one of the most valuable tools that team leaders can use to improve their agents’ negotiation and probing skills. 

While no call script can ever guarantee a hundred percent collection rate, your company should design a call model that will yield the highest success rate based on research and experience. The characteristics of what you consider an excellent call should then be outlined in a call monitoring form. This form will be used to evaluate the calls of all your outbound agents. If necessary, you can use a different call monitoring form for your inbound agents. 

Things to Remember

Call monitoring, as we’ve emphasized, is an invaluable asset in honing your agents’ abilities. Yet, it’s no secret that it can often feel like a draining, repetitive exercise. If you’ve ever found yourself longing to be on the frontline, interacting with clients instead of listening to recorded conversations, you’re not alone.

Over time, this task can become monotonous, leading even the most diligent supervisors to unintentionally cut corners. This underlines the critical need for robust policies and processes to safeguard the quality of call evaluations, even as the task becomes increasingly tedious.

While AI solutions are looming on the horizon, promising to revolutionize and refine this process, many companies still handle call monitoring manually. Teams often select calls randomly for evaluation, adding a layer of unpredictability to the process.

The focus of this article is to shed light on the vital nature of call monitoring and discuss the best practices to be followed when automation isn’t yet part of the equation. It’s about elevating this essential activity, celebrating its impact on your collection team, and navigating its complexities without the assistance of automation.

Calls Monitored

The minimum number of calls that need to be evaluated per agent should depend on their tenure and performance. For example, more calls should be assessed for new hires and non-performers. As agents gain experience and improve performance, the number of calls that their supervisors would need to listen to on a weekly basis should go down. This kind of arrangement will motivate supervisors to push their agents to perform. As more agents meet or even exceed their respective targets, the lighter their workload will be. 

In addition, it would be better if most of the calls listened to by your team leaders were live ones and not recorded copies from your call recorder. This enables the team leader to provide immediate feedback and correct any mistakes your new agents make during a live call. Nowadays, most systems allow supervisors to barge in ongoing calls without their agents’ knowledge.

Coaching

Similar to the call monitoring requirement, the frequency of coaching should also depend on the agent’s tenure and performance. New agents and non-performers should be coached more often than those who are performing well. Remember that time away from their phones means that your agents will get to talk to fewer cardholders. And the fewer clients they speak to, the lower their collections will be. As such, it is essential that you pull out your agents from their jobs only when it is necessary and beneficial for the team in the long run. Remember that Steve Kerr will never pull out Steph Curry to give him good feedback on his shooting when he’s on fire, especially when the game is on the line, right?

Call Calibration

Evaluating calls can be subjective. To ensure that your team leaders are fair and consistent in assessing calls, your team should have regular call calibration sessions. In this activity, evaluated calls are randomly selected by the person or group in charge of quality assurance in advance. The team leaders would then listen to these calls and simultaneously evaluate them. They would then go through each item on the call monitoring form and share their evaluation at the end of each call. If one or a couple of supervisors have differing assessments, the group will discuss the topic and agree on the correct evaluation.

Call calibrations ensure that team leaders share the same views on what constitutes a good call. Moreover, it also acts as a quality control exercise that aligns the standards of all team leaders since some can be very strict or generous when evaluating their agents’ calls. 

Audit

As mentioned earlier, call monitoring is a very monotonous task. As such, don’t be surprised when some of your supervisors will find ways to make it easier for them. They can do this in several ways:

First, they can choose calls that have a duration of 3 minutes or less. They have chosen these calls knowing that they are most likely reminder calls only. The length of the call can indicate that the agent did not encounter any difficulty with the client. Reviewing these kinds of calls will not help agents improve their skills. If supervisors really want to see how they can help their agents get better, they should choose longer calls for their call monitoring task. It is in these calls that the weaknesses of their agents are usually exposed. 

Second, they can recycle their findings since they basically know how their agents conduct calls. While they will still comply with the minimum requirements, the quality of their work is already low, given that they are just passively listening to the calls. 

Another thing they can do, which is the worst, in my opinion, is to fabricate call monitoring evaluations. It is easy to get away with this if your company doesn’t have a system in place to check for possible violations. All they have to do is choose accounts with PTPs in your system and make up call evaluations. Needless to say, this should be considered a serious offense and carry the appropriate sanctions as allowed by your employee handbook.

To prevent these from happening, your compliance or quality control team should regularly check the quality of your supervisors’ work by evaluating the same calls your team leaders assessed. They do not have to listen to all of them, as this would be counterproductive. They can just do random sampling and compare their assessments with the supervisors’. Relevant findings should then be reported to unit heads for further investigation.

Call Monitoring Form

You can get a free call monitoring form when you subscribe to our newsletter. Once you subscribe, you will automatically receive the sample call monitoring form in your e-mail inbox. Please feel free to modify or add sections that you may deem necessary.  Moreover, kindly note that the form you’ll receive contains topics that are discussed in our Debt Collection Management Masterclass course. If you haven’t purchased the course yet, you can check out the course outline here and see if it is a course that you and your company can benefit from – Debt Collection Management Masterclass. If you only need a sample call monitoring form, just subscribe to our newsletter using the form below. On top of getting a sample call monitoring form, you’ll also receive emails on how to manage and improve your collections. 

Conclusion

Call monitoring is a very important tool when you’re running a contact center, whether it’s customer service, sales, or collections. It helps your management team evaluate the quality of calls of your agents and also check if they comply with the standards set by your company. However, as discussed earlier, you have to have safeguards in place to ensure that this task is done properly. 

Looking for tailored solutions? Let’s talk about your unique business needs and how we can help. Reach out to us at info@ludasof.com. You may also send us a message through our contact form by clicking on this link – Contact Us. Let’s create your success story together.