Call Center Monitoring

Companies offering call center monitoring services or software solutions offer concrete methods for assessing, assuring, and improving the performance of call center agents. Call center monitoring is achieved through metrics such as evaluations, comparative analyses, and feedback.

Call Center Monitoring

Call center monitoring is accomplished through three basic actions: measurement, analysis, and feedback. This creates a continuous loop of assessment and calibration based on objective metrics and scoring gleaned from call recordings, real-time analytics, and other forms of evaluation.

For call center metrics to be most effective, the statistics and reporting must be considered relevant, practical, and above all, objective by the call center agent.

Traditional call center metrics often rely on two key aspects:

• Speech analysis
  • Phonetic indexing
  • Transcription
  • Multi-speaker speech separation (Role recognition)
  • Emotion detection
  • Talk-over analysis
• Call flow
  • Call duration
  • Call time
  • Number of call transfers
  • Number of call holds
  • Hold duration

Newer features of speech analysis, such as emotion detection, reflect a blending of competing viewpoints (acoustic features only vs. linguistics-only philosophies) and the technologies that can accommodate them both.

Acoustic features include:

• Volume
• Tone
• Pitch
• Intensity
• Inflection
• Rate of speed

Linguistic attributes include:

• Words
• Pauses
• Stops
• Hesitations
• Laughter
• Sighs

Emotion detection can create a more layered, nuanced approach to call monitoring, ensuring that the overall context (rather than simple word frequency) provides a fuller picture, especially if that picture is one of customer frustration.

Another new tool in speech analysis is talk-over analysis. Simultaneous crosstalk between customers and representatives is a source (and indicator) of frustration. Talk-over analysis can also pinpoint silences, which can imply a knowledge gap and a potential improvement area to target.

Real-Time Analytics

Real-time analytics are increasing in popularity with many call center managers. Recorded calls can take days to index, depending on factors such as how much data there is and where it's housed (on-premises or hosted). Real-time analytics can help call center agents to regulate and improve their CRM performance while it's most critical — as it's happening.

The real-time call center monitoring and reporting offered by some call center monitoring services and software give call center managers quick access to data on groups and individuals. Some call center solutions take real-time analytics a step further by integrating real-time analytics into the call center routing procedures. ...