Did you know that 91% of customers reported poor customer experience in 2021? 

Around 81% of customers believe that customer experience is as important as the products and services offered by your company.

As such, every company wants its call center to offer the best experiences to its customers. 

While many companies train their agents for customer interaction, some still find trouble satisfying and resolving customer issues.

One of the best ways to solve this problem is through call monitoring and call listening. 

In this article, we will take a closer look at call listening and its importance.  Alongside this, we will also examine what is call monitoring and the benefits of call monitoring to the business world.

What are Call Monitoring and Call Listening?

Call listening refers to when managers listen to real-time calls between their customers and agents. They do so for various reasons including training purposes, resolving issues, and evaluating the agent. 

Your managers listen to calls based on the agents’ past performance or when call time is higher than usual. Moreover, a call listening session is done to evaluate your agent and use the same messages to train others.

The difference between call monitoring and call listening is simple. Call monitoring refers to almost all call-related activities that supervisors do to improve the quality of customer services. As such, it also includes call analytics. 

Thus, call monitoring includes generating reports of call history, viewing the number of calls that are currently ongoing, and more.

Also check out: Call Masking

Why is Call Listening important?

Call listening is an essential feature for any company to have. It’s similar to conducting an informal survey on how happy your customer is with your product and services. 

Listening to your customers can help you understand their experience with your customer services. Moreover, a call listening session can even help understand how well your agents can assist them. 

A few other purposes of call listening include:

1) Enhancing metric analysis

Call listening can help a company analyze the real reason behind metrics like CSAT, FCR, and AHT. All of these can provide you with a good understanding of your call center performance. 

For example, say the Average Handle Time (AHT) of an agent is higher than expected. With call listening and call monitoring, you could always find the real reason behind it.

Additionally, call listening activity can also help you figure out where and when your metrics have to be less rigid. For example, not all calls that take a long time are ineffective. 

Call monitoring can also help you figure out what your script is missing. This is especially useful when an agent deviates from the traditional script and goes for something else!

2) Improves First Call Resolution

Call listening can improve the customers’ trust and confidence in your company. 

This is especially true when agents are aware that their calls are being recorded and monitored. As a result, they will work hard to resolve the callers’ problems in the first call.

3) Improves customer satisfaction

Call monitoring and call listening helps companies take instant steps to resolve customer satisfaction scores whenever they’re solving queries.

4) Ensures timely intervention

Whenever an agent cannot solve a customer issue, it can be of great assistance. During call listening sessions, your manager can interfere and help the agent with the next steps. 

As such, a lot of time is saved for your customers. Moreover, it will reduce your customers’ requirements to go through the entire process again.

5) Ways to monitor a call

Calls can either be monitored in real-time or recordings, and there are several ways to monitor these calls. Historical calls can be monitored through the recordings from the cloud contact centers. 

Live calls, however, can be monitored in three different ways. These include:

6) Barge-in

Barge-in is a method that allows the team leader, supervisor, or a third party to silently join the call. This occurs while a customer and an agent are talking. 

During the barge-in session, no participant on the call would be notified. Therefore, the best time to use this method is when you require a less intimidating call monitoring method. 

This is because nobody on the call would know you are listening to them.

7) Whisper

This one-way communication technique allows the manager to speak to the agent in private. It does so without letting the customer know or hear what they are saying. 

This is usually done when a manager sees a situation that requires intervention. This intervention is done without letting the customer know.

Whisper can be very effective in helping agents continue whenever they find themselves in a pinch. For example, when they have a question, are stuck between calls, when the situation is getting heated, etc.

8) Snoop

The Snoop Call Monitoring technique allows your supervisor to talk to your agent and the customer when required. 

This method is usually used to resolve customer queries faster. But, it can also help develop a sense of importance in customers when a senior staff member takes over.

Also read, The Complete Guide To Outbound Calling

Benefits of Call Monitoring

An important part of creating your customer experience strategy is to ensure proper training and support of your agents. Call monitoring acts as the perfect way for you to ensure agent performance is up to the mark.

A few popular benefits of call monitoring include:

1) It allows the supervisor to focus on the proficiencies and deficiencies of their agents’ performance.

For example, say an agent is struggling with interactions with customers about certain aspects of your business. This may be due to lack of knowledge or training. 

In such a case, you can then train them in that specific area and increase their performance.

2) It allows the manager to create a goal-setting process and develop a more detailed action plan for individual agents. 

For example, a manager can address specific issues and develop solutions for agents constantly falling below expectations in specific areas.

3) Call monitoring allows supervisors and companies to track the company’s progress and individual agents through data and scoring.

This is a very useful feature of call monitoring. However, it might require them to listen to many call recordings and live calls, especially those targeted.

4) Call listening activity can help managers understand the deficit of an agent and provide unique feedback through recordings. 

This helps your agent understand exactly where the problem lies and enhances the feedback process.

There are many more advantages to call monitoring and call listening. But overall, the result of both is enhanced customer satisfaction and service quality.

Also read,  The A-Z of Call Tracking

Conclusion

As you can see, call listening and monitoring is very useful for any business for various reasons.

Call listening activity allows supervisors to monitor calls, listen to them, and even intervene if need be. 

Effective call listening sessions can also help quickly find areas of improvement and better evaluate your agents’ performance.

Moreover, the various benefits of call monitoring truly help perfect your customer experience strategy.

Overall, you should always use call listening and call monitoring to improve customer experiences with your company!