Contact Center Call Monitoring
From assessing customer interactions to developing business KPIs, call monitoring plays a significant role in running smooth-sailing, lucrative contact centers.
In order for call center agents to deliver the best possible customer experience, they need proper training, coaching, and support from your organization. One of the best ways to provide these is for call center managers and supervisors to monitor your agents’ inbound or outbound calls in real time.
RingCentral’s AI-powered call monitoring capabilities, for instance, allow you to listen in, enter conversations, and even take over ongoing calls if necessary. Being able to do so can help you improve communications, provide consistent-quality support, and lead your reps toward success.
What is call monitoring?
Call monitoring is the process of listening to live calls with the goal of improving customer interactions. Call center supervisors, coaches, and quality assurance teams typically utilize this call management function to plan agent training and manage performance.
Under federal law, you can monitor phone calls provided that they are business-related. Some state laws, however, take it a bit further and require that all parties agree to the conversation being recorded or monitored. That's why it's best practice to notify customers that the call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes and get their consent via the interactive voice response (IVR) system before the automatic call distribution (ACD) and call routing feature kicks in and transfers the call to an agent.
What is a call monitoring software?
A call monitoring system is one that allows you to observe your call center agents’ recorded and real-time calls. It's included in many business phone systems or cloud-based call center solutions.
In particular, RingCentral has a very flexible call monitoring tool within our AI-first omnichannel contact center platform. More than just a simple call center quality monitoring software that only lets you listen in, whisper, barge in, and take over calls, our solution also lets you:
- Monitor calls from different devices, including your mobile phone or computer via the RingCentral App
- Monitor calls from business VoIP phones using simple key commands
- Create up to 100 call monitoring groups per account
- Enjoy automatic or on-demand call recording
Advanced call monitoring key features for call centers
Call whisper
This feature allows anyone monitoring a call to speak directly to the call center agent without the customer hearing. With only the agent hearing them, supervisors and coaches can give real-time verbal assistance without affecting the call.
Call barge
This feature lets the person listening in to join the conversation. In this case, both the agent and the caller will hear and talk to the coach. It's usually done when the agent has trouble handling the customer’s concern and isn’t picking up whispered instructions very well. Since the coach is already listening to the call, they can step in when the caller asks for a supervisor or manager. It’s more efficient than using call forwarding to route calls to the next available supervisor.
Call takeover
In cases where the agent makes mistakes that can be detrimental to the customer relationship, the person listening in can also completely take over the live call. In this case, the agent is cut off from the caller, who will now directly speak to the coach or supervisor who took over the call.
Call recording
Instead of listening in on active calls, your quality assurance team can instead choose to review the agents' previously recorded calls from the call logs. They won't be able to affect the call anymore, but it's a useful tool for evaluating agent performance and identifying trends in customer inquiries. You can record calls automatically or on demand.
Benefits of call monitoring
Optimize coaching and training
Call monitoring makes it possible for agents to get immediate feedback and assimilate instructions into the task at hand. With options for call listening, whispering, barging, and takeover, managers can assist agents in providing the best call support that customers deserve.
Minimizes escalations
By getting direct instructions from their coaches and supervisors, customer service agents are more likely to resolve concerns themselves rather than escalate cases to a superior. These direct coaching sessions also improve performance, reducing the number of future escalations, follow-ups, and callbacks.
Manage remote employees
With modern businesses moving towards remote work setups, the ability to still provide direct coaching and supervision to agents is key. It’s a good thing call monitoring can be done through any internet-connected device, be it a VoIP phone, mobile phone, desktop, or laptop.
Training new agents
Agents who are new to the job need more help in handling different types of calls and customers. What call center monitoring software brings to the table is the luxury of providing personal instruction where the coach can be in the new agent's ear. Quality monitoring and assurance teams can hear sales and customer service staff as they speak with customers, leads, and clients and provide instructions as needed.
How does call monitoring software work in your business phone system?
Activating this capability can be different from provider to provider. With RingCentral, it’s easy. You can enable call center monitoring through your IT department or whoever has call center system admin privileges. Here’s how it works:
- Once enabled, create groups and add users that will be given the ability to monitor live calls. These are usually coaches, supervisors, QA analysts, and managers.
- Once the monitors are given this designation, they can then add the users you want to be monitored. These are the agents or employees under the umbrella of the monitors.
- Once the group is created, the users given the monitoring privilege can now listen in, whisper feedback and instructions, barge in, and even take over calls.
People with admin privileges can also manage, set parameters, delete, and change configurations of each call monitoring group.
Who uses the call monitoring feature of a call center software?
Call monitoring solutions are for everyone. No matter the size of your business, you can benefit from the ability to directly monitor all your employees’ live calls from an all-inclusive dashboard. Nowadays, customers can contact businesses through different types of channels like social media, live chat, SMS text messaging, email, or even video conferencing. Still, the traditional phone call remains to be the preferred way of doing so. Having different options for training and guiding your employees in effective communication is worth it.
Technical and customer service teams
Customer support teams usually take on long call queues. They handle large volumes of inbound calls that range from simple account queries to complete technical assistance requests. Because of this, QA teams utilize call monitoring to ensure agents meet the call center quality standards and directives.
This applies not only to in-house teams. A lot of companies outsource their customer and technical support teams to external contact centers, and call monitoring helps these third parties meet their clients' demands in terms of service level quality.
Sales teams
Sales departments typically use call monitoring to train new agents. Coaches can provide direct feedback and instruction to agents during inbound and outbound sales. For example, they can give actionable insights on how to approach specific cues from prospects.
They can also do it in reverse. Instead of the coach listening in on the new agent's call, the new agent can listen in on more experienced sales agents. This way, they can personally hear how seasoned agents handle complex cases, counter a lead's arguments, and generally answer any questions thrown at them.
Marketing teams
While marketing teams rarely interact with customers directly, they can still use call monitoring to monitor how the sales team pitches their product or services to leads or potential customers.
Marketing departments want to ensure that the branding and messaging they implement in marketing campaigns align with what the sales team communicates. If there is a disconnect, it is something that the whole company must address, or it will lead to lost leads and sales.
Gain complete control of agent phone calls with RingCX and ensure positive customer experiences every time.
Create smarter customer experiences through intelligent call monitoring
Streamline workflows, reduce agent handle times, develop quality monitoring metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs), determine customer FAQs and create answer templates, and find process automation opportunities—you can do all these and more when you have the right call center solutions by your side.
With RingCentral, you get a complete suite of AI-infused contact center tools within a singular dashboard to help you elevate agent performance and increase customer satisfaction rates. Our catalog covers everything you would ever need: call monitoring, text and speech analytics, workforce optimization, predictive dialers, intelligent routing, CRM integrations, and so on.
Get in touch with our RingCentral team today for more information about our plans and pricing, and let’s get started in transforming your business!
Learn how you can create better customer experiences through a flexible and versatile call monitoring feature. Click the demo button to find out more about RingCentral's AI-first contact center solution.