Quality Assurance in the Age of Remote Work: Tools, Metrics and Human Oversight

Ensuring Contact Center Quality Assurance in Remote Work Environments

Contact center quality assurance for remote work needs a straightforward way to determine which ruleset to use and whether someone has performed their job correctly. As such, you must prioritize developing a balanced scoring method for work units that defines how your internal systems should operate. 

Using this, your team can automate to ensure you have both coverage and speed in customer service responses. Using a hybrid model with human oversight can then ensure that you are doing the best job possible.  

Lastly, building bilingual QA into the system from day one, with clear rubrics for both languages that account for cultural nuance, can ensure you support both equally. Meanwhile, collecting recordings, transcripts, and other capturable information helps build a comprehensive dataset for long-term improvement. 

The QA Challenge in Remote and Near-Shore Contact Centers 

Communication is always harder at a distance, and when those you need to communicate with are directly interfacing with your customers or clients, the challenge is clear: 

“How do you do quality assurance with remote contact center agents? 

First, we would recommend that you define a single individual or group responsible for owning the scoring, coaching, and appeal system for a distributed team. Then they can organize any contact center quality assurance remote work, so your central team can monitor whether your QA coaches are doing their job of improving call center tasks correctly. 

Many remote contact center QA best practices involve these multi-layered approaches. The intent is that good training “trickles down”, allowing those more remote logistically to understand what you have communicated to fewer people, saving you time, effort, and money. 

Essential QA Tools and Technologies for Hybrid Operations 

QA tools call center remote agents are increasingly powered by AI each year. This form of hybrid intelligence significantly enhances your team’s capabilities by digitally analyzing their work. 

Sentiment Analytics 

Speech and sentiment Analytics is already a significant aspect of language model development.  

Outsourcing QA monitoring tools to an AI allows you to avoid issues related to human bias. Instead, a connected system can act as a neutral third party, giving you insights on: 

  • Which of your team members more often displays a problematic tone
  • Which of your team members causes the customer to display a problematic tone
  • What questions and comments are made by both your team and customers shortly before the problematic tone
  • Which members of your team cause customers to express joy or happiness most often

Live-chat Monitoring and Transcript Analysis 

Digital systems offer both greater effectiveness in detecting sentiment and a much faster method for analyzing and monitoring calls. Much like in other industries, you may be able to provide real-time feedback to team members who sound upset or to customers who seem frustrated. 

Key QA Metrics Every Contact Centre Must Track (With Benchmarks) 

Asking “What QA metrics should a remote call center track?” This is a good place to start when collecting the most important datasets. QA metrics for contact center outsourcing can provide key insights into what your company is doing outside your oversight as you scale up. 

In addition to the standard ones (CSAT, FCR, complaint rate, sentiment trends) and financial ones (such as cost per contact and rework time), you should track which interactions specifically put you at risk of legal or regulatory failures. Use these compliance triggers to identify “red flags” that need to be handled with QA immediately to prevent the issue from escalating. 

You should also ensure that your metrics read as “zero” for collecting and storing the following improperly: 

  • Sensitive authentication data 
  • Payment data 
  • ePHI 

You should also ensure your metrics read as “100%” adherence to call recording consent regulations. 

The Indispensable Role of Human Oversight and Bilingual Agent Coaching 

Ensure that you keep humans in the loop at all times. Doing this allows you to adjust and correct for things that a rules model may get wrong, like: 

  • Empathy 
  • Cultural nuance 
  • Complex judgment over longer interactions 

This requirement is so essential that, in some quarters of the world, it becomes a legal requirement. As such, if you are dealing with those areas in your customer service efforts, ensure you carefully consider what your team needs to do, along with any digital systems. 

All analysis and coaching should also take into account bilingual call center QA needs. These might include: 

  • Accent clarity 
  • Dialect guidance 
  • Translation reviews 
  • Examples of excellent bilingual work for training 

How Centris’s QA Framework Supports Remote Bilingual Service 

We use AI and machine learning tools to capture and transcribe every customer interaction, providing scores, alerts, and other key data for review. 

With bilingual, nearshore support, we deliver exceptional English- and Spanish-language customer support, ideal for remote operations. 

We have also published our QA process for continual improvement. As such, if you wish to learn more, you can see for yourself what our efforts look like. 

Building Your Remote QA Roadmap – Practical Next Steps 

For the first month, don’t install anything except data collectors. Use this time to create baselines and discover nuances of your system. 

In your second and third, calibrate and scale up your system to offer more feedback. 

Over the next quarter and beyond, add and maintain your sentiment analytics and bilingual support, calibrating quarterly to ensure efforts align with KPIs and pivoting your roadmap. 

Improve Your Outsourced Contact Centre Quality Source Remote Work 

Outsourced contact center quality assurance remote work can be extremely challenging to do right. However, with a dedicated service offering from a team that coaches itself by collecting and using actionable analytics from every customer in contact, you can ensure you stay ahead of the game. 

Ready to raise QA standards for remote and bilingual operations? Talk to the QA experts at Centris Information Services about our proven framework for voice and chat channels. 

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