When you want to improve the quality of your phone calls, it can be challenging to know where to start. Even if you have standardized procedures and phone scripts, every phone agent operates a little differently. To improve outcomes, you need to know how to use quality assurance training and what some of the outcomes you should be looking for are.
What is Quality Assurance Training?
Quality assurance training focuses on making sure that your phone agents are having successful phone calls with customers and potential customers. Depending on the type of phone call they are conducting, this means that they should be able to resolve any concerns, answer questions, and set appointments with the people to whom they are talking. It can also focus on phone skills, conflict resolution, or any other important metrics to you and your dealership. Quality assurance training is most effective when the employees are not aware that the phone call they are currently on will be used to evaluate them and provide the basis for training. This can give you a clearer picture of what their usual phone calls contain.
How to Conduct the Training
To conduct quality assurance training, you need to start by establishing benchmarks and metrics that employees need to hit to be considered successful. The more clearly defined you can make these metrics, the better because these provide the basis for evaluation and training. Once you know what you are looking for, you should select random phone calls to record and evaluate each phone agent. These phone calls should be evaluated against the established criteria, and feedback should be noted immediately. This immediate feedback can serve as the basis for training if the phone agent doesn’t pass the evaluation, or it can be used to provide feedback and praise to phone agents that do pass. Once you have gathered the data about your phone agents, it can be used in two different ways for training. First, this information should be used to evaluate the success of each phone agent individually and provide them with steps they can take to improve their performance. It can identify areas of weakness before they cause too many problems. Second, this data, in aggregate, can help you see how your dealership is performing and what patterns are emerging. This should inform your overall training and where you should focus your efforts for improvement.
Increased Appointments
Appointments are one of the best ways to bring in new sales. People who show up to look at vehicles without an appointment can be converted into a sale, but if you know someone is showing up intending to buy a car during their appointment, you have a greater chance of success. And with so many dealerships competing for a limited pool of customers, you need everything you can get on your side. This is why ensuring your phone agents are successfully setting appointments is crucial. If you are effectively using your quality assurance evaluations and training to focus on this, you should see an increase in both appointments set and appointments that show up.
Decreased Escalation
One of the biggest things that lead to conflict over the phone and phone calls that need to be escalated is ineffective phone agents. Customers often get frustrated when they feel like they aren’t being listened to, when no one can answer their questions, or if they are left on hold for longer periods. These issues can be reduced if phone agents are trained properly in more than setting appointments. Quality assurance evaluation and training can help you pinpoint what is frustrating customers and require phone agents to escalate a call to the next level. While you won’t be able to avoid all need for escalation, reducing the number of calls with frustrated customers is important for your reputation and overall customer satisfaction.
When used effectively, quality assurance training is one of the best tools that you have to help your phone agents be successful at their jobs and to keep your dealership running smoothly. Setting clear metrics and understanding what success looks like is key to getting the results you want.
Do you need some extra assistance with your training? Check out how our active coaching can help!
As the COO | Partner of Phone Ninjas, Chris delivers leadership, coaching, and mentorship to 55 team members providing software sales and phone skills coaching. He fosters powerful partnerships and collaborations with leaders across various business sectors, establishing expectations, communicating vision, and escalating performance to maximize productivity and effectiveness.
Chris is an innovation-driven business executive with over 25 years of experience delivering leadership to teams of up to 75 overseeing development, launch, and sale of website lead acquisition, reconditioning process software systems, and technology that support automotive dealerships across the U.S., Canada, and Europe.
