What is Call Calibration? [Best Practices]

How do contact centers maintain consistent customer service quality across hundreds or even thousands of interactions daily? The answer lies in a strong quality assurance (QA) program, with call calibration at its core. According to industry insights, quality assurance can directly impact customer satisfaction, as 86% of customers say they are willing to pay more for a great experience.

Call calibration is a process that aligns evaluators on consistent scoring metrics, ensuring that customer service quality is measured fairly and accurately. By involving managers, QA specialists, and team leads, contact centers can ensure that every agent is held to the same standards, ultimately driving a consistent customer experience.

What is Call Calibration?

Call calibration is the process of aligning evaluators in a contact center to ensure they assess customer interactions fairly and consistently. This method involves multiple stakeholders, such as managers, QA specialists, and agents, who review a set of calls and discuss the scoring criteria.

Importance of Call Calibration

Ensures Consistency: Calibration sessions guarantee that all evaluators are using the same metrics and standards, eliminating bias in quality assessments.
Improves Agent Performance: By providing consistent feedback, agents can improve their skills and provide better service to customers.
Builds Trust: Calibration promotes transparency between evaluators and agents, leading to a more open and collaborative environment.

Call calibration is essential in maintaining uniform quality standards across the contact center. When evaluators score interactions differently, it can lead to inconsistent feedback, causing confusion for agents and affecting overall service quality.

How Call Calibration Sessions Work

Call calibration sessions are essential for maintaining consistent evaluation standards across contact centers. These sessions bring together evaluators, such as managers, QA specialists, and team leads, to review and align on the evaluation criteria for customer interactions. The goal is to ensure all evaluators apply the same scoring standards when assessing agent performance, promoting uniformity and fairness across the board.

Purpose of Call Calibration Sessions

Call calibration serves multiple purposes, each contributing to the overall effectiveness of the quality assurance process in a contact center.

Aligning Scoring Metrics: The primary goal of call calibration is to ensure that every evaluator follows the same guidelines when scoring customer interactions. This alignment reduces subjectivity and ensures that all agents are evaluated fairly, regardless of who is conducting the review. By agreeing on a standardized scoring system, contact centers can eliminate discrepancies in performance assessments.
Improving Communication: Calibration sessions foster a collaborative environment where evaluators can openly discuss their perspectives on scoring criteria. This open communication helps bridge any misunderstandings or differences in interpretation of the evaluation guidelines. It also encourages a dialogue that ensures all team members fully understand and agree upon the criteria being used.
Enhancing QA Processes: These sessions offer a platform to identify any inconsistencies or gaps in the existing QA processes. By discussing and analyzing discrepancies in scoring, teams can pinpoint areas where the current evaluation process may be lacking. As a result, improvements can be made to refine the QA system, making it more effective and efficient over time.

Steps Involved in Call Calibration

Call calibration sessions follow a structured approach to ensure maximum alignment and fairness in evaluating customer interactions. Each step plays a crucial role in refining the QA process and ensuring consistency across evaluators.

1. Review of Customer Calls

In a typical calibration session, evaluators listen to a predefined set of customer calls that have been selected for review. These calls often represent a range of interaction types, including both successful and challenging conversations.
The purpose of reviewing the same calls is to ensure that all participants evaluate identical scenarios. This step is essential in identifying where variations in scoring may occur, whether due to differences in interpretation or adherence to the guidelines.

2. Discussion of QA Scores

Once all participants have reviewed the calls, they come together to discuss their scores. This discussion is key to uncovering any discrepancies in how the evaluators interpreted the call’s content and applied the scoring metrics.
During this stage, participants share why they scored the calls in a particular way. This collaborative discussion helps reveal subjective biases or differing interpretations of the evaluation criteria.

3. Consensus on Evaluation Criteria

The final step involves reaching a consensus on how the calls should be scored based on the agreed-upon evaluation guidelines. Through discussion, the team identifies areas where inconsistencies occurred and works to align their scoring methodology.
By achieving consensus, the team ensures that all future evaluations will follow the same standards, minimizing discrepancies and ensuring a uniform approach to QA evaluations.

Benefits of Call Calibration for Contact Centers

Call calibration offers a range of benefits that can help contact centers enhance their operations and maintain high levels of customer satisfaction.

Maintaining Consistency in Scoring

Call calibration ensures that all evaluators are scoring interactions in the same way, reducing inconsistencies in evaluations.
Consistent scoring is vital for identifying true performance gaps and offering constructive feedback to agents.

Meeting Customer Satisfaction Goals

Regular calibration sessions contribute to maintaining high customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores by ensuring service quality remains high across all interactions.
Calibration helps detect issues early on, allowing for prompt action to improve the customer experience.

Identifying Agent Training Gaps

Calibration sessions reveal areas where agents may need additional training or coaching, helping to develop a more skilled workforce.
These sessions allow evaluators to provide more targeted feedback, which can lead to more focused training efforts.

Providing Meaningful Feedback

Call calibration sessions enable evaluators to offer actionable feedback that agents can use to improve their performance.
Feedback from calibrated sessions is often more constructive, as it is based on a unified understanding of evaluation criteria.

Enhanced Engagement and Collaboration

These sessions encourage collaboration between managers, QA teams, and agents, promoting a culture of transparency.
Collaboration fosters a more engaged team that is committed to continuous improvement.

Best Practices for Effective Call Calibration

To maximize the effectiveness of call calibration, it’s important to follow best practices that ensure consistent and productive sessions.

Document Quality Standards

Establish clear, measurable criteria for evaluating calls. These should be easily understandable by all evaluators.
Quality standards should be reviewed regularly to ensure they align with current business goals and customer expectations.

Define Calibration Baseline

Set an acceptable score variance (usually under 5%) to ensure that all evaluators are scoring within a reasonable range.
The baseline helps in identifying any outliers or inconsistencies during the calibration process.

Set Clear Session Goals

Focus on specific objectives for each calibration session, whether it’s improving agent coaching or refining the QA process.
Clear goals keep the calibration process on track and prevent sessions from becoming too broad or unfocused.

Choose a Session Facilitator

A facilitator ensures that the session stays on topic and that everyone has a chance to share their perspectives.
The facilitator plays a critical role in driving discussions toward productive conclusions.

Practice Blind Calibration

Hiding the identity of the agent during calibration ensures that evaluators focus solely on the content of the call.
Blind calibration helps in reducing personal biases, leading to more objective evaluations.

Analyze the Outliers

Review calls that received unusually high or low scores for further insight.
Outlier analysis can help uncover potential scoring issues or highlight calls that require deeper review.

Using AI in Call Calibration

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has revolutionized various aspects of contact center operations, and its role in call calibration is becoming increasingly valuable. AI-driven tools streamline the call evaluation process, enhance the accuracy of assessments, and offer actionable insights that improve overall quality assurance (QA). By automating some of the more repetitive tasks in calibration, AI allows evaluators to focus on refining quality standards and providing meaningful feedback to agents.

AI Tools for Speech Analytics

One of the most significant contributions AI brings to call calibration is through speech analytics. AI-powered speech analytics tools can evaluate customer interactions by analyzing various elements of a call in real-time, providing deep insights that would otherwise require hours of manual review.

Automatic Evaluation of Key Phrases: AI tools can detect and evaluate key phrases spoken during a customer interaction. This ability allows evaluators to focus on critical aspects of the conversation, such as greetings, compliance-related statements, or responses to specific customer inquiries. By analyzing these key phrases, AI helps ensure agents are adhering to scripts and guidelines.
Sentiment Analysis: AI-driven sentiment analysis evaluates the tone and emotion behind the words spoken during the call. This helps identify whether a call was positive, neutral, or negative, enabling evaluators to assess how well agents handle various customer emotions. Sentiment analysis is critical in understanding customer satisfaction and improving agent performance.
Detection of Scripting Deviations: AI can quickly detect deviations from pre-established scripts or protocols. If an agent strays from the approved script or fails to follow certain guidelines, AI tools can flag these instances for further review, ensuring that all interactions remain compliant with the contact center’s standards.

AI tools not only identify issues but also provide a comprehensive overview of call performance, allowing evaluators to get a complete picture of how agents interact with customers.

Improving Efficiency with AI-Driven Calibration

AI enhances the efficiency of the call calibration process by automating many tasks that previously required manual intervention. This automation speeds up the evaluation process and allows teams to focus on more strategic activities.

Automation of Repetitive Tasks: Instead of having evaluators listen to each call manually, AI tools can automatically analyze large volumes of calls. This reduces the time spent on repetitive tasks, such as flagging specific keywords or tracking adherence to scripts.
Faster Analysis of Call Volumes: AI can process thousands of calls in minutes, something that would take a human evaluator significantly longer. This speed allows contact centers to review a larger sample of calls, leading to more accurate insights and better calibration across the team.
Accurate and Objective Insights: AI tools offer a level of objectivity that can sometimes be challenging for human evaluators to achieve. By providing data-driven insights, AI helps minimize human biases, ensuring that evaluations are consistent and based on measurable criteria.

Enhancing Accuracy and Reducing Bias

AI’s ability to analyze calls based on predefined criteria helps eliminate human biases from the evaluation process. This contributes to more objective and accurate evaluations, ensuring that agents are scored based on performance rather than subjective opinions.

Standardization of Evaluations: AI tools use standardized algorithms to assess every call. This consistency ensures that every call is evaluated against the same set of metrics, leading to more reliable outcomes in the calibration process.
Reduction of Human Biases: Even the most experienced human evaluators may bring unconscious biases to the table, impacting the fairness of evaluations. AI mitigates this risk by providing data-driven insights that focus solely on the content and context of the interaction, reducing the likelihood of biased scoring.

Actionable Insights for Continuous Improvement

By using AI tools, call calibration sessions can generate more actionable insights that drive continuous improvement in quality assurance.

Identifying Trends and Patterns: AI tools can identify recurring trends or patterns in customer interactions that may not be immediately apparent to human evaluators. These insights can reveal areas where agents commonly struggle or excel, allowing for more targeted coaching and training efforts.
Proactive Problem-Solving: With real-time analysis, AI tools can flag potential issues before they escalate. This allows QA teams to take a proactive approach to problem-solving, addressing performance gaps or compliance issues early on.

AI-driven insights enable contact centers to make data-backed decisions that lead to more effective agent coaching, improved service quality, and enhanced customer satisfaction.

5 AI Tools for Enhancing Call Calibration

AI-powered tools are transforming the way call calibration is conducted in contact centers by automating key processes, improving efficiency, and providing actionable insights. Below are five leading AI tools that are widely used to enhance the accuracy and effectiveness of call calibration sessions.

1. Observe.AI

Observe.AI is a popular AI-powered tool designed to improve the quality of customer interactions by using speech analytics and automated evaluations. It allows contact centers to calibrate calls more efficiently and gain deeper insights into agent performance.

Key Features

Real-Time Speech Analytics: Observe.AI captures real-time customer conversations, providing detailed analyses of sentiment, scripting deviations, and key phrases. This enables evaluators to assess call quality more quickly and accurately.
Automated Quality Monitoring: By automating the evaluation process, Observe.AI reduces the time needed to review customer calls manually. It automatically scores calls based on predefined criteria, ensuring consistency across evaluations.
Agent Performance Insights: This tool provides detailed feedback on agent performance, identifying areas for improvement and offering targeted coaching recommendations based on data-driven insights.

Benefits

Improved efficiency in call evaluation, with automated processes that free up evaluators’ time.
Objective scoring and feedback, reducing human bias in the QA process.
Enhanced customer satisfaction through consistent and accurate quality assessments.

2. CallMiner Eureka

CallMiner Eureka is an advanced AI-driven platform that offers comprehensive call analysis using speech and text analytics. It helps contact centers enhance call calibration by providing detailed insights into agent-customer interactions.

Key Features

Sentiment and Emotion Analysis: CallMiner Eureka can detect emotions such as frustration or satisfaction during a call, helping evaluators understand the customer’s experience in a deeper context.
Automated Transcriptions: The platform transcribes every call, allowing evaluators to focus on key areas of concern rather than listening to entire conversations.
Compliance Monitoring: CallMiner Eureka ensures that agents are adhering to legal and company compliance standards by automatically flagging non-compliance issues in real-time.

Benefits

Provides deep insights into customer sentiment and agent performance.
Reduces time spent on manual call calibration with automated transcription and analysis.
Enhances compliance monitoring, ensuring every call adheres to legal standards.

3. Verint Speech Analytics

Verint Speech Analytics is a powerful AI solution that helps contact centers improve their call calibration process by analyzing customer interactions and delivering real-time insights.

Key Features

Keyword and Phrase Detection: Verint automatically detects critical keywords and phrases, such as customer complaints or requests, ensuring that evaluators focus on important parts of the conversation.
Multilingual Support: This tool supports multiple languages, making it ideal for contact centers operating in diverse markets.
Customizable Scorecards: Verint allows contact centers to customize QA scorecards, aligning them with specific business needs and ensuring that all evaluators use the same criteria for call calibration.

Benefits

Customizable scorecards ensure that calibration sessions are tailored to the needs of the business.
Multilingual support allows global contact centers to perform accurate evaluations in any language.
The tool highlights key moments in customer conversations, helping evaluators quickly assess critical areas of performance.

4. Cogito

Cogito offers real-time AI-driven emotional intelligence insights, which are particularly useful in improving the emotional tone of customer interactions. Its focus on behavioral analytics sets it apart from other tools, offering a unique angle on call calibration.

Key Features

Emotional Intelligence Insights: Cogito analyzes the emotional tone of customer and agent conversations, providing real-time guidance to agents on how to improve empathy and emotional engagement.
Real-Time Feedback: The tool offers immediate, real-time feedback during customer interactions, enabling agents to adjust their approach during the call itself.
Agent Performance Dashboard: Cogito’s performance dashboard provides detailed insights into agent behavior and offers suggestions for improvement, making it easier to calibrate calls based on emotional intelligence.

Benefits

Provides unique insights into the emotional aspects of conversations, helping evaluators calibrate calls with empathy in mind.
Real-time feedback allows agents to adjust their behavior mid-call, improving customer outcomes instantly.
Focus on emotional intelligence leads to more human-centered interactions and greater customer satisfaction.

5. NICE Nexidia Analytics

NICE Nexidia Analytics is an AI-powered platform that enhances call calibration by offering advanced speech and text analytics. The platform helps identify agent performance gaps, improve customer interactions, and streamline the QA process.

Key Features

Omnichannel Support: Nexidia analyzes not only voice interactions but also text-based interactions such as chat and email, ensuring a comprehensive approach to call calibration.
Automated Insights: The platform automatically provides insights into agent performance, flagging areas of concern and highlighting trends across interactions.
Customizable Reporting: Contact centers can create customized reports to track and measure specific performance metrics over time, ensuring continuous improvement.

Benefits

Offers a comprehensive approach to quality assurance by analyzing voice and text interactions.
Automates the identification of performance gaps, enabling more targeted calibration efforts.
Customizable reporting allows contact centers to monitor specific areas for improvement, leading to better agent performance and customer satisfaction.

How Often Should Call Calibration Be Conducted?

Call calibration sessions are critical to maintaining consistency in the evaluation process within contact centers. Regular sessions help to align evaluators, identify inefficiencies, and ensure that the quality of customer interactions meets high standards.

However, determining the optimal frequency for these sessions depends on various factors, such as the volume of interactions, team size, and the complexity of the contact center’s operations. Conducting call calibration at the right intervals ensures that the team remains aligned without overwhelming the evaluators or sacrificing performance.

Recommended Frequency for Call Calibration Sessions

The recommended frequency of call calibration sessions varies depending on the specific needs of the contact center. Many contact centers conduct these sessions either on a weekly or monthly basis, though the exact cadence can differ.

Weekly Sessions: For contact centers that handle a large volume of calls or that have complex evaluation criteria, weekly calibration sessions are highly recommended. Weekly sessions allow for continuous monitoring of scoring consistency and immediate identification of any discrepancies. These frequent sessions help teams stay on top of quality standards and address any issues as they arise, reducing the risk of long-term inconsistencies.
Monthly Sessions: Contact centers with smaller teams or lower call volumes may find that monthly calibration sessions are sufficient. Monthly calibration works well when there is less variability in call types or when the evaluation criteria are more straightforward. While less frequent than weekly sessions, monthly calibration still ensures regular alignment among evaluators, though it may be slightly less responsive to immediate shifts in quality standards.
Ad-Hoc Sessions: In some cases, contact centers may conduct calibration sessions on an ad-hoc basis, particularly when there are significant changes in operational processes, new evaluation criteria, or after a major campaign. These sessions are typically triggered by specific needs and can be useful for addressing urgent concerns related to call quality or consistency.

Factors Influencing Frequency

The frequency of call calibration sessions should strike a balance between consistency and practicality. Several factors influence how often these sessions should be held:

Team Size and Structure: Larger teams with multiple evaluators may need more frequent calibration sessions to ensure uniformity in scoring across the team. Smaller teams, on the other hand, may not require such frequent alignment.
Volume of Customer Interactions: Contact centers with high call volumes need to calibrate more often to ensure that agents are consistently meeting performance standards across a large number of interactions. High call volumes also make it more challenging to maintain scoring consistency without frequent calibration.
Complexity of Calls: Centers that handle a wide range of call types, such as technical support or high-level customer service, may benefit from more frequent calibration to address the various nuances involved in each type of interaction.

Benefits of Regular Calibration

Regardless of whether the sessions are held weekly, monthly, or ad-hoc, the benefits of regular call calibration cannot be overstated. These sessions provide a structured way to ensure quality across all evaluators, reduce inconsistencies in scoring, and offer valuable insights into improving customer interactions.

Spotting Inefficiencies

Regular calibration sessions are instrumental in identifying inefficiencies in the evaluation process or QA system. For example, through consistent calibration, contact centers can identify patterns where evaluators may be misinterpreting criteria or focusing on the wrong aspects of a call. These inefficiencies can be addressed promptly, leading to a more effective and streamlined QA process.

Process Optimization: Calibration helps uncover flaws in the current evaluation process that may be causing unnecessary delays or inaccuracies in scoring.
Quick Resolution: Regular calibration allows for early detection of inefficiencies, enabling contact centers to address them before they become larger issues.
Improving Agent Performance: By identifying areas of improvement, calibration sessions provide actionable insights that can be used to enhance agent training and development.

Maintaining High Quality

Frequent calibration ensures that evaluators remain aligned on quality standards, which is critical for maintaining high levels of service quality across customer interactions. When evaluators consistently score calls based on the same criteria, agents receive more reliable feedback, leading to better customer service outcomes.

Consistent Service Delivery: Regular calibration sessions ensure that agents are held to the same performance standards, regardless of who evaluates their calls.
Improved Agent Feedback: When scoring is consistent, agents receive clearer, more actionable feedback, which leads to targeted coaching and improved performance over time.
Higher Customer Satisfaction: When agents perform consistently well, customers are more likely to have positive interactions, which directly impacts customer satisfaction scores.

Staying Agile and Responsive

Call calibration also keeps teams agile, allowing them to adjust to new customer needs or business goals quickly. As customer expectations evolve, so do the standards for evaluating call quality. Frequent calibration sessions ensure that evaluators can adapt to these changes and provide accurate, up-to-date assessments.

Adjusting to New Standards: As contact centers introduce new products, services, or communication channels, regular calibration sessions allow for quick adjustments to evaluation criteria.
Addressing Customer Trends: Calibration sessions help contact centers stay responsive to customer trends, such as changes in customer sentiment or new frequently asked questions.
Improving Operational Agility: Regular calibration allows teams to be proactive in adjusting their QA processes to stay ahead of potential quality issues.

Striking the Right Balance

While regular calibration sessions are necessary, it’s important to avoid overwhelming the team with too many sessions. The frequency of these sessions should be high enough to maintain consistency and spot issues early but not so frequent that it detracts from other essential activities. Over-calibration can lead to evaluator fatigue and reduced productivity, which may counteract the benefits of the calibration process.

Avoiding Burnout: Too many calibration sessions may lead to team burnout, where evaluators feel overwhelmed by the constant need to recalibrate.
Maintaining Focus: Fewer, but more focused, calibration sessions can ensure that the process remains productive and aligned with the contact center’s goals.
Prioritizing Quality: The goal should always be to prioritize quality over quantity when it comes to calibration. Holding meaningful sessions that yield actionable results is more important than the sheer number of sessions.

Conclusion

Call calibration plays a vital role in enhancing quality assurance in contact centers. By maintaining consistent evaluation standards, identifying agent training gaps, and utilizing AI tools to streamline the process, contact centers can significantly improve their operations and customer satisfaction. Adopting regular call calibration sessions ensures a continuous feedback loop, enabling teams to stay aligned and focused on delivering top-tier customer service.