Short answer: Tone of voice decides how a call feels to the customer, yet most call center QA forms only score the black-and-white items like greeting and disclosure. Hire for attitude, add tone to your QA form, track sentiment alongside it, and coach it privately against a clear goal.

Tom Laird, CEO of Expivia and host of Advice from a Call Center Geek, has a habit when he consults for a contact center. He asks to see the scorecard:

"Can I see your QA form? Can I see what you're using to score agents?"Tom Laird, 5 Ways to Improve the Tone of your Contact Center Agents! (2023-03-06, 09:46)

What most call center QA forms actually score

What he finds is almost always the same: greeting, disclosure, probing questions. In his words:

"It's all of these black and white type things that come into play, but very rarely do I see some type of scoring on tone."(2023-03-06, 09:59)

If you want to see what your own form is missing, run it through the free QA Form Analyzer. Tom also covers what belongs on a form in What belongs on a contact center QA form?

Why tone of voice matters in a call center

Tom tells every new class the same thing: "The tone is the message" (2023-03-06, 06:29).

He describes two agents. One gives the customer the right answer and still gets low CSAT and sentiment scores. The other "had to tell no all day long to customers" and scores higher, because their tone was where it was supposed to be (06:46–07:22).

A checkbox form can't tell those two agents apart. That's one of the reasons Tom argues the QA score is dead in its current form.

How to improve agent tone of voice: three things to try this week

1. Hire for attitude, not just a resume

At Expivia, Tom says, "we are trying to hire, incent and promote off of attitude and effort" (TikTok AMA Episode, 2023-02-02, 03:31). A phone conversation in the interview tells you more about tone than a resume does.

2. Measure tone, and watch sentiment

Tom calls himself "a huge sentiment score guy from analytics more than NPS and CSAT" (2023-02-02, 10:22). Sentiment from speech analytics lets you watch tone across far more of your calls than a person has time to score by hand. Pair it with a tone item on the QA form so the score and the coaching line up. For a harder version of the same problem, see Tom's take on how to score empathy on a QA form.

3. Coach tone in private, with a goal

"These are all employees, these are all people, nobody wants to be embarrassed."Improving your Call Center and Contact Center Agent Coaching (2023-03-13, 02:48)

And: "tie goals to your coaching" (2023-03-13, 08:52). Coaching with no target number is just a chat. More on that in how supervisors should coach agents after a QA review.

If your form can't hear tone, fix the form

If your QA form can't tell the difference between the agent with the right answer and the agent with the right tone, the form is the problem, not the floor. Not scoring tone is one of the common call center QA mistakes worth fixing first.

Listen to the full episodes of Advice from a Call Center Geek for the complete discussion.

Frequently asked questions

Why is tone of voice important in a call center?

Because the customer remembers how the call felt. An agent who has to say no but keeps a good tone can earn better sentiment than an agent who gives the right answer in a flat or impatient tone.

Should tone be on a call center QA form?

Yes. Most forms score the black-and-white items like greeting, disclosure and probing questions, and very few score tone. Add a tone item with clear examples of what good and poor tone sound like so evaluators score it the same way.

How do you improve an agent's tone of voice?

Hire for attitude and effort, measure tone on the QA form and through sentiment, and coach it privately with a specific goal so agents aren't embarrassed in front of their peers.

What is sentiment analysis in a call center?

It's speech analytics that estimates how positive or negative a conversation is. It's a useful signal next to the tone item on your QA form, and it can cover far more calls than a person can score by hand.

Related reading

About the author

Tom Laird is the founder of OttoQA and CEO of Expivia, with about 30 years in contact centers. He hosts the Advice from a Call Center Geek podcast. Connect with Tom on LinkedIn.