ISO 18295 certification has become a key standard for call centers wishing to deliver high-quality customer service and maintain operational efficiency. This standard, developed specifically for customer contact centers, establishes clear requirements for improving customer experience and optimizing internal processes, ensuring that call centers meet and exceed expectations.
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What is ISO 18295?
ISO 18295 is an international standard that is divided into two parts:
- ISO 18295-1: Focuses on the requirements that customer contact centers (CCCs) must meet to ensure a high-quality customer experience.
- ISO 18295-2: Specifies the requirements of customer organizations that use contact center services, ensuring that there is alignment between the organization’s expectations and the results delivered by the call center.
This standard was designed to address the needs of customers and end users by providing clear guidelines on how call centers should manage their processes and interactions with customers. The goal is to ensure that contact centers deliver a service that is not only efficient but also personalized and aligned with customer expectations.
Key requirements of ISO 18295
The requirements of the standard cover various aspects of contact center management, with a particular focus on customer experience. Here are some of the most important points to keep in mind:
1. Customer-centric approach
One of the pillars of ISO 18295 is customer focus. Call centers must establish processes that ensure each interaction with the customer is positive, and efficient, and, above all, effectively resolves the user’s needs. This involves using metrics to measure customer satisfaction, such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) or post-call satisfaction surveys.
2. Accessibility and response times
The standard establishes criteria for call center accessibility, which implies ensuring that customers can communicate quickly and without complications. In addition, adequate response times must be met to resolve customer issues within a reasonable period. This includes reducing queuing time, avoiding unnecessary transfers, and providing solutions on the first call.
3. Agent training and performance
Another key aspect is the ongoing training of call center staff. This ISO requires that agents receive adequate training to handle all types of inquiries and situations, improving not only their communication skills, but also their problem-solving abilities. Staff performance is also evaluated, with periodic audits implemented to ensure that employees maintain a consistently high standard of quality.
4. Complaint management and conflict resolution
To ensure customer satisfaction, call centers must have effective complaint management systems in place. ISO 18295 details how complaints should be handled and what processes should be followed to resolve disputes quickly and transparently. This ensures that any dissatisfaction is addressed before it affects customer loyalty.
Benefits of ISO 18295 certification for call centers
Obtaining ISO 18295 certification provides many benefits for both contact centers and organizations that rely on their services. Here are some of the main ones:
1. Improved customer satisfaction
One of the most important objectives is to improve the customer experience. By implementing established processes and standards, call centers are able to offer more efficient and satisfactory interactions, which increases customer loyalty and reduces churn rates.
2. Operational efficiency
It also contributes to the optimization of internal call center processes. The requirements of the standard force companies to be more efficient in the management of their resources, which translates into higher agent productivity, less downtime and faster problem resolution.
3. Regulatory compliance
For many industries, such as finance and telecommunications, compliance with international regulations is crucial. ISO 18295 ensures that call centers maintain high compliance standards, helping to avoid penalties and comply with data protection regulations such as GDPR or MiFID II. This also reinforces customer confidence in the service.
4. Reduced costs
Although obtaining ISO 18295 certification requires an initial investment in training and process tuning, in the long run it reduces operational costs. By improving efficiency and reducing errors, call centers save time and resources, which translates into lower expenses related to problem resolution and complaint handling.
How AI can help you comply with ISO 18295
Artificial intelligence (AI) has proven to be a valuable tool for transforming the way call centers operate, improving not only internal efficiency but also customer satisfaction. By implementing AI solutions, contact centers can more easily meet ISO 18295 requirements and even go beyond.
1. Optimizing the customer experience with advanced analytics and personalization
One of the main challenges for call centers is to ensure that every customer interaction is as efficient and satisfying as possible. AI solutions based on advanced data analytics make it possible to optimize the customer experience by providing real-time personalization. These tools collect and analyze large volumes of information about customer history, past interactions, and general behavioral trends to anticipate customer needs and deliver personalized solutions faster and more effectively.
Through the use of sentiment analysis and other predictive analytics tools, call centers can detect the customer’s emotional tone during the call and adjust agent responses and upcoming interactions to match the customer’s mood, creating a more empathetic and efficient interaction. In addition, it allows you to understand which customers may be most at risk of churn based on the level of satisfaction with their interactions with the contact center.
This improves the customer experience; increases first-call resolution rates and reduces churn rates.
2. Improving agent training with speech analytics
The use of AI-powered speech analytics enables call centers to analyze every phone interaction and extract valuable information about agent performance and customer satisfaction. These tools can identify patterns in conversations, assess agent tone, and suggest areas for improvement in real-time. In addition, sentiment analysis systems can help detect signs of dissatisfaction, enabling early intervention before the customer decides to abandon the service. This is aligned with the ISO 18295 requirement to continuously monitor and improve staff performance.
3. Automation of complaint handling
AI solutions can also automate complaint handling, making the process more efficient and transparent. Through automated analysis of comments and interactions, AI systems can efficiently rank and prioritize complaints, assigning them to the correct department and suggesting solutions based on previous cases.
4. Automated quality controls
Another crucial area where AI brings value is in automated quality controls. Using advanced call analytics, AI can automatically review agent interactions with customers and assess their compliance with the quality standards set by ISO 18295. These systems can quickly detect whether care protocols are being followed, identify areas for improvement, and generate detailed reports on agent performance.
In addition, automated controls allow a greater number of interactions to be audited in less time, improving consistency in service quality.
AI, with its ability to automate, personalize, and analyze interactions, has become a critical tool for call centers looking to stay competitive in an increasingly demanding regulatory environment. Find out more about how AI solutions can help you comply with regulations while delivering quality service by clicking here.