Help and Insight

[PittATL]

Hello all, I"m new here.

I manage a small (just 2 reps currently) QA monitoring team for an Insurance company call center that has about 48 reps.

I’ve been here less than a year now and my company is very goal-oriented and puts a lot of pressure on reaching these goals.

At the beginning of 2010, my dept’s overall quality score goal was raised from 95% to 96%. I offered my input in saying that such a score would be really tough to reach over the course of a year but they made the change anyway.

Well…in Jan we scored a 95.2% and thus far in Feb we’re on target for about a 95.7%. While these scores are great, it’s going to be virtually impossible to avg a 96 score for the entire year. Our CEO just wants to see year-over-year improvement but he is very removed from our dept.

Anyway, my boss has tasked me in putting together “a case” to lower our goal back down to 95% and present to our VP. I’m having trouble finding hard data to justify this though and wondered if you could provide some insight or direction.

Call Center details:
- 48 reps
- We monitor anywhere from 5-9 per rep based on previous month’s performance and tenure (IE: we grade the higher performing reps less…therefore that does hurt the overall dept score correct? Since the best scoring reps have less observations….)

Other factors I thought of:
- It’s impossible to score a 96% on a call based on our weights, therefore is it bad for that dept score to not be in line with that?
- Do ANY call centers out there have a minimum standard set this high? Aiming for a 96% as a minimum seems very very lofty to me. 95% was already high, at what point do we level out? It's been raised every year (starting at 90% 4 yrs ago).
- In the past 12 months, we’ve only hit a monthly score of 96% once. Are we setting ourselves up for failure here with such a goal?


I’d really appreciate your thoughts here as I’m having a ton of trouble nailing this down.


I also struggle with proving to high leadership that we do not grade enough calls to have a true picture (confidence level) of an agent's work. Reps take roughly 4200 calls a month, and like I said, we grade 5-9 of them. I'd like them to realize this so we can add a new team member to raise audit numbers but it's been a tough sell.

It also comes into focus when we receive a complaint about a rep, I'm asked how the rep scored in X month, I say 96.5%, and they say "well how can that be? we've gotten complaints, maybe you're not grading effectively?" and then I have to defend my team.

Any insight would be highly appreciated, thanks for your time.

[addison.marlin]

Hi PittATL

I am also new. I am glad to meet you.

[Abby]

As a call center consultant and operational leader, I've seen many QA programs, some good, others, well, not so good. Your situation leaves me with a few concerns.
First, it's not uncommon for people outside the department to focus on a few bad experiences and assume they represent the entire process. Just remind these nay-sayers what a QA program is (adherence to standards) and let them know you'll look into specific examples of the errors they site. This is important, especially when your scores are so high, across the board. Are your standards really addresssing the right things? If outsiders are finding acutal errors, are those aspects of the call clearly covered in your standards? It's important to measure the right thing.

To accurately reflect the impact of the higher scores your more seasoned reps achieve, you might consider this formula/process
If Agent A (seasoned rep) is monitored only 2x and
Agent B (all other reps) is monitored 7x

(You may have 15 people in the A group and 100 in the B group. Each person gets only one score for the period)
Average Agent A's scores
Average Agent B's scores
Compute the average with one score for each rep, rather than the average of all the scored calls.

If that wasn't clear, you can email me at abby@kutner. com, with your questions.

I hope this helps.

GL

[alexcarlson]

See your condition leaves me with a few concerns. It's not unusual for people outside the branch to focus on a few bad experience and assume they represent the entire process.