Quality - Performance Management

[calgarykim]

Only two things are within a call centre agent’s control – quality and schedule adherence. So with this in mind, I want to redevelop our scorecard.

The Schedule Adherence piece is easy - but what about quality?

These are the things we currently have on our current scorecard with regards to quality - most are subjective - so I'm wondering what you thought or what you do - to ensure that quality is not so subjective.

1. Soft Skills, tone, empathy, use of customer name, etc.
2. Effective Communication
3. Prioritization of work
4. Follow up
5. Judgement/professionalism

With some of these in mind - how the heck do you accurately measure this? What/how do you measure quality?

[Johanna Lubahn]

One of the most important things is that agents are trained on call frameworks and that the framework is incorporated into the quality monitoring. Soft skills can be scored separately for the overall call. Agents need examples of good calls, poor calls so they can pattern their delivery. Depending on how you coach back to an agent, one of the most effective ways is to tape calls, schedule time to listen together and score the call together as a coach and agent. This does place a burden on the coach to be very quick at coaching. Coaching is also something that needs to be trained and delivered in a consistent manner. Feedback is historical and one-way, coaching is forward looking, two way discussion ending with an action plan that improves skills.

[Michcall]

There will always be parts of quality that will be subjective, but there are ways to develop a quality program that will let it be subjective, but not arbitrary. First, separate accuracy as a objective topic. Did the agent give the right or wrong information to the caller? The agent could score 100% on all the soft skills, but if the information is wrong, then it was a failed call. Agents should be trained on the correct answers as well as the preferred answers if a question can have more than one resolution. This allows the quality monitoring team to have a concrete measurement.

After that, the goal is to train all quality agents/supervisors, etc. to look at calls the same way to lessen the subjective nature. Calibration sessions should take place regularly using taped and/or live calls where all involved (quality team, supervisors, managers, clients (if applicable) and agents) score the same calls and then discuss how or why the calls were scored as they were. The group must come to consensus on the outcome of the call and the how the scores were derived. Involving the agents allows them to understand how the calls are scored and why---giving them buy-in to the process. Calibration sessions are very valuable on items like empathy, listening skills, tone of voice, etc. to get the group in sync on the definition of these and how they relate in your environment.

In addition, agents should be given standards that should be used in each call such as a standard greeting line, use of first or full name, use of callers name, standard closing, asking for additional questions, mentioning other services, etc. The call needn't sound scripted, but with standards to follow, the agents are again being scored on concrete objective items---did they or didn't they follow the standards.

[quality1]

One of the most important things about quality monitoring is consistency. Do you have one person that listens to and scores calls? Do you have several people responsible for scoring calls? Do you schedule calibrations where all people responsible for scoring calls meet, listen to and discuss the reasons that they scored a particular behavior as a meets or a did not meets? An associate should be able to receive the same evaluation from each person that monitors them with little variance.

The associates need some type of documentation on what the criteria is that they are being scored on. For instance, we provide our associates a guide sheet that evolves as the criteria does. In this document, they have the tools to meet and exceed the guidelines that are in place.

To make an evaluation less subjective can you drill down the criteria some? For example, you listed Effective Communication as one of the guidelines. What is involved in effectively communicating with a caller? (i.e.- Listening Skill and Questioning Skills) Just because and associate does not ask the right questions, it does not always follow that they are not listening. They may just be confused as to the caller's actual need which would prove to be a training need.

If you would like more information, please feel free to e-mail me at quality_123001@yahoo.com

[bcrowder49]

The responses so far have had some very good information. Mitchel covered the area of "calibration sessions" which I would like to take one step farther.
Subjective items can only be broken down so far, but there will always be an element of subjective scoring.
One of the ways that we keep the scoring as consistent as possible is by having sessions where all scorers, including the client (if you are an outsourcer) is to have weekly conference calls where everyone listens to a call and when the call is over, each member shares the score they would have given. We use a <= 2% range on the scoring. If each of the scores is within 2% then we consider that the group is in calibration. If a score falls outside of the margin, we discuss the reasons why there was differences until we get back into the <-2% range. We call this a "calibration session."
We normally listen to three calls that we score within 2%, even if that takes listening to many calls. Depending on the ATT you can decide how long each session should be. We normally schedule 1.5 hours per week.
Some companies have a calibration session quarterly, and others have one a month. We have found that the longer the timeframe between calibration sessions, the wider the disperancy.
Food for thought

[Alan Clayton]

All the call coaching feedback is terrific. It is critical to do that process.

However, and this is a huge however... A center I was running a few years ago was reporting fantastic call coaching scores.

Too high in fact.

We were doing the group reviews, we were doing all the above.

Something still wasn't clicking. Our true customer satisfaction was not being measured. What we thought was great service wasnt necessarily what the customer might think was great service.

We took our measurement to the ultimate level. We called customers who had called us, and did a true customer satisfaction survey. Remember, our internal measures showed that we were achieving a 95% plus quality.

Our first real customer satisfaction survey showed a 68% customer satisfaction level. Our goal was 95%.

It took some detailed analysis of WHY the customers weren't as impressed by our work as we had been.

After a month of analysis, and another 2 months of implementing the changes, the true measure (from the customer) came up from that initially dismal 68% to 88%.

We had discovered through talking to the customers that some of our internal processes were flawed. By correcting those flaws, both the CSR satisfaction and the customer satisfaction levels were increased dramatically.

The moral to that story ... Once you think you are done with your internal work, if you want to REALLY know the levels of quality, ASK the CUSTOMER for their feedback.

Feel free to call me for more details

Regards

Alan

[bcrowder49]

That was really great input and so critical. Can you tell me, was this an "insourced" center or an "outsourced" center?
The reason I ask is that we are an outsourced center and the client will not let us call the customers back for our own survey.

[Alan Clayton]

Maybe then they would let an independent firm do that type of research?

Any kind of feedback loops that companies can get from their customers would leave a great impression on the customer.

Leads to loyalty.

By the way, it was our own center, so we had no issues of that sort.

Regards

Feel free to call or email

Alan

[josephafreddy]

Dear calgarykim

email me at josephafreddy@indiatimes I will send you a format which you can go through and adapt for your use. This is not a software it is a simple format which you can merely insert information as per requirement.

regards

Joseph

[calgarykim]

Thanks for all the great suggestions - some of which we are doing now, ie call monitoring, tapes,etc.
We will be having a single QA body do the listening in the future which may not remove subjectivity, but should provide consistent subjectivity. We are also review our customer survey process as well.
Thanks again.

[Thai]

Do any of you, or have any of you ever monitored an e-mail support system? If so, can you give me any insight in to how you did this, what tools you used and so on.

Thanks alot,
Thai

[dawn devoe]

Originally posted by Alan Clayton
All the call coaching feedback is terrific. It is critical to do that process.

However, and this is a huge however... A center I was running a few years ago was reporting fantastic call coaching scores.

Too high in fact.

We were doing the group reviews, we were doing all the above.

Something still wasn't clicking. Our true customer satisfaction was not being measured. What we thought was great service wasnt necessarily what the customer might think was great service.

We took our measurement to the ultimate level. We called customers who had called us, and did a true customer satisfaction survey. Remember, our internal measures showed that we were achieving a 95% plus quality.

Our first real customer satisfaction survey showed a 68% customer satisfaction level. Our goal was 95%.

It took some detailed analysis of WHY the customers weren't as impressed by our work as we had been.

After a month of analysis, and another 2 months of implementing the changes, the true measure (from the customer) came up from that initially dismal 68% to 88%.

We had discovered through talking to the customers that some of our internal processes were flawed. By correcting those flaws, both the CSR satisfaction and the customer satisfaction levels were increased dramatically.

The moral to that story ... Once you think you are done with your internal work, if you want to REALLY know the levels of quality, ASK the CUSTOMER for their feedback.

Feel free to call me for more details

Regards

Alan

[dawn devoe]

Alan,
I was wondering what questions you were asking and what feed back you were getting in order to obtain your scores? You had a great article. Have you noticed no one has mentioned ethics (truthfullness) as part of a quality guideline? That's one of my biggest issues when measuring quality calls!

[Alan Clayton]

We were checking off all the boxes, ie did the CSR do X Y and Z?

However, we were missing part of the picture.

Our back office procedures were messed up which the call measurement process wasnt taking into account. Our CSR's were being nice, they were saying a lot of the right things, but then, our back office wasn't delivering what our CSR's were saying would be delivered... OOPSSSS..

Like I said before, we really had to dig to find out why people werent happy with us. I would be more than happy to chat or email with more info as that is just the tip of the iceberg..

Happy Holidays!!

PS Thanks for the compliment!!

[CCPro]

QAs can coach til the cows come home with good results, but you'll never get excellent results. To move from good to excellent you need the Rep's immediate supervisor involved in the process. Until the person that writes the review and recommends the raise is brought into the process, you will not move to the level you want to achieve. QA people simply do not have the WIFM (What's In It For Me) Impact that a direct line supervisor does. The sup does not necessarily have to perform QA Evals, but they need to be following up on the QAs and reinforcing strengths and weaknesses and driving the improvement change in their people. QA "reports the news", they don't make it,,,and that's the way any QA in any industry should be viewed.