Quality Assurance: Call Monitoring Your Agents Will Love (Session 1 of 2)
CallTalk™ Caramels: Sweet Snippets from BenchmarkPortal’s Best CallTalk Episodes
Quality Monitoring, traditionally seen by agents as the dreaded ‘Big Brother’ operation of a company, can be transformed into a process appreciated by agents, as well as helping achieve customer service objectives. Key points include:
- Work to get everyone to accept that quality monitoring is an essential aspect of call center management and must be done well for everyone’s good;
- During feedback sessions, avoid criticizing agents frontally where possible. Ask questions to get them to critique themselves, then offer ways to improve;
- In grading, expectations must be clearly defined to agents before they start their jobs – not after they are graded;
- Have a clear understanding of company objectives and strategies and match QA objectives to meet those needs;
- Hire people who can work within the strategies of the company (i.e. don’t hire a ‘Techie’ for a sales job, or a customer service type for a sales position, etc.);
- Measure only what matters: if it doesn’t matter – don’t measure it;
- Direct caller feedback through post-call surveys are the optimum way to rate calls for quality (soft aspects of the call). That leaves the monitoring team to focus on the “compliance” components of the call: accuracy, adherence to policy, etc. Combining caller feedback and compliance monitoring is the best and most complete way to approach quality monitoring.
- Perception is important: consider changing the name of the ‘Quality Monitoring’ group to ‘Skills Enhancement Team’. The label ‘Supervisor’ can also be changed to ‘Agent Advocate’ to achieve the same affect.
- Key point: when the agent looks into the eyes of the person giving them feedback, do they see someone who is trying to criticize them, or trying to develop them and help them succeed?
In short, open your mind, your ears and your heart – but be organized about it. Pick one or two things to change and then execute and monitor. Once you have some success with your first initiatives, you can move on to others. You CAN make a real difference! This CallTalk Caramel was compiled and edited by Bruce Belfiore and Kamal Webb from a CallTalk episode with Lisa Courteau.
Air Date: Wednesday, February 2, 2011 - 8:30AM/PT
Host: Bruce Belfiore, CEO & Senior Research Analyst, BenchmarkPortal
Guest Speaker: Lisa Courteau, Optum Health
Season: 2, Episode Number: 13
CallTalk is a monthly internet radio program for the customer service industry featuring the most innovative managers and thought leaders in the customer contact field, interviewed by BenchmarkPortal CEO, Bruce Belfiore. Broadcast monthly, directly over the Internet to your desktop, CallTalk covers hot topics that impact today's call center. CallTalk airs without the participation of vendors so that topics will be free from their influence and guided by the needs of its listeners. If you have a topic you would like us to cover, send it to CallTalk@BenchmarkPortal.com.