Call Center Management Featured Article
Not as Difficult As You Think: Bringing Quality Scores Up With a Few Easy Steps
Many companies today claim excellence in the quality of customer support they offer, but as we know…claims on annual reports aren’t necessarily reality. There is often a strong disconnect between the quality of customer support companies think they are providing, and the opinions of real customers on the matter. Companies that engage in quality monitoring may wish to look a little deeper: look at customer feedback, and see if it matches the conclusions you have drawn from the data on your side of the equation.
In a recent blog post, Monet Software (News - Alert) CEO Chuck Ciarlo recommends a few relatively easy and inexpensive ways companies can bring their quality scores up. It need not involve huge investments in technology, expensive management consultants or formal customer surveying, so use your existing schedule to fill your quiet times with some of these activities.
Not to embarrass anyone, but… Chances are good that your contact center, like all contact centers, has some agents whose performance is weaker than others. Hoping these agents will improve with experience is not a great solution. Ciarlo recommends identifying these people with your quality monitoring solution – call and screen recording is great for this -- and targeting them for some extra training during times of low call volume.
“Training sessions are too important to be subject to interruptions,” wrote Ciarlo. “With a workforce management solution, you can pinpoint activity lulls and schedule accordingly.”
What are customers’ most common complaints? You don’t need to address all customers’ issues today, but if you can ferret out where customers are most commonly running into roadblocks and fix those issues, you can bring your quality scores way up. Is it long hold times? It may be time to redo the schedule with more accuracy, hire a few more agents or bring some effective self-service technologies online. If you’re having trouble identifying customers’ most common complaints, then start listening to the calls that don’t go so well rather than randomly listening to calls.
“This may seem obvious, but many contact centers still base assessments on random samples of calls and surveys, rather than those with negative customer feedback,” wrote Ciarlo. “That’s where the problems are, so that is where training should start.”
Recraft your training. Are you using mostly classroom-based training? If it’s not “sticking,” perhaps you need to try and change up your training methods. Most people today have low retention when it comes to listening to someone talk. Consider putting simulations in place for training, or ensuring that managers and supervisors have time to sit down and offer some very hands-on training. Perhaps you could consider pairing newer agents or those working on new skills with veteran agents during slower call volume times. There’s nothing better than learning by example.
Check all the channels. While the telephone may still be the most common channel of choice for customers with issues, the rise of other channels is real (as is the volume), and it’s particularly easy for poor customer experiences to go viral in other channels, particularly chat and social media. If all your phone-based transactions seem good but customers still aren’t satisfied, remember that many customers today aren’t touching your contact center by phone. Be sure to put quality standards in place for all channels, and review them regularly.
Get technology to help you listen. If you’re still having trouble with quality but simply don’t have the time to listen to a sufficient number of problematic calls to diagnose problems, consider letting technology do it for you with speech analytics, which are often built into today’s quality monitoring solutions.
“Real-time speech analytics tools can allow you to start raising performance levels and quality scores immediately,” wrote Ciarlo. “It will be easier to detect when agents are not following the script or using language that is not compliant with company policy.”
While you may not have the resources to follow all these steps, chances are good that implementing even one of them will bring quality scores up. Even a few percentage points in improvement can make an enormous difference to your business.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi