Contact Center Quality Management Featured Article

Full Disclosure: I’m one of those guys that doesn’t opt-in for the “quick survey’ offered at the end of a chat with a call center. I know it’s important, but so is my time. Turns out that if I had opted in, I might have been rejected by the survey! Who knew?

Apparently, Nicole Burney, Service Operations Manager at inContact knew, and had a few words to say about it.

In a recent blog post, Burney vented about call centers that dangle the offer of a survey, and then fail to follow through. “One of my biggest pet peeves is when companies invite their callers to participate in a survey after a call, but then fail to survey callers that opted in,” she wrote.

Even worse, Burney notes, is when you tell them that yes, you will participate, and while on the call you see their number come up on your caller ID, ready to ask you survey questions before your call is even through! It’s all reminiscent of a recent New York City mayor who had the annoying habit of constantly asking, “How’m I doing?”

Burney, one of whose jobs is to make sure the service offered by a call center is spot on, has a few other peeves as well.

“How ‘bout those quality monitoring (QM) forms?” she asks. “These days most companies have caught on that customer perception is company reality.  So why don’t QM forms support this?”

Burney observes that in her experience, “Companies that have excelled in quality and customer satisfaction have incorporated both process and customer experience components into their QM form. Their QM form reflects the required process standards that keep the company out of trouble, but it also incorporates elements of the WOW effect that makes the difference in customer interactions. I will summarize this for you in two simple words: Genuine Care. Show your agents the behavioral attributes of genuine care, and you will show your agents success.”

To help make everyone’s experience better, Burney offers a few tips for successful call center operations:

To avoid your callers from feeling stood up, use verbiage in your survey invitation that clearly states the callbacks are randomly selected from the population of customers that opt in. Setting clear expectations can prevent your customers from assuming they were not called back intentionally.

Be sure your survey launcher only initiates surveys after a call termination is generated.

In your next calibration, try using your QM speech analytics to find sample calls that showcase an exemplary standard of genuine care, and then develop your QM genuine care attributes from those characteristics.

They seem so simple, but apparently many call centers are not following the above suggestions. Yet it appears that taking a few simple steps first can alleviate a host of problems down the road.