Call Center Management Featured Article
Lead Agents into Quality Assurance, Don't Drive Them
Quality assurance is one of the core duties of call center management. It’s a fairly abstract concept, however, and many companies struggle to put it into practice. To do so, agents will need guidelines for improving customer support quality – including real procedures backed up by their desktop technology, and support and encouragement from managers to get there.
In the Short Term
Once you’ve established your new customer experience standards, you need to determine how you’re going to change your processes and your agent training to attain the new goals. Using recorded calls can help immensely, but to get agents on board, try switching from a process in which you try to catch agents mistakes to a process in which you emphasize customer contact strategies that work. In other words, “accentuate the positive,” according to Dick Bourke writing for Customer Think.
“In the case of voice, instead of listening to calls and pointing out to the agent where they went wrong, supervisors should play the calls with the agent and ask them what they thought worked and what they thought could be improved,” wrote Bourke. “While this takes a company out of a situation where agents receive only a numerical score for a call, it also allows the agent to take individual responsibility and ownership of their work.”
Screen capture of non-call contacts can help agents learn more effective strategies for communicating with customers in non-voice channels.
In the Long Term
You won’t know how you’re doing with your improvements until you measure them. Quality metrics need to be tracked, recorded and analyzed so managers have a baseline framework for determining when quality is improving (and what actions are helping it improve) and when it may be slipping.
Measuring internal numbers is important and it will tell you how you’ve improved from years past, but it won’t tell you how you’re doing up against your competitors. This is where benchmarking comes in: it allows you to compare your own performance against other companies in your industries, particularly the best-in-class performers. Critically important metrics to benchmark include call abandonment rates, time to answer, call duration, agent absenteeism, and agent attrition.
Smart contact center managers understand that you can’t punish your agents into supporting a good quality assurance program. But when agents understand the goals and the procedures and receive meaningful feedback on their work, managers can help agents take pride in their work, which will translate to better efforts and more authentic interactions.
Edited by Maurice Nagle