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IP Contact Center Feature Article


[October 29, 2004]

Enhancing Workforce Efficiencies: Taking an Enterprise View of Quality Assurance

By Oscar Alban, Witness Systems


In todays information-rich business world, one area of the company is a virtual goldmine: the contact center. Information in the form of real customer feedback on your products and services is essential in todays fast-paced business environment. More executives realize the contact centers strategic value. Its the business intelligence hub that represents the customers voice into the organization. More intelligence flows through the contact center in one day than in any other part of the company!

Understanding the content and context of customer feedback is indispensable to improving the performance of your workforce in general, and contact center agents in particular. For example, the well-known Six Sigma process touts Voice of the Customer as one of its founding principles. As a highly disciplined process that helps companies focus on developing and delivering near-perfect products and services, the contact center is crucial due to its direct link to customers.

Customers will tell you what should be measurable because its important to them, as well as what they are willing to pay for. This feedback is used in determining the Critical to Quality criteria that will be measured to determine service effectiveness.

Today, there are many criteria that go into workforce effectiveness in the contact center, including the obvious choices involving the right selection and hiring practices, effective initial training, strong supervisory leadership, and proper monitoring and coaching. There is one other area, however, that is not necessarily considered at first, and yet it has a profound impact on workforce effectiveness: Quality Assurance (QA).

A recent customer internal audit found that agents can control customer situations only 16 percent of the time. The rest is out of their hands. These issues have to do with processes and initiatives rooted in other departments such as marketing, finance, fulfillment and product development that have a tremendous impact on contact center initiatives, such as first call resolution, as well as agent effectiveness, morale and retention.

The traditional view of QA, in which we only focus on individual agents in the contact center, is simply not enough. By re-engineering the QA program to focus on high-level, enterprise-wide initiatives, the entire organization is brought together to own the customer issue. This creates a proactive approach to root-cause analysis and resolution. The result removes the obstacles that keep agents from being all that they can be for the customer. As a result, workforce effectiveness climbs to new levels.

How do companies initiate the QA re-engineering process? It all begins with the Quality Assurance group. Traditionally, the QA group has had the responsibility of monitoring contact center agents and evaluating them on their skill sets in different areas of their interactions with customers. Whether done manually or through an automated quality monitoring solution, QA representatives complete the call evaluation forms. These forms are usually then passed on to front- line supervisors, who then have the responsibility of reviewing the information with their agents.

This is where the breakdown begins. The supervisor points out a skill area in which the agent didnt perform well. The agent becomes defensive and disputes the rating given by the QA representative. The supervisor then becomes defensive and states, Hey, dont shoot the messenger. I didnt listen to or rate your call! At that point, the credibility of your Quality Assurance program is at risk. This also brings up another important question: If the QA group is monitoring and filling out the agent evaluation forms, then what are the supervisors doing?

An Enterprise Team Approach to Performance Optimization

Expecting different results by doing things the same way you always have will never make for a successful formula. If companies want to mine the gold that they have sitting in their call centers in the form of valuable information and business intelligence, then the process must change.

I propose a dramatic shift. First, change the name of the Quality Assurance group. Why? Because quality is the responsibility of everyone, not just one group. It has to be part of the culture. Everyone has a stake in it.

I recommend that Quality Assurance be changed to POINT, which is an acronym for Performance Optimization Intelligence and iNformation Team. What is the difference between POINT and the traditional Quality Assurance team? First of all, the QA team no longer monitors individual agents to evaluate them on call handling skills. This now becomes the responsibility of the supervisors. It only makes sense! The average cost of hiring and training an agent in the U.S. today is $8,500. Yet, the majority of agent attrition takes place during initial training and within the first 60-90 days following it. There is no way a company can recoup its hiring investment in this short of a time period.

According to Datamonitor, in 2005, there will be an estimated 2.9 million agents in the U.S. If we take a conservative 30 percent agent attrition rate, that means corporate America is going to spend somewhere around $9.5 billion re-staffing its contact centers due to attrition.

For this reason alone, one of contact center supervisors main responsibilities should be to protect this investment. Their number one mission is to monitor, coach and develop their agents. However, for this to take place, supervisors need to be trained in the art of coaching (that in itself is an entirely separate topic). According to BenchmarkPortal, which collects and warehouses a database of performance metrics for customer contact and support centers, contact centers that have a strong monitoring and coaching program experience, on average, a 26 percent agent attrition rate, while those centers that do not experience a 42 percent attrition rate.

POINT Reveals Your Strategic Pain Points

Knowing the impact even traditional QA has on workforce attrition, lets now take a look at what POINT can do. It will monitor and measure against established corporate and center goals, strategies, initiatives and business value drivers. For example, one of its categories should be Branding Through Service. Every interaction with a customer, regardless of channel, is a branding opportunity. Are agents supporting the company brand through positive customer experiences, or are they compromising it? Another important monitoring category is Market Intelligence. Its amazing what customers will tell you about your competition and the market in general. All of this data needs to be captured and shared with executives and others in the organization.

Just as the central idea behind Six Sigma is that if a company can measure how many defects it has in a process, then it can systematically figure out how to eliminate them and get as close to zero defects as possible, POINT strives to show you exactly where those performance improvement opportunities lie.

Here are some examples of contact center units:

  • Inaccurate information provided by agents
  • Improper service skills when working with customers (i.e., rude tone)
  • Poor training yielding agent inaccuracies on product/service knowledge and business processes
  • Inaccurate customer records/files resulting from agents not annotating customers accounts correctly
  • Poorly established sales/service business processes, leading to agent ineffectiveness
  • Improper deployment of technology (i.e., CRM front-end tools), making agents jobs harder rather than easier

Before something can be defined, it must to be identified. Customer interaction recording software, including monitoring of phone calls, e-mail and the Web, helps identify the areas that need to be defined. These improvement areas can be people, processes or technologies.

Based on captured interactions from any channel, you now can measure the effectiveness of these three components based on the criteria that was originally defined. Online performance evaluation software helps here. More targeted measurements can be completed using automated scorecard solutions.

Further, you can bolster the improvement phase with actionable learning software by sending training thats specific to an agents individual need. Once agents complete learning, your monitoring software can capture additional interactions and highlight the areas where learning was taken to tangibly measure improvement. This represents a true closed-loop improvement process.

Getting to the Root Cause

One of the major struggles for contact center management is the fact that it lives in a reactive world. Rather than a ready, aim, shoot approach to business, its become more of a ready, shoot, aim approach. This isnt going to work anymore. Contact centers are handling more strategic objectives, and the results of their work have a critical impact on the entire organization.

The POINT concept is a key step in changing this. Probably the most important monitoring category is Root Cause Analysis. For example, the POINT team can look at customer calling patterns over a specified period of time. It may find that some higher revenue customers are calling in four times, on average, in a 30 day period, when they used to call twice in the same time span. By drilling down to the corresponding calls, it can identify the symptoms prompting those additional interactions. It could be the fact that payments are not showing up correctly on customers billing statements. Further investigation into the back office data entry group that handles payment processing could show that theres a problem with the use of a new data entry system. The back office agents think theyre keying in payments, but perhaps they are not using the correct screens. The root cause of these calls has then been identified and corrective action can now be taken.

Analyzing for root cause will be a major step in moving from a reactive environment to one that is now proactive and full of empowerment. It becomes a win-win for the customer, as well as the contact center and organization.

Following is a list of areas that POINT should focus on:

  • Execution of strategic initiatives
  • Branding through service
  • Return on information
  • Market intelligence
  • Competitive intelligence
  • Process evaluation
  • Multi-channel delivery
  • Root-cause analysis
  • Internal collaboration and execution
  • Trend analysis
  • Behavioral trends
  • Six Sigma, Voice of the Customer

POINT Logistics

In order for POINT to be successful, it needs to report directly into a vice president. There also needs to be collaboration with other departments in the company. For instance, a POINT representative should meet with the head of marketing on a bi-weekly basis. During these meetings, the representative could share information on branding trends, market intelligence, competitive feedback and customer responses to a new pricing structure, for example. In turn, marketing could share information on upcoming initiatives that will have an impact on the customer base, as well as the contact center and its ability to service customers needs.

Steps to Success

As a starting point, following is a list of items to consider when thinking about re-engineering your Quality Assurance program into a Performance Optimization Intelligence and iNformation Team:

  • Identify who the executive champion will be
  • Identify and engage the Six Sigma executive champion
  • Develop an internal communication plan who, what, when and why
  • Identify all company stakeholders (marketing, finance, product development, etc.)
  • Identify all channels and languages to be monitored
  • Identify the business drivers to be measured
  • Establish attributes to be monitored
  • Create business rules for recording specific customer contact types
  • Create an evaluation form with these business drivers
  • Train supervisors on the art of coaching
  • Establish quarterly executive overview meetings to discuss ongoing findings

Bottom Line

Dont expect different results doing things the same way. The modern contact center has evolved into much more than a place that customers call for product/service support and to inquire about billing statements, for instance. Its become a strategic part of the organization.

Let me put it in perspective: More people will communicate with a company through the contact center in one day than will see that companys advertising! That means that the biggest branding vehicle that any company has is its contact centers.

Know the content and context of customer feedback and accept it as indispensable to improving the performance of your workforce. Remember the Voice of the Customer as you apply your own disciplined process that helps you focus on optimizing performance.

Oscar Alban serves as principal global market consultant for Witness Systems a worldwide provider of performance optimization software and services for contact center, IP telephony and back office environments. Prior to joining Witness Systems, he spent 12 years with a Fortune 500 company in its state-of-the-art call center division, where he managed its 1,200-person inbound/outbound contact center. Today, he performs consulting and participates in worldwide speaking engagements with an emphasis on workforce and performance optimization, customer service and satisfaction, agent and supervisor performance, and the role coaching and training play in the process.

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