June 2004

By Kimberly King, InterWeave

To effectively manage performance in a call center, the first step is to monitor the telephone performance of your representatives. By the very nature of this task, it can quickly become a numbers game. 'Did you complete your number of evaluations for this month?' 'How many calls did we monitor in the center this month?' 'What was the average score?'

However, the real heart of the matter is not about how many calls you monitored or even your average score. The real goal of monitoring is to improve performance by effectively mentoring and motivating the representatives. This presents a real culture shift for many call centers. If you want to reap a genuine return on investment from your monitoring equipment and the time and effort it takes to evaluate calls, your center should adopt a behavioral- based measurement and mentoring process. To make this cultural transformation, it is critical to review all the finer details of your quality assurance process.

'Wowing' Customers
The very first change requires thinking of quality in terms of 'wowing' your customers. Gather your key management staff in a room and listen to some of your customer interactions without a monitoring form in front of you. After listening to those calls, ask 'Did that call 'wow' me?' If not, you need to analyze the specific behaviors that require modification in order to move your organization to a higher level of customer satisfaction.

Many organizations become trapped in the process of assigning a score to a call and never really step back from the situation and ask some key questions. 'What behaviors created a negative perception of our company to that customer?' 'How did we exceed that customer's expectations?' 'Did we handle that call efficiently in order to save the customer's time while managing our call-handling time appropriately?' Identify the specific behaviors that are driving your company's success and make sure everyone in your company fully understands those behaviors.

Behaviors, Not Attitudes
Your monitoring form should reflect behaviors, not attitudes. It is very challenging to monitor for levels of 'friendliness,' 'sincerity,' 'rudeness' or 'curtness.' It is even more difficult to mentor to those attitudes. Your entire management team ' recruiters, trainers and line managers ' needs to understand and model the behaviors that drive these attitudes. Frontline supervisors must be able to demonstrate lowering their volume, dropping their pitch and slowing their pace to express empathy. They need to be able to identify the crisp articulation that creates the perception of rudeness or curtness. If they can't identify and model these specific communication skills, they will be unlikely to change or modify the behaviors in others.

Organizations need to be careful about sending mixed messages to representatives. Some contact centers drive an organizational objective, such as pushing an average call time, rather than concentrating on a behavioral change. Representatives hear, 'Lower your average handle time!' and interpret it many different ways. Some will begin talking faster, others will interrupt your customers and still others will hang up on customers or transfer them to someone else. Are these the behaviors you wanted to create?

Drive the right behaviors by sending a clear message. Work with individuals who need attention and help them understand the specific behaviors that are creating a higher-than-average handle time. They might need some additional assistance in navigating the system or asking the right questions to identify the problem faster. Maybe they need to stop talking with their co-workers or making lunch plans while on the phone with your customers. Be honest with yourself and your representatives in determining the root cause of the high handle times and address the specific behaviors on an individual basis.

Get Everyone Involved
Another way to get the most out of monitoring is to make sure your entire organization is calibrated in the practices of performance management. Hold calibration sessions with supervisors, quality analysts, trainers and recruiters. Make sure these sessions consistently monitor and measure performance and do not focus on just scoring the evaluation form.

Concentrate on identifying the behaviors that contributed to success and the behaviors that did not meet the needs of the customers and your business. Then, practice mentoring skills to ensure that everyone is not only monitoring and measuring performance consistently, but that they are also mentoring and motivating the representatives with the same level of inspiration and accountability. Make sure your organization is not tolerating lack of performance or you will never rise to higher levels of customer loyalty and call-handling efficiency.

It is important to realize that your quality assurance department and your supervisors monitor performance for completely different purposes. Your quality assurance department monitors to create a statistically valid representation of your performance, creating benchmarking data and trending your performance changes. Their purpose is to monitor for the trends and to analyze your progress. Your supervisors, on the other hand, are monitoring to provide meaningful and inspiring feedback to your representatives to drive changes in performance.

With these two purposes in mind, it makes sense to set a static number of evaluations for your quality analysts to complete on every representative each month for trending and incentive programs. However, creating a similar goal for supervisors is only asking for trouble. If you look around your center at the end of the month and see your supervisors frantically monitoring phone calls, it is because they are striving to achieve their monitoring goal. Their focus has shifted away from performance improvement and you will probably not experience any changes in performance. They are now simply trying to hit their monitoring numbers.

The key to driving performance changes and reaping the benefits from monitoring is to shift supervisors' focus from the number of evaluations that are completed to the behaviors that have been improved. Your supervisors need to clearly understand that their goal is to improve performance, not monitor a certain number of calls every month. They should concentrate on mentoring representatives.
Monitoring is also more meaningful and useful if you use it throughout your organization rather than restricting its usage to your supervisors. Set up a learning lab environment in your organization where representatives can regularly go to hear and evaluate their own performance. This will increase their level of confidence in your quality process and give them an opportunity to assess their individual strengths and opportunities.

Engage trainers with your monitoring system so they can play prerecorded calls during the new-hire training process to emphasize the right customer interaction skills as well as the ones that are undesirable. This will help new-hires understand and appreciate your quality processes. New representatives will be indoctrinated into your organization with a positive feeling about monitoring performance and understand the value of quality assurance to your customers and your organization.
The more everyone in your organization appreciates the significance of monitoring to your call center, the more value you will experience from it. Clearly defining the specific behaviors, focusing everyone on performance improvement and holding everyone accountable to the behaviors that 'wow' your customers will enhance monitoring effectiveness and efficiency and create greater results for your business.
 

A contact center expert, Kimberly King has more than 20 years' experience working for call centers and consulting with them. She frequently speaks at conferences, writes extensively on issues facing the industry and consults with such clients as HSN and Verizon Wireless. She is the president of InterWeave Corp. (www.interweavecorp.com), a performance management consulting firm to the contact center industry. InterWeave helps call centers gain return on their investments in people and technology by streamlining processes and procedures, increasing the effectiveness of frontline leadership, reducing attrition and increasing customer satisfaction. She can be reached at kking@interweavecorp. com or 813-933-4431.
 

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