Qualitative Improvement How call center managers can influence their companies.

By Joe Fleischer
When I visit call centers, agents and managers often share with me why they have chosen careers in customer service. The reasons agents cite often include flexible hours, opportunities for career growth, and most important, the fulfillment that comes with helping people.

The best call center managers make the transition from agents to supervisors when they derive satisfaction toward achieving a dual purpose: assisting customers and enabling agents to develop in their careers. Managers with this mindset recognize that quality assurance, too, serves a dual purpose for their companies. By listening to recordings of agents’ conversations with customers, supervisors identify ways agents can do their jobs better. Beyond the call center, the recordings reveal ways that the entire company can improve its communication with customers.

Let’s say, for example, that customers call to complain about new late fees from a credit card company. Agents are typically the first people who hear the complaints, but they are not necessarily in a position to suggest that the company rethink the policy that led to the complaints. That is why the most effective call center managers share recordings with their colleagues and bring to light issues that the entire company needs to resolve.

In the scenario we’ve described, the call center manager with the credit card company refers to recordings to show that numerous customers are closing their accounts in response to the late-fee policy. Based on listening to the recordings, the manager recommends that the company clarify the late-fee policy that appears on customers’ credit card statements, and suggests that the company consider alternatives that are less likely to alienate customers.

To influence colleagues, call center managers do not have to describe the day-to-day details of how they minimize hold times or how they devise schedules to maximize agents’ utilization. These details are essential for call center managers to do their jobs, but they reveal little to the rest of the company about how customers behave. An interaction with a customer is a story that requires interpretation, and therefore, listening. That is why recordings are so valuable. By enabling your colleagues to listen to them, you present a far more compelling demonstration of how customers respond to your company’s decisions than if you rely on spreadsheets alone.

Call center managers who pay attention to qualitative attributes of calls are better advocates for customers, and for the agents who assist them, than managers who limit their analysis to quantitative metrics. When I first covered call centers nearly 12 years ago, many managers I interviewed cited shrinking headcounts and declining handle times to demonstrate how they made their centers more efficient. They often attributed gains in efficiency not to agents, but to call routing systems that shortened the timeframes for customers to connect with agents, and IVR systems that replaced agents as the primary source of information about their account balances.

The problem with this way of thinking is that it fails to account for the majority of a center’s productivity. The speed with which we route calls is of little consequence if we don’t evaluate what happens during them. In addition to measuring the productivity of these interactions in terms of how agents spend their time, we also have to find out if customers perceive that the time they spend communicating with agents is worthwhile.

Call centers have come a long way since the 1990s in their ability to integrate quantitative and qualitative observations. Yet even qualitative observations are inadequate if the only people who have the opportunity to listen to or evaluate agents’ interactions with customers are in your call center.

You can evaluate interactions more thoroughly and accurately when you seek more perspectives. That is why, besides recordings, quality assurance ought to incorporate the results of surveys. Many of the leading providers of call monitoring systems let you generate automated surveys; these systems transfer a random selection of callers to an IVR system to complete the surveys after their conversations with agents. When you augment your company’s internal evaluations of calls with customers’ immediate feedback, your expectations for service better reflect those of your customers.

Quality assurance also entails collaboration. At the very least, companies ought to include call center managers not only in discussions about how they will execute marketing campaigns, but also as they plan these campaigns at the outset. When companies consider changes to policies involving customers and how they will communicate these changes, they would do well to ask call center managers how customers have previously responded in similar circumstances. Call center managers establish influence within their companies when they recognize that beyond recording conversations, quality assurance is about enabling their companies to learn from them. CIS

Joe Fleischer has covered the call center industry for more than 11 years. With Brendan Read, he co-authored the book The Complete Guide to Customer Support.

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Qualitative Improvement How call center managers can influence their companies.

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