Last week in Part 1 of this post, I cited several quality monitoring practices commonly embraced by the world’s best contact centers, then stopped midway through in a desperate attempt to make you come back to my website this week.
Here we go with Part 2. I hope the wild anticipation didn’t cause you to lose too much sleep.
Incorporate customer satisfaction ratings and feedback into monitoring scores. Here is where quality monitoring is really changing. This shift in quality monitoring procedure is so important, it’s underlined here – and just missed getting typed out in ALL CAPS.
Quality is no longer viewed as a purely internal measure. Many contact centers have started incorporating a “Voice of the Customer” component into their quality monitoring programs – tying direct customer feedback from post-contact surveys into agents’ overall monitoring scores. The center’s internal QA staff rate agents only on the most objective call criteria and requirements – like whether or not the agent used the correct greeting, provided accurate product information, and didn’t call the customer a putz. That internal score typically accounts for anywhere from 40%-60% of the agent’s quality score, with the remaining points based on how badly the customer said they wanted to punch the agent following the interaction.
Add a self-monitoring component to the mix. The best contact centers usually give an agent the opportunity to express how much he or she stinks before the center goes and does it for them. Self-evaluation in monitoring is highly therapeutic and empowering. When you ask agents to rate their own performance before they are rated by a quality specialist (and the customer), it shows agents that the company values their input and experience, and it helps to soothe the sting of second- or third-party feedback, especially in instances when a call was truly flubbed.
Agents are typically quite critical of their own performance, often pointing out mistakes they made that QA staff might have otherwise overlooked. Of course, the intent of self-monitoring sessions is not to sit and watch as agents eviscerate themselves – as much fun as that can be – but rather to ensure that they understand their true strengths and where they might improve, as well as to make sure they and your quality personnel are on the same page. Self-evaluations should cease if agents begin to slap themselves during the process, unless it is an agent you yourself had been thinking about slapping anyway.
Provide positive coaching soon after the evaluated contact. Even if you incorporate all of the above tactics into your monitoring program, it will have little impact on overall quality, agent performance or the customer experience if agents don’t receive timely and positive coaching on what they did well and where they need to improve. Notice I said “timely” AND “positive” – this is no either/or scenario: Giving agents immediate feedback is great, but not if that feedback comes in the form of verbal abuse and a kick to the shin; by the same token, positive praise and constructive comments are wonderful, but not if the praise and comments refer to an agent-customer interaction that took place during the previous President’s administration.
At the end of each coaching session during which a key area for improvement is identified, the best centers typically have the coach and the agents work together to come up with a clear and concise action plan aimed at getting the agent up to speed. The action plan may call for the agent to receive additional one-on-one coaching/training offline, complete one or more e-learning modules, work with a peer mentor, and/or undergo a lobotomy.
Reward and recognize agents who consistently deliver high quality service. While positive coaching is certainly critical, high-performing agents want more than just a couple pats on the back for consistently kicking butt on calls. Top contact centers realize they must reward quality to receive quality, thus most have some form of rewards and recognition tied directly to quality monitoring results. Agents in these centers can earn extra cash, gift certificates, preferred shifts and plenty of public recognition for achieving high ratings on all their monitored calls during a set month or quarter. In some centers, if an agent nails there quality score during an even longer period (six months or a year), they may earn a spot on the center’s “Wall of Fame”, and perhaps even the opportunity to serve as a quality coach who can boss around their inferior peers.
To foster a strong sense of teamwork and to motivate more than just a select few agents, many centers have built team rewards/recognition into the fold. Entire groups of agents – not just the center’s stars – can earn cash and kudos for consistently meeting and exceeding the team’s quality objective over a set period of time. Such collective, team-friendly incentives not only help drive high quality center-wide, they help protect the center’s elite agents from being bludgeoned with their own “#1 in Quality” trophy by co-workers.
If you have some other key quality monitoring practices you’d like to share, please do so in the comment box below. If you’d like to take serious issue with the practices I’ve highlighted, get your own blog.
Quality monitoring is as old a practice in contact centers as sending electric shocks through agents’ headsets to help keep handle time down. But just because centers have been conducting quality monitoring forever doesn’t mean they have been doing it right.
Effective quality monitoring is so important, I’m going to do two successive blog posts on the topic. This week and next my posts will highlight the quality monitoring tactics and strategies shared by contact centers that are better than yours. Here we go:
Gain agent understanding of and buy-in to monitoring from the get-go. In top contact centers, managers introduce the concept of monitoring during the “job preview” phase of the hiring process. Agent candidates learn (or, if experienced, are reminded) of the reasons behind and value of monitoring, as well as how much monitoring will occur should they be offered and accept a job in the center. Managers clarify that monitoring isn’t intended to catch agents doing something wrong, it just often works out that way. They explain how monitoring is not only the best way to gauge an agent’s strengths and where they can improve, but also to pinpoint why the people who designed the center’s workflows and IVR system should be fired.
Gaining agent buy-in to monitoring goes beyond mere explanations and definitions. The best contact centers show new-hires and sometimes even job applicants how quality monitoring actually works by having them listen to recorded calls with a quality specialist. The specialist goes over the center’s monitoring form/criteria, shows how each call was rated, and lets the newbies decide on a fitting punishment for the agent evaluated.
Use a dedicated quality monitoring team/specialist. In many contact centers, quality monitoring is carried out by busy frontline managers and supervisors. In the best contact centers, the process is carried out by dedicated quality assurance nerds – folks whose sole responsibility is making sure that the center’s agents and systems aren’t making customers nauseous.
I’m not saying that frontline managers/supervisors don’t know how to monitor; rather I’m saying that they typically don’t have time to do so effectively and provide timely coaching. With a dedicated quality monitoring team (or, in smaller/less wealthy centers, a single quality specialist) in place, there is time to carefully evaluate several customer contacts per month for each agent, and to provide prompt and comprehensive feedback to those agents about why they should have stayed in school.
Develop a comprehensive and fair monitoring form. A good quality monitoring form contains not only all of the criteria that drives the customer experience, but also all the company- and industry-based compliance items that keep your organization from facing any indictments.
In top contact centers, the monitoring form is broken into several key categories (e.g., Greeting, Accuracy, Professionalism/Courtesy, Efficiency, Resolution, etc.), with each category – and the specific criterion contained within – assigned a different weighting depending on its perceived impact on customer satisfaction. For example, “Agent provided accurate/relevant information” and “Agent tactfully attempted to up-sell after resolving customer issue” would likely be weighted more heavily than “Agent didn’t spit while saying ‘thank you for calling’" or “Agent remained conscious during after-call wrap-up”.
In developing an effective monitoring form that agents deem fair and objective, smart managers solicit agent input and recommendations regarding what criteria should or should not be included, and how agents feel each should be weighted. Showing agents such respect and esteem is a great way for you to foster engagement and a great way for me to make money if I ever write a book aimed at agents.
Invest in an automated quality monitoring system. There are contact centers that still rely mainly on real-time remote listening to evaluate agent-customer interactions. There are also doctors that still use leeches for bloodletting.
If your center is staffed with more than 20 agents and you want a shot at lasting customer satisfaction, continuous agent improvement, and an invitation to private vendor cocktail parties at conferences, you must invest in an automated quality monitoring system. There is simply no better and faster way to capture customer data, evaluate performance and spot key trends in caller behavior and agent incompetence.
I’m certainly not saying that other monitoring methods are not useful. Real-time remote observations, side-by-side live monitoring, mystery shopper calls, hiding beneath agents’ workstations – these are all excellent supplementary practices in any quality monitoring program. But they should do just that – supplement, not drive the program.
Monitor ALL contact channels, not just phone calls. As a researcher, I’m always amazed by how many multichannel contact centers have formal monitoring process in place only for live agent phone calls. According a study by ICMI, fewer than two thirds of contact centers that handle email contacts monitor customer email transactions, and fewer than half of centers monitor customers’ interactions with IVR or web self-service applications.
By virtually ignoring quality outside of the of traditional phone channel, contact centers allow poor online and automated service to continue, creating a breeding ground for customer ire and high operating costs. Failure to monitor the email and chat channel will not only lead to agents’ errors and poor service going unnoticed, it can actually propagate bad service. Agents who see that the center is so focused on the phones but not on email or chat are likely to give it their all during customer calls but let quality slip a bit when tackling contacts via text. They may even use…gulp…emoticons. :0
The best contact centers have a formal process in place for evaluating agents’ email and chat transcripts for information accuracy, grammar/spelling, professionalism, and contact resolution. In addition, these centers continually test their IVR- and web-based self-service apps to ensure optimal functionality, as well as monitor those apps during actual interactions to make sure that customers aren’t being thrown into IVR dungeons or abandoning web pages to rip the company a new one on Twitter.
That’s it for Part 1. I’ll share several more key quality monitoring practices in Part 2 next week. If you simply cannot wait that long, you have no other choice but to purchase a copy of my ebook immediately: http://www.greglevin.com/full-contact-ebook.html.
When I came into this industry as an eager young journalist way back in 1994, the call center wasn’t sexy. It wore a frumpy dress, horned-rim glasses and sensible shoes. It was sturdy and reliable, but by and large was overlooked by the rest of the organization. Sure, there were some inbound centers that handled sales in addition to customer service, but few generated enough revenue to get invited to sit and eat at the popular kids’ table.
The call center helped plan the school prom, but rarely if ever got asked to go to it.
That was then. This is now. In today’s ultra-competitive business climate where there exists so much parity in available products and offerings, the differentiating factor is often the service and support the customer receives. Customers have tons of viable choices when it comes to which product to buy, what account to open, what policy to purchase, what airline to fly, and what hotel to sleep in. What typically tips the scales today and keeps these customers loyal for life is not what they see during a television ad, or read in a magazine, or hear on the radio; nor is price alone a determinant factor. No, what turns a potential or existing customer into a company advocate is what they experience when they contact your organization:
· How long do they have to wait in queue when calling to reach a live agent?
· How long do they have to wait to receive a response after sending an email or initiating a chat session -- or, gulp, firing off an angry tweet.
· Once reached, how friendly, empathetic, engaged and knowledgeable is the agent, and how quickly is the agent able to provide the information needed?
· How easy is it to use your IVR and web self-service apps (when self-service is what the customer chooses)?
· How personalized is the overall experience when interacting with the agent/application in question?
· How adept is your company at anticipating the customer’s needs?
· How accountable is your company when it has made a mistake or fallen short of customer expectations?
· How much does your company care about the customer?
· How much does your company care about itself?
As you can see, the contact center – or the call center, or whatever you want to call this place where millions of customers interact with your company – not only has an impact on customer loyalty and overall business success; it has perhaps the biggest impact.
And let’s not forget the impact that the contact center has internally on the rest of the enterprise. No other area in the company has the capability to capture even a fraction of the data, expectations, desires and behavioral trends of customers – who are, in essence, the lifeblood of any organization. Once captured and shared within the enterprise, such invaluable information and insight makes Marketing, Sales, Research & Development and plenty of other departments a collective force to be reckoned with.
And the beauty of it all is that the contact center hasn’t let its increased power and popularity go to its head. It doesn’t strut around talking about its importance and value; rather it works very hard at demonstrating it. And it doesn’t ask for all the credit whenever lilting customer satisfaction is converted into lifetime customer loyalty, nor when revenue shoots through the roof due to highly consistent and positive customer experiences.
No, it doesn’t ask for such recognition; but unlike in years past, it’s starting to get plenty of it.
And deservedly so.
Note: This post was taken from the closing chapter of my ebook, Full Contact: Contact Center Practices & Strategies that Make an Impact. To learn more about Full Contact, feel free to contact me – I won’t shut up about it. Or you could just check out the following link: http://www.greglevin.com/full-contact-ebook.html
Just because your call center surveys customers and occasionally even looks at the feedback they provide doesn’t mean you have a “Voice of the Customer” initiative in place. A true VOC program entails continuously and carefully analyzing customer ratings and sentiment, identifying trouble spots and trends, and taking decisive action before your customer base starts to hate you as much as your agents do.
If your call center is as serious about the customer experience as it is about low wages and bad lighting, then you need to make sure that your VOC initiative includes the following special components:
Tools that report whether the customer was using their “inside voice” or their “outside voice.” Naturally, you want to pay attention to any customer who provides negative comments about a recent interaction, but for prioritization purposes it’s important to distinguish between customers who are merely a little frustrated and those who are considering hiring a hit man. By investing in speech analytics tools that detect customers’ emotion/volume levels during calls and survey responses, it becomes easier to determine which customers to ignore, which ones to call back within the week, and which ones to kidnap immediately before they ruin your brand via Twitter.
“Fist of the Customer” (FOC) software. Sometimes customers don’t verbalize exactly what they are feeling, thus it’s important to have tools in place that can dig deeper and uncover hidden sentiment. While still very much in the testing phase, FOC technology measures how forcefully frustrated customers throw their phones or punch their computers when interacting with an agent or IVR. Equipped with special motion-detection software that I’m too stupid to understand or explain, a typical FOC solution can be programmed to send an instant alert to the call center’s recovery team whenever a customer’s punch reaches a “Mike Tyson” or “Jerry Springer guest” level of force.
A “Last Word” option for agents. To avoid having your customers’ negative and abusive comments adversely affect agent retention and morale, it’s important to incorporate a VOA (Voice of the Agent) component into your VOC program. After receiving a scathing rating or comment from a customer, agents will likely want to retaliate and get the last word in after they stop crying. Let them do so by providing them with what they think is the customer’s phone number but is really the number to a crisis hotline where operators are used to enduring profanity-laden diatribes from complete strangers.
NOTE: If you found Greg’s “Voice of the Customer” recommendations to be insightful and valuable, you should consider seeking help from a licensed mental health professional. Contact Greg for referrals.
As Lindsay Lohan will attest, sometimes it’s simply more profitable to be bad. Such is the case with customer service – if you know how to be bad correctly.
Many of you have probably heard of a little something called “The Service Recovery Paradox.” (And not just because I’ve alluded to it in previous posts – that would assume you’ve read me before and still returned.) The Service Recovery Paradox basically states that an effective recovery process following a bad customer service experience often results in higher customer satisfaction ratings than if the bad experience had never occurred in the first place.
While many of you are familiar with this paradox, most of you aren’t taking full advantage of it. Your service is simply too solid and consistent to ever shake things up, to ever wake customers out of their comfortable service coma and take notice of your company. Sure, your agents occasionally mess up on a call and give your company the opportunity to put the powerful paradox into action; however, you have too many quality initiatives and incentives in place that keep agents from screwing up big enough to have any real and lasting impact on customer sentiment.
If you truly want to win customers over, you have to dare to almost lose them first. I’m not suggesting that you encourage agents to sabotage every customer call, email and chat they handle – just one out of every five.
Below are some tips on how to help your call center suck just enough to dazzle customers:
Utilize screen pops featuring impolite phrases and insults. Most of your agents don’t care very much about their job and thus shouldn’t have trouble finding ways to alienate and offend customers on their own. Some of your better agents, however, may struggle with intentionally botching service. A great way to overcome their struggles is to send them screen pops featuring cold, non-empathetic phrases and insults that will help them push customers to the brink of defection.
The key is to use screen pops containing language that is just offensive enough to make the customer emotional but not so over-the-top that the customer orders a hit on your agent or, worse, refuses to ever again do business with your company even after the recovery team swoops in to bring delight.
Fail to keep promises made during calls. Insulting customers isn’t the only way to win their lasting loyalty. It’s important to also make sure that their needs aren’t met 100% of the time.
However, don’t merely have agents tell customers that their issue can’t be resolved during the call, as such a feeble attempt on the part of the agent is likely to result in an angry caller explosion from which your company cannot recover. To best set customers up for the type of powerful service recovery that will ensure lifetime loyalty, you need to make customers think that their issue has been resolved upon ending the call with the agent, and then wait for them to realize that it hasn't been.
For example, agents should promise to process every order and issue all appropriate credits, but then occasionally not follow through on such actions. This will invariably result in angry callbacks from customers that escalate to the Recovery Team, who can then apologize profusely, fix the problem immediately, and tell the customer that the company will love them till the end of time. It’s also a good idea to (falsely) promise the customer that the agent in question will be fired, beaten or, worse, demoted to outbound telemarketing.
Fire any agent who doesn’t receive at least two or three serious customer complaints each month. Make “Serious Customer Complaints” a formal metric for which all your agents are fully accountable. If it doesn’t fit on your agent performance scorecard, abbreviate it as “SCC” and/or get rid of First-Call Resolution, which is impossible to measure anyway.
Provide rewards and recognition to agents who consistently maintain the center’s desired monthly SCC average. For agents who fall short, provide coaching to help them become a little ruder and more incompetent, or just take away their medication. If you have any agents who far exceed the average SCC rate, move them into the Billing department.
ATTENTION: This is a satire. This is only a satire. Had this been an actual insightful blog post, it would not have been written by Greg. Any positive result that comes from taking Greg’s advice is strictly coincidental.
Most organizations strive to implement viable web self-service applications so that only customers with highly complex issues or who are extremely lonely require live agent assistance. Unfortunately, many companies get so excited about the potential cost savings offered by self-service that they forget about a very critical factor: the customer experience. In these companies, economics alone drive the self-service strategy and, consequently, the self-service strategy drives customers to more expensive channels – or into the arms of the competition.
The terms “customer-centric” and “automation” are not mutually exclusive – you can have one with the other. In fact, to succeed in today’s competitive customer care environment, you must. Many customers – particularly those who suffer panic attacks when interacting with people, or who simply despise humanity, or who are electrical engineers – actually prefer to self-serve rather than wait in a queue for a live person to help them.
To ensure that their call center is as cost-effective AND as customer-centric as possible, leading organizations fully embrace – or at least hold hands with – the following web self-service practices:
Keep FAQs fresh and diverse – and actively promote them. You should never hear your agents mutter, “If I had a dime for every time a caller asked me [fill in monotonous, routine question here].” If you do, it means that the FAQ section of your web site either blows, is non-existent, or is under-promoted.
Top call centers invest in dynamic applications that continuously scan the vast universe of customer contacts – previous calls, email/chat transactions, knowledgebase searches – and track common customer inquiries and issues. This invaluable data is then used to develop rich and relevant FAQs (and responses) that can be posted on the web site, thus saving the center thousands of live customer contacts… and agents millions of live brain cells.
To optimize use of their online FAQ feature, smart call centers go out of their way to promote its existence and strongly encourage customers to take advantage of this valuable resource. Such promotion is typically done via automated messages in the center’s IVR system while callers are in queue (e.g., “You can find answers to a wide variety of questions on our website at www.wewouldrathernottalktoyou.com), or by having agents provide links to the FAQ portal during email and chat interactions with customers. On calls, agents can simply remind customers about the FAQ feature and, to truly inspire action, tell the caller that every time they access the FAQs, an angel gets its wings.
Implement powerful search tools featuring natural language capabilities. Today’s search engines and knowledgebase solutions enable customers who visit your website to easily find exactly what they are looking for (assuming your knowledgebase is filled with expansive content) without having to type in broken English like Tarzan or a UFC fighter. Instead, thanks to natural language technology, customers can enter complete phrases or sentences in the “search” box, and receive relevant content instantly.
Some centers aim to spice-up self-service via the use of avatars that can “converse” with online customers via basic text chat. These animated figures are able to analyze the words the customer types into the search or chat box and provide answers in natural sentence form. It’s important, however, not to get too “cute’ with your company's self-service avatar. When programmed to tell jokes or be overly chatty, avatars can annoy and alienate rather than engage and captivate the people with whom they interact – kind of like me after one too many vodka Red Bulls at a party or for breakfast.
Create CRM-powered customer accounts/portals. Even customers who hate people and aim to avoid them like the plague or Adam Sandler movies still want their self-service experience to be humanized and personal.
The best customer care organizations satisfy such universal human desires by creating customized, CRM-powered portals for each existing/returning customer. These portals are, in essence, personalized web pages where customers can access their detailed account information (e.g., balances, past transactions; pending orders, etc.) as well as receive subliminal messages that compel them to buy additional products and services they don’t need.
Make it easy to reach a live agent. Giving online customers easy access to your call center agents isn’t the ultimate objective of your web self-service strategy, but it still must be a part of it. Not every customer who begins a self-service search or transaction is going to find exactly what they are looking for, either because their issue is complex or because they are not very bright. Also, some customers simply don’t feel comfortable completing purchases online. Hiding your email web form, chat/web call-back box, or phone number from online visitors – or, worse, not providing such contact options at all – is no way to foster customer loyalty, and could result in a lot of lost revenue.
Just keep in mind that there will always be those customers who don’t ever want to let go of your call center’s hand – even for the most routine transactions that could be done online. If you have a lot of customers like this, consider implementing a “Leave the Nest” strategy, where such callers are routed to a special pool of agents trained to provide abysmal service. Once these customers endure a few calls with an agent who incessantly stutters and lisps while babbling on about their love of model trains and kite building, the customers are likely to give web self-service another shot.
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