Are Your Quality Scores in Sync with Your Customer Experience Initiatives?

Moderated by: Linda Van Doren, Vanguard Communications

In earlier posts, we’ve discussed measuring the customer experience, and how many of you are working on what that means to your organization.

So, if you’re like many of our clients who are in the midst of initiatives focusing on understanding what the customer experience is (e.g., Customer Experience Management, Balanced Scorecards, Net Promoter Scores), what are you doing in the contact center to support those efforts? Specifically, what is the state of your quality department?

If it’s been over a year since you dusted off your quality monitoring forms or calibrated your scoring, perhaps it’s time to reevaluate what you’re measuring.  Here are a few good things you can work on right now to ensure that your contact center is helping drive the desired results for larger corporate-wide customer experience initiatives.

1. Identify customer experience projects going on in the enterprise and make sure the contact center is represented in these groups.  If you have an analyst in your staff, make sure she’s at the meetings.  She’ll be able to capture what strategies are being discussed and how those translate into operational changes in the contact center.
2. Look at what you’re measuring.  Make sure that how your reps are being scored fits into the overall strategy.  Are you focusing too much on talk time?  On making sure that reps use the caller’s name X times during the phone call?
3. Make sure that your staff has the right tools and enough time to help drive desired behaviors.  Are your supervisors swamped with meetings?  Or are they available to help and to coach?  Does each representative get at least 5 calls monitored a month, selected from different times of day and on different days of the week? Are the calls selected consistently across groups?  And are they randomly selected and calibrated?
4. Evaluate customer (and employee) satisfaction surveys, and address issues that come up.  Ensure that your contact center is nimble enough to make changes as necessary to accommodate both business needs (a new focus on customer retention was just announced), and on satisfying your customers (our customers want to be able to “click to chat” with our agents – let’s make sure we can monitor those interactions).  One of our clients recently had a large gap between their customer satisfaction scores (which had lots of room for improvement) and their internal quality scores (which were consistent across the contact center and in the high 90s).
5. Measure what your agents can control, monitor the things they can’t.  So measure adherence, but monitor talk time and manage to exceptions.
6. Ensure that tools are available to help agents improve. If there is nothing available to help, then consider not scoring it.  For example, if agents are being scored on “voice quality” and they get a sub-par score, it’s not alright to say “do better next time,” or “improve.”   Ensure that there are internal (e-learning modules, role playing, coaching) or external (courses, seminars) resources available.  Make sure too that your quality forms are closely linked back to the training department for new hire and ongoing training modules.
7. If you don’t already have a comprehensive Performance Management Optimization program in place, work toward this.  Give your agents visibility into the overall customer experience, and give them the tools to help monitor themselves in their own performance.  Give them accountability and responsibility.

What are you doing in your contact centers?  Do your quality programs support your overall strategy?  Who’s doing other creative things with quality – like having a QM form for your IVR interactions or for your website?  Let us know what you’re doing.