Newsroom

17 Apr 2006

ContactCenterWorld.com Q&A: Quality Reporting & Monitoring

Submitted by:
Alton Martin
CEO
Customer Operations Performance Center Inc. (COPC)
April 2006

Responses for Quality Reporting & Monitoring Feature: May 1 – May 5, 2006


1. In your opinion, how frequently should contact centers monitor the various contact channels prevalent in today's customer care organizations?

Contact channels should be monitored on a monthly basis at a rate that is statistically significant at the process level.

Monitoring should also occur at the agent level at a rate that provides (a) sufficient on-going coaching to allow the agent to meet end user customer needs/requirements and (b) on a cumulative basis will provide a statistically valid scoring of the agent’s performance over a rolling 12 month period.

COPC believes arbitrary sample rates (e.g., one per rep per week) are in many ways both meaningless and misleading. Meaningless because of an insufficient sample size to truly be indicative of agent performance. Misleading because it “looks” like there is a “quality” program in place but there isn’t.


2. Who conducts quality assessments and what's being done to ensure that they do so effectively?

Responsibility for conducting quality assessments varies by organization. Typically, a dedicated group outside the line delivery staff conducts these assessments. Other organizations have team leaders conduct the assessment. Curiously, very few organizations involve end users in the development of the survey questions or have them participate in the assessment processes.

Not much is being done to ensure the effectiveness of these assessments. Most organizations would not recognize any performance differentials if the monitoring system were eliminated. The best methodology is to correlate internal QA scores with customer satisfaction indices or customer feedback from focus groups. Very few organizations do this.


3. Given the results of a quality assessment, what is being done to enhance agent and center wide performance, as well as the contact center's overall knowledge of the customer?

An effective QA system can enhance agent and center-wide performance. A proper system will have a much greater focus on the overall process and customer experience, with less focus on the individual call. For instance, each call (contact) may be handled extremely well, getting high internally measured QA scores, yet result in very poor customer satisfaction. This is because customers do not rate satisfaction incident by incident. They tend to rate satisfaction by overall process experience. So, if it takes multiple calls/contacts to get a resolution, the organization will get low scores. Research demonstrates repeatedly that customers will give low scores when it take more than two contacts to resolve problems, regardless of the experience within each contact. Being nice, courteous, and so forth, is not nearly as impacting as solving problems or correctly assessing the needs of the customer.

Most contact centers have very little knowledge of true customer requirements. This is not reviewed very often. Or, the organization doesn’t really think the agents have much need to know the formally defined needs of customers. There are exceptions to this rule of thumb, but not that many.


4. What are the current monitoring trends and practices in contact centers?

At this time, many contact centers are moving toward:

- Trying to automate with autoscoring. Pretty ridiculous effort, in my opinion, as it confuses quantity with quality.

- Outsourcing the call monitoring to low cost labor markets.

- Scoring email and other non-phone touches. However, almost no organizations score CTI or IVR effectiveness.


5. What 3 tips would you give for revving up call quality?

- To improve call quality, consider not tracking it for a while. In fact, stop performing the entire quality monitoring function altogether and see if there are any negative impacts. Risky, controversial – yes. But it will demonstrate if QA has any impacts on the business. We have seen multiple times in which QA doesn’t matter at all. The QA scores are 99%+ yet, other metrics are all over the place. Truth is, accuracy may actually be more critical than QA.

- Focus on accuracy much more aggressively than soft skills.

- Get a process score in addition to an agent.