QAQNA

The Worst Presentation Habits

Mike Sansone linked a great post through Twitter last night. From SmartLemming: the 10 Worst Presentation Habits.

Here are my favorite three from their list (disclaimer: at one time or another I've been guilty of all of them!):

• Reading from notes: you might just as well have emailed it to me and let me read it at my desk.

• Failure to rehearse: bear with my while I get this to work, oops, sorry about that, I'm not sure why it's doing that. Hold on a sec.

• Reciting bullet points: Dude, that's quite a bald spot on the back of your head. In fact, it's the most interesting thing in this presentation as you turn to read the paragraph off your slide.

Which presentation bad habits drive you crazy? Any others that didn't make the SmartLemming list?

Creative Commons photo from Flickr and photo mojo

Why Are We Here?

When I present workshops and seminars about setting up a Quality Assessment program (QA), I always start by asking the participants to discuss why the purpose of the QA program and what the real focus of the program is going to be:

CSR focused QA programs often exist to motivate and build up the self-esteem of the front-line CSR. It becomes a way to give folks a pat on the back.

Corporate focused QA programs usually exist to hold the corporate line and hold CSRs accountable to comply with programs, policies and procedures. It becomes a leverage tool.

Customer focused QA programs most often attempt to measure interactions from the customer's perspective. It becomes a microscope.

Existential QA programs generally exist for no apparent reason other than for a company to say "we have one, therefore we must care about customer service." It becomes meaningless.

Of course, you may detect traces of all four within your existing QA program. Nevertheless, I find that most programs will have a determined bent in one of the four directions.

Which way does your QA program bend? What gives it away? Which would you prefer? What could you change to make it what you think it should be? Please share!

Measure What You Know, Not What You Perceive

I am a patient person. Nevertheless, I've learned that I can also be an emotional volcano. I am very slow to anger, and I rarely erupt, but there is a limit to how much frustration I will bear before the explosion is bound to occur. I'm not saying this is a good thing, but it is true about me. Because of this, family, friends, and service providers will often misread me and my responses. I don't look angry. I'm not screaming and yelling. So, they conclude, everything is just fine when it's not. In reality, there's an eruption brewing just below my calm exterior.

You can't always tell what a person is thinking and feeling.

When creating criteria for your Quality Assessment (QA) scale or monitoring form, it's best to clearly define the behaviors you're listening for from the Customer Service Representative (CSR) on the phone. The easiest way to stay objective is to measure that which you can hear and know. Keep your criteria limited what the CSR says to the person on the other end of the conversation.

It's quite common to find companies or individuals basing their assessment on what they perceive the customer thinks or feels. I've seen QA scales that are based on how well the CSR met or exceeded the customer's expectations. However, unless you interview each customer, you're making specious judgements about what that customer thought of the experience. In addition, some customers will never be satisfied. It would not be appropriate to rate the CSR's effort based on an uncontrollable outcome.

People also like to make arguments based on the perceived response or lack of response from the customer. "I shouldn't be penalized for not saying 'please,'" a CSR might argue, "because the customer clearly didn't care whether I said it or not." But, you don't know what that particular customer thought, felt or perceived. Just like my friends thinking that I'm perfectly calm when there is an eruption brewing beneath the surface. QA is not intended to be a crystal ball that looks into the mind of each customer.

We can know, for a fact, what drives our customers' satisfaction on the whole. A good customer satisfaction survey will provide us with this information and it can be critically important in defining the elements we expect as part of our QA criteria. But to try and judge an individual call based on perception of the customer's response is an exercise in futile subjectivity.

We can't control or accurately read every customer's mind, but we can control what we say to each customer and how we say it.

Creative Commons photo courtesy of Flickr and nancee_art

Prioritizing Goals for Improvement

Through years of helping struggling QA programs and training/coaching CSRs, I've found an opportunity for improvement that is consistently overlooked within the organization. The opportunity is found in the setting of performance management goals or QA improvement goals.

CSRs and front-line supervisors will often go down the QA report quickly and pick out the lowest scoring elements to place as the highest priorities for improvement. However, years of crunching QA data reveal that the lowest scoring elements on the QA form are usually those behaviors that rarely apply and, therefore, carry relatively little weight in the customer's overall service experience.

For example, hold etiquette and transfer elements typically apply to a relatively small percentage of calls. Because these elements are required less frequently, they tend to be easily forgotten and CSRs in the contact center usually score poorly on them.

When setting goals for improvement, I'll hear CSRs quicky say, "I need to work on thanking the caller for holding!" because their score is so low. But, they only put the customer on hold on 8 out of every 100 calls. An element that applies far more often, like apologizing for the caller's unmet expectations, may have a much higher score but represents a higher priority for improvement. It applies more often and will have a much greater impact on the overall customer experience.

When setting goals for improvement, be sure to consider applicability and relative impact on the customer experience as well as the QA score itself!

Creative Commons photo courtesy of Flickr and anitacanita