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Why Monitor Your Company's Phone Calls?

While it seems that everyone is monitoring phone calls these days, and it is certainly the norm in the call center industry, the reality is that there are many small to mid-sized companies who have not entered the world of call monitoring. Some companies are unaware that the technology exists and is easily accessible to companies who have just a few people serving customers on the phone. For others, the idea of call monitoring and Quality Assessment (QA) seems a daunting idea. The thought of recording and assessing phone calls brings to mind several uncomfortable questions. Many executives and managers are overwhelmed with the idea of trying to figure out what to do with it and how to figure out how to make it work for them. Others prefer to remain blissfully unaware.

Nevertheless, for a business of any size, there is value in call monitoring. When it's done well, the recording and assessment of customer interactions provides:

• Valuable Knowledge. Monitoring and analyzing calls between your business and your customers is far more than playing Big Brother and grading the performance of your agents. Within those recorded conversations is a plethora of valuable information. From monitoring calls you find out why your customers are calling, what problems your customers are commonly experiencing with products and services, what customers are saying about your business, and who your customers are. You discover clear opportunities to improve efficiency, productivity, and improving your customer's experience.
  
• Accountability. Call monitoring also provides you and your employees with accountability, ensuring that your brand is being consistently communicated and your people are performing to their potential. Monitoring calls and performance allows you to reward those who you know are contributing to your success and address those who are impeding it. Without call monitoring, you're blind to the hundreds or thousands of "moments of truth" that are impacting your customer's satisfaction and future purchase intent on a daily basis.
  
• Tactical Improvement. When our group performs employee satisfaction surveys for our clients, we find employees consistently desiring more communication and feedback from their superiors. The vast majority of employees want to know know how they are doing and how they can improve. Call monitoring provides a company with the means to make that communication and feedback happen. A successful Quality Assessment (QA) process gives employees specific, behavioral goals for improvement, tracks their progress, and gives managers the data they need for productive performance management discussions.

There has never been a greater opportunity for businesses of every shape and size to benefit from the available technology to record, monitor and analyze conversations between your company and your customers. Companies who take advantage of the resulting data and information will find themselves a step ahead of others who continue to trust their gut.

Who QA's the QA Team?

It's a classic dilemma. The Quality Assesment (QA) team, whether it's supervisor or separate QA analyst, evaluates calls and coaches Customer Service Reps (CSRs). But, how do you know that they are doing a good job with their evaluations and their coaching? Who QA's the QA team?

The question is a good one, and here are a couple of options to consider:

• QA Data analysis. At the very least, you should be compiling the data from each supervisor or QA analyst. With a little up front time spent setting up some tracking on a spreadsheet program, you can, overtime, quanitfy how your QA analysts score. How do the individual analysts compare to the average of the whole? Who is typically high? Who is the strictest? Which elements does this supervisor score more strictly than the rest of the group? The simple tracking of data can tell you a lot about your team and give you the tool you need to help manage them.
• CSR survey. I hear a lot of people throw this out as an option. While a periodic survey of CSRs to get their take on each QA coach or supervisor can provide insight, you want to be careful how you set this up. If the CSR is going to evaluate the coach after every coaching session, then it puts the coach in an awkward position. You may be creating a scenario in which the coach is more concerned with how the CSR will evaluate him/her than providing an objective analysis. If you're going to poll your CSR ranks, do so only on a periodic basis. Don't let them or the coaches know when you're going to do it. Consider carefully the questions you ask and make sure they will give you useful feedback data.
• Third-party Assessment. Our team regularly provides a periodic, objective assessment of a call center's service quality. By having an independent assessment, you can reality test and validate that your own internal process is on-target. You can also get specific, tactical ideas for improving your own internal scorecard.
• QA Audit. Another way to periodically get a report card on the QA team is through an audit. My team regularly provides this service for clients, as well. Internal audits can be done, though you want to be careful of any internal bias. In an audit, you have a third party evaluate a valid sample of calls that have already been assessed by the supervisor or coach. The auditor becomes the benchmark and you see where there are deviations in the way analysts evaluate the call. In one recent audit, we found that one particular member of the QA team was more consistent than any other member of the QA and supervisory staff. Nevertheless,there was one element of the scorecard that this QA analyst never scored down (while the element was missed on an average of 20% of phone calls). Just discovering this one "blind spot" helped an already great analyst improve his accuracy and objectivity.

Any valid attemps you make to track and evaluate the quality of your call analysis is helpful to the entire process. Establishing a method for validating the consistency of your QA team will bring credibility to the process, help silence internal critics and establish a model of continuous improvement.

If you think our team may be of service in helping you with an objective assessment or audit, please drop me an e-mail. I'd love to discuss it with you.

The Call Center as Social Media Outpost

At ICMI's ACCE 09 conference last month, the buzz was around expanding the call center to become a social media outpost. It is rapidly becoming clear that interacting with customers is no longer just through phone calls. Interacting with customers must happen through the emerging communication channels like Facebook and Twitter.

I recently had an article come across my desk from Keith Fiveson of ITESA. He agrees:

Agents can outreach and act as a “social media outpost” casting their net to capture conversations, hear, and deal with hearts, minds, problems and people that impact your business products or services. Problems are inherent, in any business and it is essential that you are diligent in addressing and resolving them. Using a contact center as a “Social Media Outpost” is a good strategy to address concerns, bad press or consumer affairs issues that can plague the best brand management strategy.

Here's the entire article: Download The New Frontier Your Call Center as a Social Media Outpost

Are you preparing your call center for the new frontier of customer communication?

The Crystal Ball Approach to QA

At last weeks' ACCE Conference, I had a number of conversations with call center professionals who reported that their Quality Assessment (QA) programs were making a major shift towards the subjective. My collective understanding from all these conversations is that companies are getting tired and frustrated trying to behaviorally define their expectations in a workable form and are weary of haggling in calibration over every jot and tittle. So, they threw away the form and asked supervisors, managers and QA analysts to simply listen to the call and answer a few questions like:

• "Did you exceed the customer's expectations?"
• "Did you represent the brand?"
• "Did you resolve the call?"
• "Did the customer have a good experience?"

On the surface it appears simple and less cumbersome. On the back end, I'm afraid it is rife with obstacles. Here are a few concerns:

• Outcome is analyst dependent. Depending on where the analyst sits on the continuum between "QA Nazi" (e.g. "QA is my opportunity to identify and weed out every single flaw you have and ensure you submit to my personally unattainable high standards in the interest of an altruistic goal of exceptional service through call center domination.") and "QA Hippie" (e.g. "QA is my opportunity to build self-esteem, spread a positive attitude, and avoid any conflict by giving you glowing remarks on every call and politely ignoring those pesky 'rough edges' which I'm sure you'll change all by yourself without me having to say anything and risk you going postal."), the simple, subjective approach to QA will create radically different feedback to CSRs across the call center.
  
• Crystal ball required. Trying to determine an individual customer's thoughts, ideas, expectations of a single call requires a magic crystal ball or ESP.  Unless you have a specific customer IVR survey tied to the specific call you're coaching (which, some centers do), you don't know for certain what the customer thought (even if you do have an IVR survey attached, an individual customer's feedback to the agent can be highly correlated to their overall experience with the product or company - which could lead to unreliable feedback). The bottom line is that, in most cases, the QA analyst is just making an educated guess filtered through their own bias. Whenever you start guessing about what the customer thought, your analysis has lost any reliable objectivity. Any performance management data made on the analysts' subjective perception of the customer experience can create all sorts of HR problems.
  
• You still go back to behavior. If a CSR gets poor marks on a call, he or she still wants to know "what do I specifically need to do in order to do a better job?" The analyst must still create a behavioral definition of what a "good job" is to them (i.e. "You need to be more polite by using 'please' and 'thank you.' You need to use the customer's name more often to make it more personable." etc.). However, now that behavioral feedback is analyst dependent. You have multiple analysts giving their personal prescriptions for what they consider a 'good job.' You haven't escaped the behavioral list. You just let each analyst create and control their own individual list. Now you have multiple people in the center applying their own personal definition of quality rather than driving the center to a unified understanding of quality and what is expected of CSRs.
  
• You have poor data on which to make decisions. CSRs on the Inbound Order team are getting better QA marks this month, but why? What made the difference? Which behaviors did they modify to make the improvement and what percentage of the time are they displaying those behaviors? How do you know the supervisor isn't just in a better mood now that his divorce is final? If the Training team wants to know which service skills need remedial training and focus, they can see how many times a CSR did not represent the brand, but what specifically the CSRs are doing or not doing is up to the analyst's best recall, highly dependent on analysts definition of what represents the brand, and likely requires someone to go through every form and try to pull some kind of meaningful data from it. You may have simplified the front end of the process, but you have very little actionable data or information on the back-end to benefit your team.

This isn't to say that there isn't a silver lining to simple, anecdotal feedback. There is a place for listening to a call and providing an initial reaction based on what was heard. The approach does provide feedback. It does give the CSR a general idea of where they stand and provides an opportunity for communication about service and quality. The subjective approach is, however, a poor substitute for a systematic, data-driven, objective analysis of what CSRs are and are not saying across a random set of calls.

Creative Commons photo courtesy of Flickr and Kraetzsche

Be Discerning with Post Call IVR Surveys

"After this call, you have the option of taking a brief survey about your experience."

More and more, consumers are being given opportunities to take surveys. They are on the receipt of almost every big box retailer and restaurant chain. Technology has made it increasingly easy for companies to take a survey of customers through their IVR system. In fact, when talking to contact center managers about doing a focused customer satisfaction survey, I will often hear "we're going to use the IVR to do that."

Be careful. While IVR surveys are a great way to gather certain types of data, you need to be discerning:

• IVR surveys tend to have built in response bias. People who "opt-in" to IVR surveys generally fall into three categories: customers who had a really good experience and want to tell you about it, customers who had a really bad experience and want to tell you about it, ir customers who like to take surveys. You may be missing a large, important, and silent segment of your customer population.
• Depending on the system you use, CSRs can skew the response. If the survey is dependent on the CSR to ask, offer or transfer the customer, you'll likely get bias based on whether the CSR determined they wanted feedback from that particular customer.
• Owning a nice spatula doesn't make you a chef. As with all surveys, the questions you ask can make all the difference on the quality of data you get out of it. Many companies will sell you the technology, but determining the questions to ask so you get the data you want and need requires a different expertise.

Please don't get me wrong. IVR surveys are a great way to gather data, but they may not give you the complete picture of your entire customer population. You may also find that you're not getting everything you want from the technology.

What are Your Principles Worth?

Our group has certain guiding principles when it comes to the way we do business. For example, since Mr. Wenger founded the company back the 1980's we have refused to work with directly competing companies. The principle comes from an old teaching:

No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.

We have never felt that it was right for us to say to one client "We are committed to your success and want you to be the best," then walk down the street to a competitor and say "We are committed to your success and want you to be the best."

So, if there is some question about conflict of interest, we go to our current client and ask them. They are our client. We are committed to their success. If they feel that a potential new client is a competitor, then we respectfully decline the business. If our current client doesn't see it as a conflict and doesn't care, then we will continue to pursue the potential project.

Of course, principles are easy to live by when times are good and it seems like there's plenty of work to go around. But, in the worst economy since the Great Depression, when revenues are fraction of what they were last year and new clients are as rare as a Chicago Cubs winning streak, it can certainly test your mettle. When a company comes looking for a project that could turn into a lucrative, long-term relationship - those pie-in-the-sky principles get put to the test. They have. They will.

In those moments I simply let my mind consider current client relationships that span five, ten, 15, and almost 20 years. I start calculating the time-value proposition of long term loyal clients, and the incalculable worth of the relationships they represent. It helps put a quick buck in perspective, even in the present economy.

Worthwhile principles prove their worth over the long haul.

Creative Commons photo courtesy of Flickr and Thomas Hawk

How Customer Service Should Respond to Social Media

Whenever I hear someone in the blogosphere or Twitter railing against one of my clients, I immediately bring it to their attention. In most cases, I've witnessed my clients responding immediately and appropriately to the situation in an attempt to rectify a problem. After sending a handful of negative posts to one of my clients, however, I received a polite email back saying, "Thanks for sending these to me, but I just don't know what to do with them!"

For all of you companies who are reading this and asking yourselves the same thing, here are a couple of things you should think about:

• Consider the issue. Is this an isolated case of one customer who had a problem spiral out of control? Or, is it a policy or procedural problem that is much bigger than one blogger on a rant? If it's the former, you should be able to quickly address the issue, satisfy the customer, and hopefully get a few props from the customer on his/her next post. If it's the latter, then you're wasting your time chasing a bunch of individual consequences from the root problem in your control. Fix the problem, then go out and address the social media outlets.
• Email the person. Put your Customer Service skills to work immediately. Tell the person that you're sorry to hear about their negative experience and you'd like the opportunity to look into it and make it right. You will quickly learn if the person sincerely wants the issue resolved or if they are determined to be an unsatisfied customer on a rant. Communicating directly and discreetly with the author allows you to quickly address the issue without being viewed as trying to aggrandize your response or without getting into a spittting match with the blogger/tweeter.
• Don't demand a retraction. If you have successfully resolved the issue and the customer is satisfied, it's acceptable to politely ask that they share the experience with their readers. Don't demand, and don't black mail ("I'll do this for you if..."). Just do the right thing for the customer.

How to Get Your Complaint Heard: Make a Music Video!

In case QAQnA readers are among the few who have not seen this YouTube video I'm posting it. Since I've had my own issues with United Airlines (and own a Taylor guitar, btw), I couldn't resist helping give the story legs.

Customers who find creative ways to tell their story sometimes get a better audience to their frustrations.

Tom Vander Well Interviewed on Michael Libbie's "Insight on Business"

Thanks to Michael Libbie of Insight on Business for having me on his webcast to talk about customer service! The entire show can be viewed here.

Competing on Price is a Sugar High

I recently read a great post by John Goodman over at The Retail Customer Experience in which he lays out Five Myths of Customer Service. It's a good, quick read and I particularly enjoyed his Myth #2: Price is the name of the game to expand share and profitability.

In over 15 years of measuring customer satisfaction and service inside client contact centers, I have learned that the easiest way to compete is with price - but it's not the most profitable way. Slashing prices is a sugar high. You get a quick infusion of business from those customers who scurry from supplier to supplier based on price. But, the same customers who came your way to get your low price will scurry right out your door when the competitor lowers their price. The crash comes just as quickly and may leave you lower than when you started.

What your competitor will have the greatest difficulty matching is a great customer service experience. Investing the creation and sustenance of a service culture within your company builds loyalty in your customer base. Customers keep coming back, even if your prices are a little higher than the other guy.

If you want to build long-term customer loyalty, learn to serve your customers well. Find out their expectations. Then build a service delivery system that will meet and exceed those expectations.

Creative Commons photo courtesy of Flickr and ktylerconk