QAQNA

Are You Creating a "Powerful Customer Experience?" You Could Win!

I'm proud to have been asked to be part of the faculty for ICMI's ACCE Conference & Expo in Las Vegas October 5-9. My pre-conference workshop will focus on building an effective Quality Assessment scorecard. If you're building or revamping your QA scale, it would be a profitable 3 1/2 hour workshop for you and your team. The week will include a veritable plethora of valuable workshops, keynotes, and networking opportunities.

ICMI has just announced a contest in which you could win a free trip to the event! All you have to do is create a short, creative video describing how your call center is improving the power of your customers' experience.

Come on QAQnA readers! Get your team's creative caps on and come meet me in Vegas!!

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

QA is a Human Enterprise

I was grieved to recieve a call yesterday informing me that one of the young operators at a client's call center was in a tragic car accident and is being removed from life support.

For all the numbers and data, Quality Assessment is, at the root of it, a human enterprise. Contact Centers become family. I have always attempted to treat every person I coach and train with dignity and respect (even when, in the moment, individuals may react in angry, disrespectful ways).

It's a sobering, but worthy reminder today. Life is fragile. Let's endeavor to treat each other with care.

Praise or Criticism? What Works Best?

It's a classic debate in the world of call center quality assessment (QA). Do you use QA to praise Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) so as to encourage them and build their self-esteem? Do you use QA to be critical and hold CSRs accountable to keep them honest? Is there a happy medium, and if so, where is it?

When giving seminars, I often use the word pictures of the "QA Nazi" (who uses QA as a means of beating CSRs into submission) and the "QA Hippie" (who uses QA to give CSRs smiley faces and make their world a "happier place") to represent the extremes on both sides of the spectrum.

My coworker recently forwarded an article to me from NY Times Magazine about some research that's being done on the power of praise and criticism with children. While the research focuses on parents and their children, I would submit that there are some lessons for us all to learn in the QA, training and coaching arena.

The most recent research is finding that undue praise can actually have a negative effect. Those who are constantly and generally praised tend to become more competitive, less motivated and less willing to put out effort towards improvement.

Does this mean that praise isn't important? Not at all. What the research is discovering is that praise is a powerful force when it is specific and sincere.

I'm sure the debate will never end, and I'm not sure that it should. A professor of mine said, "truth lies at the tension between the two extremes," and I've found it apt in many situations. Finding that right balance between praise and accountability is elusive, but one to which all QA teams should strive. 

I continually come back to a few key tenets:

• Know what drives your customer's satisfaction, by asking them
• Define specific, desirable behaviors that will meet & exceed those expectations
• Measure those specific behaviors
• Give consistent, honest, data-led feedback to CSRs telling them which behaviors they are consistently performing, and which behaviors theyare inconsistently demonstrating
• Train and coach CSRs toward improvement
• Praise CSRs for the specific, documented acheivements and improvements
• Hold CSRs accountable for specific, documented lack of performance

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

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

Check the Scores for Consistency

Most companies who monitor calls and do Quality Assessment (QA) have some form of calibration. This usually follows some pattern of listening to a call with a group of people and analyzing it together to find out where you agree and disagree on an evaluation. It can be a painful process.

You can often learn just as much, if not more, by simply comparing a large sample of evaluations scored by different analysts.

For example, I was recently pouring over a comparison of quarterly data for one of our clients. I have a member of my team run the raw data on a regular basis and provide me with a comparison report. In this particular project, we have four analysts scoring a couplehundred calls per month. There are roughly 65 different behavioral elements we analyze that are rolled up into 14 corresponding attributes. There is a score for each attributeand a corresponding Overall Service score on a scale from 0 to 100.

First, I compared the average Overall Service score for each of the four analysts. The four analysts were within a half-point of the overallaverage for the group. This told me that I didn't have anyone who was particularly lenient or harsh in their analysis. Our overall service numbers were very similar. If an analyst had an overall service score that was much higher or much lower, it would have motivated me to dig into the underlying data to find out why. So far, so good.

Next, I compared the average scores for each of the 14 Attributes. Because some Attributes rarely apply, there are much higher deviations. Keeping this in mind, I focused on the attributes that apply most often and have the greatest impact on the Overall Service score. Once again, our scores were very similar.

Finally, I looked at the average number of times each analyst marked a behavior "yes," "no," or "not applicable" for each of the behavioral elements. In this instance, I found one of my new analysts who had marked a particular behavior as applicable on 100% of the calls analyzed while the other analysts had it applicable on less than half. Because it's an element within an attribute that the client normally scores very well - it didn't show up in the corresponding score. Nevertheless, it could eventually make a difference, and we were clearly not calibrated in scoring this particular behavior. By looking at the data, I was able to address the issue with the analyst and coach them on how to more accurately measure that particular behavior. From this point forward, we should be more closely calibrated.

Sometimes, you've got to let the data show you the way.

A Different Take on Difficult Customers

A few weeks ago I was fortunate to be in London for a few days with my wife, and I met up briefly with Jonty Pearce who edits Call Centre Helper magazine in the UK. Jonty and I enjoyed a follow up conversation over the phone. If you're unfamiliar with his on-line magazine, it's worth bookmarking and making frequent visits.

I loved their current article on how we respond to difficult customers. After writing a few posts of my own on some practical ideas to use with difficult customers, I appreciated Christine Knott's psycho analytical take on the subject. I believe we can learn a lot from looking at the same subject from different perspectives and disciplines.

Christine shares that, when faced with a difficult customer, we often unconsciously revert to one of three "ego states":

Parent ego state: represents the occasions when during conversations we respond in a manner that copies the behaviours and actions of parental or influential figures from our lifetime. Can you recall instances when you’ve heard yourself thinking ‘I sound just like my mother/father/teacher’? You are reflecting and copying their behaviour.

For example, during a conversation a person may display anger by shouting at someone because they learnt from an early age that when the parent shouts the child takes notice.

Adult ego state: represents the occasions when during conversations we draw on our lifetime of experiences as an adult to guide us objectively to a positive outcome. When we are in our Adult state we see, hear and respond to people as they really are, and have an understanding of why they are reacting as they do, rather than accepting at face value the way they choose to communicate.

For example, if during a telephone call our organisation is criticised we would respond with a calm, logical response which aimed at reducing or removing the emotion from the discussion in order to resolve issues in a logical and factual manner. We would adopt this state having learnt throughout our lifetime that shouting, sulking, answering back or other emotional states will detract from our ability to reach a solution, and extend the time needed to reach it.

Child ego state: represents the occasions when during conversations we revert to behaving, feeling and thinking similarly to how we did in childhood.

For example, during a conversation a person who receives criticism may react as they did in their childhood when they were reprimanded. This reaction may take on an emotional form, crying, sulking, answering back or perhaps feeling ashamed or angry.

I'm reflecting on conversations I had yesterday, and I can identify all three ego states in my reactions to different people.

How about you?

"...and a 7.5 from the Soviet judge."

I'm a child of the Cold War era, when the United States and the Soviet Union were two world super powers locked in an on-going political struggle across the globe. As a child watching the Olympics, it became a running joke to watch politics creep into the judges scores in competition like gymnastics and ice skating. No matter how well an athlete from the U.S. performed, we felt that the scores from the Soviet judges and their allies were always slightly lower than they should have been. Perhaps the Soviet children watching felt the same thing happening from Western judges.

Much like a gymnastics judge watching a routine and trying to place an objective measurement on what took place, call monitoring and quality assessment attempt to objectively measure what took place in an interaction between the company and the customer. There are ways to largely drive subjectivity out of the process and make the assessment as objective as possible. In the end, however, it is a human process. Mistakes will be made. People will see the same thing differently.

This doesn't mean, however, that you throw the baby out with the bath water. I will sometimes hear people argue that QA is completely unreliable because mistakes sometimes occur. If we apply the same logic to athletics than we should just make all the Olympic gymnasts, skaters, and divers hand back their medals and throw the sports out of the competition. That doesn't make much sense, does it?

When done properly, QA can provide a highly accurate picture of the service experience over a period of time. Because it is a human endeavor mistakes will occur. The benefits of listening, assessing, training and coaching far outweigh the risks of sticking your head in the sand and hoping that your team is doing a good job on the phone.

Creative Commons photo courtesy of Flickr and Bryangeek

Personality and Quality Assessment

I think a few people in my pre-conference workshop were surprised when I started the session with a brief personality test. After all, what do personality types have to do with QA in our call center?! Believe me, the longer I spend in this field the more I come to understand that personality often plays a huge, unrecognized role in a company's QA program.

The structure and function of Quality Assessment appears to be a nuts and bolts proposition complete with data, metrics, charts, graphs, sample sizes, and statistical methodology. The goal of QA is to objectively measure what takes place in phone calls. A good QA scale will allow you to quantify these "moments of truth" in very clear, systematic ways. Nevertheless, the program is built and administered by people. The results are communicated by people and used to coach and train people. Quality Assessment is about people, and the personalities of those people affect QA in a very real sense from beginning to end. If you're not careful, personalities can skew or derail the QA process altogether. A good QA program will provide a balanced measurement that minimizes the effect personalities may have on the process.

How are the personalities of your management team, your call center manager, your supervisors, and your CSRs affecting your QA process?

Creative Commons image courtesy of Flickrand Combined Media