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Improving Call Quality & Service Delivery
An extract from Call Quality Practices 2008
Call monitoring is inarguably one of the best methods of improving call quality and service delivery. While companies can measure customer satisfaction through customer focus groups, customer contact follow-up telephone surveys, and written satisfaction surveys, the results are often not timely enough or detailed enough to help individual agents understand their impact or contribution. A call monitoring session on the other hand, if done correctly, can instantly deliver a wealth of customer satisfaction information, gauge individual agent performance and reveal a lot about your business processes and policies. Not only can it improve the customer experience, it can also improve overall call center performance, reduce callbacks, focus training efforts, identify process improvement opportunities, and facilitate employee development. Call quality monitoring refers to the process of listening to or observing an agent’s phone conversations or other multi-media contacts with customers.
The industry has witnessed a proliferation of call-monitoring technology, as companies from search for ways to make the call monitoring process more efficient. The growth in Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is also opening new doors. Industry consolidation has reconfigured vendor offerings and combined technologies to provide more robust solutions. Recent incarnations include technologies that mine call data for keywords and others that interpret speech patterns and evaluate calls without human intervention. More and more features are being incorporated into technology solutions for call monitoring, making these systems more attractive to call center management and more challenging to implement.
Many companies have created specialized Quality Assurance groups to monitoring agent performance, in an effort to supplement supervisory effort or offload some of the burden. There are advantages and disadvantages that must be understood.
New technology and dedicated QA groups have made it possible to conduct more monitoring sessions per month per employee than were possible in the past. Has this led to higher customer satisfaction, improved call center performance, or more effective agents? Our survey reveals that there are no guarantees. Some companies have experienced great success while others are struggling. As most have found, call quality assurance is a highly complex process—from both a people and technology standpoint.
Resistance to the call quality program by front-line representatives or supervisors and call evaluation credibility are the most frequently reported challenge to the Quality Monitoring process. The second most challenging issue is the difficulty in designing and modifying the evaluation criteria. Finding the time and resources to conduct the quality program is the third biggest challenge reported by participants. Achieving calibration among monitors and/or supervisors is reported as the fourth biggest challenge. Finally, a lack of coaching skills or expertise was mentioned as the fifth biggest hurdle to an effective call monitoring process.
Study Findings & Observations
The Ascent Group’s research conducted during early 2008 sought to better understand how companies are monitoring call quality and other customer transactions. We asked companies to share their call monitoring experiences to help us identify the practices that make or break a quality monitoring process. We also asked them to provide their plans moving forward as well as lessons learned along the way. The results of this research are contained in the following report.
Companies who have implemented call quality programs have realized significant improvement in call quality, customer satisfaction, employee performance, and overall call center performance. Companies report specific improvement in call quality ranging from six-to-fifteen percent. Attributed gains in customer satisfaction ranged from four to ten percent. Some report significant reduction in failure rates, handle time, and callbacks. Other improvements mentioned included: higher first call resolution, fewer customer complaints, fewer errors, improved overall call quality, improved service level, and higher employee morale.
Measure the Customer Experience
Call quality monitoring must be reflective of customer value and expectations—it must truly measure the customer experience. Measuring the customer experience is the primary purpose of a call quality monitoring process. Do you know what your customers’ expect? If you don’t then find out though customer research—interviews, focus groups, expectations surveys, or even calibration sessions—take the time and spend the money to understand how customers’ want to be served. Keep in mind that expectations vary from segment to segment and that expectations change over time. Calibrating your call quality program with customer expectations is an ongoing effort.
Call quality monitoring is a performance measurement tool. Like any measurement tool, you have to be careful about what you are measuring. While the measurement process in and of itself produces change, you’ll also want to make sure you’re measuring the right behaviors.
What are the Right Behaviors?
If call quality is intended to measure the customer experience, make sure your evaluation measures represent your customers’ expectations, not what you think is important to your customers. This is one of the biggest mistakes made. Measuring call quality through call monitoring is a labor-intensive process; it’s also high risk, in terms of human factors. Call monitoring is a key determinant of stress in call centers—especially if it’s perceived as being inaccurate, untimely, too frequent, or too intense. So in other words, if you’re not truly measuring what customers’ value then you might just be wasting your time (and money) and placing your agents under undue stress.
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