How is quality defined in your center? You spend a good portion of your annual
budget quantifying quality by monitoring calls. Are you evaluating the right things?
The pressure is on since this is how you respond to questions about how your center is
serving the customers AND you are (or should be) tying monitoring scores to compensation
or incentives in some manner.
I challenge you to consider how your call monitoring scores can be so high.
What percentage of the scores are above 95%? Is that a true representation of how
your CSRs deliver customer service? If you are shaking your head in the affirmative,
then you should be confident that caller satisfaction scores – the view of
your service delivery from the customer’s perspective – will back up the
call monitoring scores. If you know that your call monitoring scores are inflated,
then what are you planning to do about it? In either case, you are spending a great
deal of money to collect this information and then to act upon it (training, firing,
incentive pay outs) and I question it’s subsequent value to your operation.
Many call evaluation programs attempt to rate aspects of the call that should
be evaluated by the caller and herein lies the weakness of most quality programs.
In theory, a well calibrated monitoring team should make the same assessment of the
customer relationship experience as would the customer. However, in reality that is NOT
the case. Customer Relationship Metrics conducted a comparison between the customer
relationship aspects of the monitoring program and the customer evaluation for 2,500
CSRs over a 3 month period. A statistically significant relationship was not present
for any of the comparable measurement attributes such as product knowledge, courtesy,
quality of the answer, empathy, tone, listening skills and overall satisfaction with
the call. Bottom line – the call monitoring team cannot estimate the customer
evaluation of the service. Callers should evaluate the service delivery of your center
and the call monitoring team should evaluate the adherence to policy and procedures.
Placing such a large impact on the voice of the caller is not a decision to be
made lightly. An effective measurement process is required to produce results that are
empirically sound. Your CSRs should be evaluated via a follow-up telephone interview
with callers or with Completely Automated Telephone (CAT) surveys. CAT surveys are the
least expensive route to take and are the most reliable as the evaluation of service
delivery occurs immediately after the service interaction.
Any CSR evaluation, whether via call monitoring or customer surveys, must use an
effective, reliable method that presents the least amount of criticism. If any of
your results are dismissed due to process weaknesses, then major changes are needed.
Using CAT surveys to evaluate the individual CSR provides little to no room for
criticism – the caller just dealt with Sally Jo and immediately evaluated the
service (not so if follow up telephone interviews are used). The cost is low enough
to collect surveys to match the number of calls monitored per CSR– a better
vantage point to assess how Sally Jo is serving your customers. And service recovery
opportunities are increased as dissatisfied customers are identified for the Customer
Advocate Team immediately via an Email alert. Before contacting the customer, the
Customer Advocate can listen to the customers’ comment by dialing into the CATs
system or by clicking on the sound file attached to the Email.
The evaluation of quality service cannot be a disjointed process. Your call
evaluation program and your caller satisfaction program need to complement one another
and provide an empirically sound answer to the question “how well does the center
serve the callers?”
