By Jim Rembach – Vice President, Customer Relationship Metrics
In call centers, monitoring and assessing an agent’s call performance is—and
should be—a standard practice. Research shows that over 90% of call centers
monitor the quality of their agents’ phone calls and other customer interactions.
It is very important for your leaders to monitor your agents’ call performance
to evaluate their competency and proficiency. Monitoring is also a tool that you can
use to assist in identifying system, training, and other performance gaps.
Almost 95% of all call centers use an in-house set of criteria in the monitoring
process. Leaders, sometimes with agents’ input, generally formulate these internal
criteria. They are often formulated with the intent that if all of the criteria are
met then total customer satisfaction has occurred. This is a common misconception.
Internal quality and external quality are two totally different things. Often,
call center professionals make the mistake of relying on internal quality scores to
measure customer satisfaction or customer loyalty. Don’t you make that mistake.
For a quality program to be successful it must contain both internal and external
quality measures. If the proper criteria are utilized for each, then a more realistic
view of customer satisfaction will be apparent. To reduce the gap between internal
and external quality, use customer feedback information to calibrate your internal
quality criteria.
Both measurements must be timely and used as a tool for improvement. Often times
external quality measurement is not tied back to a specific interaction or is requested
days, even weeks after an interaction has taken place. This results in inadequate and
inconsistent results that are not credible enough to make positive change. To improve
the confidence level of the feedback make sure the survey process is tied to a specific
agent and contact.
Measuring both internal and external quality, in conjunction, is vital to the
success of your call center and your organization. To truly become customer-focused
make sure you do both.
