Do you speak Business? We've all had to learn to understand the jargon and cliche-filled jibber-jabber common in most industries today, but do you speak it yourself?

I interviewed an otherwise intelligent and articulate software vendor representative last year who punctuated every other statement with the phrase "At the end of the day ..." He may have even said "At the end of the day, it is what it is." That statement says absolutely nothing.

Peter Leppik over at Vocal Laboratories, the customer service survey firm, had a blog post on survey questions that caught my eye recently.

He relates a story of the pseudonymously-named BigBank, which had the doomed idea to attempt lead generation via live second party post-call surveys.

The idea was that if a bank customer answered "yes" to the question "would you recommend your bank to a friend," the follow-up question was something to the effect of "okay, what's your friend's name and telephone number?" Bad idea. Any regular person can see how this might lead to trouble, but the trouble didn't come from the bank's customers.

"As soon as this question was added to the survey," Leppik writes, "BigBank's 'net promoter' score (the metric generated from the 'recommendation' question) plummeted." Now would could that be?

Leppik:

After some months of investigation, BigBank discovered that the interviewers found the follow-up question unbelievably awkward--and I don't blame them. So awkward, in fact, that they absolutely did not want to ask the question. But they had to ask the question, and if a customer answered 'yes' to the recommendation question, the interviewers would get in trouble if they didn't put something down for a new sales lead.

So when a customer said 'yes' to the recommendation question, the interviewer would simply enter 'no' in the form for the survey--intentionally miscoding the answer to avoid having to ask the awkward follow-up. Since the interviews weren't recorded, the odds of getting caught were small.

Leppik's right, of course, but the biggest lesson I extract from this example is that call recording (and by extension, data mining) of all kinds can save a center months in decyphering service problems. If your survey team asks a terrible question, you'll know early on. And this extends to all kinds of call center interactions; even small centers can afford to record every call now. They ought to.

As we prepare for the imminent arrival of the new year, it's a good time to think about applications of technology your call center deploys now that, until recently, were not readily available to most call centers. One of the best examples of these is speech recognition.

Here's a guest post from ICMI vice president Jay Minnucci:

At the ACCE conference in Seattle last month, I began a discussion on what separates good call centers from great ones. One question I left unaddressed during the session is the one that I imagine most everyone would want to know: How do you know when a call center has been able to "break through" and join the elite class? We are still refining the common characteristics, but one already identified that I want to focus on today is simplicity.

As I write this I'm taking an online survey. Paul English's gethuman.com webite has sent out a Survey Monkey survey in an effort to track some consumer preferences regarding IVRs.

As most readers now know, Paul English has united with Microsoft and Nuance to come up with what amounts to some best practices in IVR design. It is the triad's hope that the call centers that use IVRs will opt in to this list of best practices, and that they will become industry standards. Those who choose to join will get to use a little jingle or "earcon," a chime that callers will hear when they call Get Human-compliant call centers. But now back to our survey.

Several experts list some of the more common errors along with a few best practices for quality monitoring.

We asked four vendor representatives two questions: what are some of the most common mistakes call centers make with their quality monitoring program? And what are some quality monitoring best practices?

Shelley Veazie, Director of Marketing Communication, CTI Group:

Call Center administrators rarely work to improve the moral of their employees. Their monitoring techniques seem too restricting; too much like 'Big Brother.' Happy and informed employees will work harder and be more productive.

Some call centers do not properly define procedures and guidelines for communication expectations of their employees.

Some administrators waste too much time by trying to manually monitor their employees by walking around the office.

The best practice for call center administrators is to create a policy and stick with it. Define your communication policy from customer service to performance expectations. Do not limit your employees by spending too much time looking over their heads and micromanaging. Define expectations and hold them accountable.

We've been asking vendors and consultants about call monitoring and recording for the last few weeks for our September feature on the subject and we've been getting some good responses. Our first question is the most basic: what is the goal of the quality monitoring system today? It isn't as straight forward as it used to be, with enterprises using the call center's recordings for business intelligence and marketing, not just agent training.

ICMI consultant Lesley Vereen reminded us that any system is only as good as its users -- software that isn't implemented properly is useless, and it needs the enterprise's support:

"Although the technology itself doesn't result in improvement of quality anymore than a workforce management system results in improvement of the forecasting and scheduling process, a Quality Monitoring System can play a critical role in the success of an organization's quality monitoring program. In order to know what to expect from the QMS, we need to identify the quality goals, where all of the quality data and interfaces are and what we're going to do with data once we have it."

So what do vendors have to say? We asked a few of them via e-mail, and here's what they had to say.

The Consumerist blog has another AOL horror story -- this one about a woman trying to cancel her dead father's account. "Is that the only reason?" The agent asked her.

The blog Boing Boing had a post on Wednesday from a guy in the UK who tried to cancel his Sky TV service. The Sky agent: "You want to cancel because it’s too expensive? But everything goes up in price." And: "What do other people in the house watch?" The account was evetually closed.

But wait! There's more: In a post called Canceling Fax Service Like Passing Gallstones, the Consumerist blog tells of a woman who tried to cancel her J2 fax and voicemail service via web chat (she couldn't get through by phone).

A blogger named Vincent Ferrari posted a recording of the call he made to AOL trying to cancel the account. The Consumerist blog calls it the best thing they've ever posted.

Listen to it. It's an enraging example of how not to handle customers who want to leave. This one will never come back, and by posting the recording on his blog (which has 187 comments and counting) and posting it through Digg (which got 490 comments and counting), he's ensuring that everyone knows how bad AOL's customer service can be.

Is the mobile phone industry finally stooping to improve their legendary lackadaisical customer service? Maybe. But has anyone noticed yet?

"Their collective mediocrity is becoming more costly as customers leave each month by the hundreds of thousands. Now that most Americans own cellphones, growth for mobile carriers means not just finding new subscribers but holding onto existing ones," writes Matt Richtel in the New York Times.

In response to Mr. Barcellos' comments about Call Center Magazine's article, How Much Should You Satisfy Customers?, I wholeheartedly agree with the idea that assuring customer loyalty is and should be the ultimate aim of measuring customer satisfaction.

To be clear, the article to which Mr. Barcellos refers describes the results of research into customers' perceptions of banks based on their interactions with the banks' call centers. The research evaluated the effect of customers' communication with call centers on whether customers would recommend their banks to others.

Philosophically, I and probably most people concur with Mr. Barcellos' statements about the distinction between customer satisfaction and loyalty. As Mr. Barcellos writes, "A satisfied customer is not necessarily a loyal customer."

With that said, I should point out that the article specifically discussed research whose focus, by design, was on how call centers influence customers' satisfaction. As Call Center Magazine's editorial team becomes aware of subsequent research that links loyalty and customer service, we look forward to sharing it.

The role of a manager is a position of responsibility. But what exactly are call center managers responsible for?

Most people would agree that call centers need to maintain a balance between the number of calls they handle, and how well they handle them. In short, they need to ensure they have the resources to answer a sufficient quantity of calls without sacrificing quality. Call centers also need to achieve a sufficient level of quality when communicating with customers without sacrificing efficiency, so that they don't risk keeping customers on hold for long periods of time.

Quality is more difficult to evaluate than quantity. That's true not only in terms of calls, but also in terms of choosing performance metrics. More metrics don't necessarily convey more useful information or contribute to a more thorough understanding of performance. To illustrate this point, I'd like to refer to my correspondence with a customer support manager at the end of last year.

The manager sought advice about how to measure the following:

* the timeliness of a support rep in documenting a customer's request;

* the accuracy of a support rep's notes;

* the support rep's sense of ownership in responding to a customer's request;

* the support rep's contact with the customer; and

* the support rep's timeliness in resolving the customer's request.

As you'll recognize by reading on, the ultimate aim wasn't to figure out how to calculate these metrics; it was how to streamline these five metrics into one or two key indicators. A related goal was to convey more information, and to do so more succinctly, with one or two indicators rather than with the five metrics we began with.

It's good to see the industry starting to shake off the doldrums of the past few horrific years. In particular, one bright spot is in the quality monitoring and recording sectors - people are using it for more innovative and productive things than just logging.

Donna Fluss of DMG Consulting has written a really superb in-depth report on this sector of the marketplace. It's called the 2005 Quality Management/Liability Recording Product and Market Report. Detailed analysis of all the companies that play in this space. Plus, she makes some really interesting forecasts:

• The overall QM/liability recording market will grow by 12.5%, from $817 million in 2004 to $919 million in 2005. The contact center sector is expected to increase by 14%, from $471 million to $536 million.
• This year will see the significant adoption of speech analytics, performance management, surveying, and coaching offerings as traditional QM vendors expand further into the enterprise.
• VoIP recording will see at least a 100% increase in market penetration in 2005.

"Any company that hasn't purchased or upgraded its quality management application during the past three years should take a serious look at the new offerings in the market," says Donna.

Donna's written several articles for Call Center in the recent past, including this piece exploring the meaning of her findings. We'll be mining this report ourselves for more info in the coming weeks - stay tuned for our research analysis in an upcoming print issue, and here online. For more direct info about this report, visit the DMG site.

We had an interesting dialogue with Mercom's Kristyn Emenecker, talking about agent management best practices.

Here's the money quote:

"The QA form should not drive the behavior - culture should drive the behavior, and this will involve all programs and efforts. Quality assurance should be viewed by the agents as just a logical flow from the rest of the culture and a way to have their efforts consistently noticed and acknowledged. The culture drives, QA follows. When that takes place, they will always be in sync."

Read the rest: Q&A: Effective Agent Management