For too long, quality assurance in call centers has taken on a perversely Pavlovian approach. Supervisors review recordings of calls to listen for correct behaviors. For agents, correct behaviors yield rewards like recognition, more pay and eventually, promotions. When agents achieve the status of newly-minted managers, they train others to adopt the same behaviors that led to their rise in rank. And the cycle continues.
How useful are checklists of behaviors? Some of the actions supervisors hope to detect within a recording are easy to document, like how many times an agent says a customer's name, but may have no effect on the call's outcome. Perceptions of other behaviors, like conveying empathy, are subjective and tend to reflect a supervisor's, rather than a customer's, point of view.
What's more, the application of call monitoring to quality assurance often depends on a flawed premise to begin with. When you use a recording to evaluate an agent, you're presuming that the agent can control the outcome of the call. By this logic, a poor outcome, like an irate customer, is evidence of poor performance from the agent.
This assumption undermines the value of call monitoring to quality assurance. There's a lot you're not hearing if you only listen to a recording to find out what an agent is doing wrong.
Sometimes, the agent is the scapegoat for problems that originate with a company's products.
Larry Hennessey, director of call center technology with Data Collection Resources (Colchester, CT), recalls that was the case with one client, a manufacturer of camping stoves. "Someone would buy something, have a bad experience and pound the agent," he says. (The pounding, even if verbal, was still painful.) It was not until the company improved its products that agents stopped receiving angry calls.
Recordings reveal customers' perceptions of a company's products, services and policies. If you factor in customer surveys, recordings can serve as powerful gauges of how much an agent's communication skills affect customers' views of a company. Coupled with images of agents' screens, recordings of calls also show whether issues involving phones, computers or software contribute to problems with communicating with customers.
To have a positive effect on your center, call monitoring should be a tool to enable agents, and your company, to serve customers better. And, where possible, agents should have a say in whether monitoring, evaluations and training are helping them achieve this goal.
As Diane Williams, director of marketing with Envision (Seattle, WA), puts it, "the agent is becoming an active participant in his or her own growth."
Pepco, the Washington, DC-based utility that earned a Call Center of the Year award last year, is a key example of a company that abides by this principle. Agents helped come up with the form, which is in place throughout the utility, to evaluate how agents communicate with customers by phone.
An innovative application of call monitoring, like Pepco's, is a winning strategy. This article outlines the characteristics of a forward-thinking approach to call monitoring, and describes some examples of new call monitoring products. We will examine related areas, like training, in feature articles next year.
A NEW RECKONING FOR RECORDING
As the cost of recording calls and storing them goes down, it's easier to justify recording all calls rather than random samples.
The rationale for recording all calls is that you have the option of retrieving a conversation should you need to. That's especially important if you have to demonstrate compliance with laws ranging from the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to Do-Not-Call telemarketing legislation that goes into effect this month. But the number of recordings you possess is less important than what you learn from them. This point is easiest to illustrate with a story.
For the tens of millions of people who lost power during the afternoon of Thursday, August 14, and several days afterward, the blackout was a test of patience and adaptability. In New York City, the site of Call Center Magazine's editorial office, most businesses, including ours, had little choice but to close.
Commuters spent hours attempting to get to their homes. The subway system shut down. With traffic signals and streetlights no longer functioning, police served as crossing guards. Congestion was inevitable as buses and cars struggled to maneuver amid throngs of pedestrians.
Communication was a challenge, too. Lacking electricity, office phone systems shut down. Many wireless phones stopped working as well. Battery-powered radios became prime sources of news.
Yet the greatest breakdown in communication I experienced wasn't during my seven-hour quest to get to my apartment in New Jersey. It was while my wife was on the phone with the call center for a major airline to try to reschedule a flight from Newark we had arranged for the next morning.
The airline answered calls from a center in Jacksonville, FL, which, like the rest of the southern US, was spared the blackout. That may explain why the agent who took my wife's call didn't seem to appreciate how difficult it was for her to get home, let alone to an airport. As long as flights were leaving from Newark, where the airport had regained power, we had to follow our original itinerary. If we rebooked, we'd end up paying nearly triple our current fare.
When my wife asked the agent to connect her with a supervisor, the agent kept her on hold for several minutes. Upon coming back on the line, the agent said she conferred with her supervisor, who agreed there was nothing more she could do.
At this point, my wife and I had enough with communicating with the call center. We did manage to arrive at the airport, and we got on our flight. But we don't plan to fly with or recommend the airline.
Was the one conversation with a call center agent the sole cause of our negative perception of the airline? Not entirely. The agent adhered to a policy that she may not have had the authority to override.
But let's say another agent had answered our call. If he or she had taken time to acknowledge the havoc the blackout caused, my wife might have a different opinion of the airline. And despite the policy, we might want to fly the airline again.
My wife's experience occurred at a time when customer service is regaining center stage in the travel industry. An article in the August 18 edition of The New York Times reported that Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity relied on their call centers to assist customers who changed their travel plans due to the blackout. The larger aim of these companies, the article noted, is to evolve from offering cheap flights to competing with airlines for customers' loyalty.
Call monitoring can help companies discover what they need to do to retain customers. That's only possible when call monitoring advances from a means of behavior modification to a tool for understanding how the call center shapes a customer's view of a company.
An old-school evaluation of my wife's call with the airline would show that the agent followed protocol and provided proper referrals. A more thorough evaluation would reveal that my wife said that the agent contributed to her dissatisfaction with the airline's policy for rebooking flights. The evaluation would consider whether the agent had the authority to handle the call differently, and whether factors beyond the agent's control, like problems with the reservations system, affected the call's outcome.
By offering a survey immediately following the call, the airline also could have determined if dissatisfaction with the conversation was likely to result in lost business.
With our example in mind, let's think about how call centers can come up with more enlightened approaches to call monitoring.
ASSESS BEFORE YOU EVALUATE
Evaluations can serve two purposes. They provide guidance on how an agent can perform better. They also confirm whether the center should employ the agent at all.
Some call monitoring systems tie in pre-hire assessments with evaluations. Dictaphone's (Stratford, CT) ContactPoint software lets you define attributes you're looking for with each type of position in your center. ContactPoint also allows you to build on-line assessment forms or launch assessment software you already have. Based on applicants' responses on your forms or to questions from other pre-hire assessment instruments, you indicate which applicants you want to interview.
In theory, assessment questions should pinpoint characteristics you're looking for in applicants, like if they enjoy serving customers. In practice, call centers tend to assess whether candidates can get to work, if they can be available as the center requires and if they meet minimum qualifications in terms of education, experience or typing speed.
But if you want to ensure continuity between hiring and training, your best bet is to include questions within pre-hire assessments, in advance of interviews, about why candidates want to work as agents at your center. Then, for the candidates you hire, you can develop career paths that reflect what they share in their answers to your questions.
When you use ContactPoint to evaluate agents, the software retrieves recordings from Freedom, Dictaphone's call monitoring system. ContactPoint lets you define criteria for evaluating agents, who access the software to find out how they did on evaluations, what courses they have to take and what incentives they satisfied.
ContactPoint includes a learning management system, which Dictaphone developed, that enables you to create courses and link them to evaluations. The software allows you to set up rules so that, for example, if an agent receives a low score in a certain portion of an evaluation, ContactPoint automatically assigns the agent courses in areas where the agent needs help. In addition, you can use the software to devise curricula for agents, and give agents the option of requesting courses.
Beyond enabling you to associate incentives with overall scores, ContactPoint lets you tie incentives to scores in specific portions of evaluations, so that you have a systematic way to reward agents who improve in areas where they previously struggled.
Career paths aren't always set in stone. The needs of your customers, and your company's expectations for your call center, can change. After a certain number of months in their jobs, agents specialize in handling specific types of calls, and their career goals may change as well. That's why, says Dictaphone's vice president of marketing John Kaiser, "the competency model for agents needs to be reviewed periodically."
Assessment is a unique discipline in itself, as you'll read in this month's case studies. So you shouldn't have to burden yourself with mastering the art of developing competency models for agents. Nor should you expect to become an expert overnight on how to adapt competency models based on assessments and evaluations. That's why Dictaphone offers guidance on devising competency models through a partnership with Answerthink, an Atlanta-based consultancy.
A by-product of tracking assessments with evaluations is that it furnishes you with yet another way to classify calls. Within the next few months, Nice Systems (Rutherford, NJ) plans to offer reports about recordings of calls that track who trained, assessed or hired the agents who took these calls.
If you're interested in standalone assessment software that can work with your existing call monitoring and evaluation systems, you have plenty of tools to choose from, including etalk's (Irving, TX) Job Applicant Screening Simulator (JASS).
