Call centers need call monitoring so they can improve their reps. No, we're not only talking about agents. We're talking about reputations.
Agents are responsible for customers' perceptions of the companies they represent. That's a fact that comes with the job of speaking with customers. Recordings of calls are facts, too; they comprise a call center's best evidence about how agents communicate with customers. But evaluating agents requires more than listening to recordings of calls or replaying agents' actions on their computers during these calls.
Recordings are only valuable when you can learn from them. In this article, we devote our attention to new standalone call monitoring tools that enable you to locate opportunities to improve the outcomes of agents' calls. (Our next issue will feature case studies that describe call centers' quality assurance efforts.)
Recordings require interpretation; they can't interpret themselves. Spotting words isn't equivalent to interpretation; neither is identifying moments when agents or customers speak loudly. Interpretation isn't something you can automate or replace with a form. Interpretation requires call centers to develop evaluation criteria that focus on the results of calls rather than on the actions of agents. By examining the environment in which previous calls occur, and the perceptions of the participants in these calls, you can establish better control over the results of subsequent calls.
Perceptions are reality. When call centers misread customers' perceptions, they damage their reputations and those of the agents who work for them. As the survey in this issue's Research Corner shows, customers' perceptions are often more accurate than companies' perceptions of themselves. One of the survey's most significant revelations is the gap between how highly call centers evaluate the service they provide, and how poorly their customers evaluate them. The irony: the main criterion call centers claim they use to judge their performance is customer satisfaction.
This survey describes call centers' and customers' attitudes about offshoring, but many of its findings apply no matter where call centers are located. The divergence between customers' priorities, and call centers' perceptions of them, transcends geography and culture.
Among customers' most prevalent issues with dealing with agents at offshore call centers were that agents seemed to be poorly-trained, and that they were unable to resolve customers' problems. Two of customers' top three gripes with overseas agents had little to do with offshoring. They had more to do with customers' perceptions of, and attempts to find explanations for, outcomes of calls.
When call centers monitor calls, they tend to focus on agents' behavior to confirm if agents do their jobs well. But this approach isn't at all helpful in resolving another leading complaint of callers to offshore call centers, which was that agents didn't have their customer histories.
Call centers nevertheless tend to place the burden of quality almost entirely on agents. If, for instance, a customer is not happy that a dental insurer no longer reimburses him in full for teeth cleaning, chances are that the customer will vent his frustration on agents. At the same time, the insurer will evaluate agents on how they respond to angry customers, rather than trying to prevent customers from getting angry. From the customer's and the call center's perspectives, the agent is the person most responsible for the customer's anger.
That's why call centers need to shift quality assurance from individuals to organizations. In this way, they help agents become more adept with the aspects of handling calls that are under their control. Companies also need to develop evaluation criteria that put agents' roles in context, and that account for how all operations affect the results of calls. Quality assurance is everyone's responsibility.
As Oscar Alban, principal market consultant with Witness Systems (Roswell, GA), explains, monitoring used to be solely a call center function. Now, he says, "it's extending to other areas of the company."
Indeed, the role of call monitoring must expand from recording conversations, and evaluating them after the fact, to discovering ways to serve customers more effectively. Call centers don't change their operational habits easily.
"We're still seeing companies recording agents for 'just in case' scenarios, or only evaluating calls when potential problems arise or when they see a problem in the agent's performance," says Chris Homer, vice president of sales and marketing with VoiceLogger (Enid, OK). He characterizes these efforts as "reactive measures as opposed to proactive."
At a time when compliance is foremost among companies' priorities, it makes sense that call centers often implement call monitoring as a way to mitigate risks, such as in circumstances when recordings confirm whether customers consent to particular transactions. Compliance is a justification for monitoring calls; it isn't the goal.
What are the goals of call monitoring? In the opinion of Ted Lubowsky, vice president of sales and marketing with Envision (Seattle, WA), "the most important thing is understanding what your customers want." Tony Procops, general manager with ASC telecom (White Plains, NY), says that call centers "must carefully measure results based on the customer's perception of the organization if they are to increase retention rates and revenue." And, in the opinion of Lou Boudreau, chief technology officer with Verint Systems (Melville, NY), call monitoring is ultimately "about successful call outcomes."
If we synthesize all these goals, the aim of call monitoring becomes a matter of linking outcomes of calls to customers' behavior, and not only to the behavior of agents. To be effective, monitoring has to expand its purview beyond agents to encompass all participants in, and contributors to the outcomes of, conversations. As John Kaiser, vice president of global marketing with Stratford, CT-based Dictaphone's Communications Recording Systems group, says, "If you don't listen more broadly, you miss a tremendous opportunity to evaluate the interaction itself."
By gathering customers' feedback about calls, call centers can use monitoring as an opportunity to evaluate calls from customers' perspectives, instead of depending on checklists that specify how agents ought to behave. Call centers can also learn what effects, if any, their approaches to training and coaching agents have on customers.
You can give agents a larger stake and role in what transpires during calls by identifying characteristics, or key performance indicators (KPIs), of calls whose outcomes are positive for customers and the company. In this way, a call center can establish guidelines for handling calls instead of dictating what agents should do.
For a financial services company that offers 401(k) plans, for instance, a relevant KPI would be the percentage of incoming calls that result in rollovers among new plan members who have switched jobs. The rollover is a relevant outcome to the call center because it is the result of agents' conversations with plan members.
The value of KPIs is that they address agents' communication with customers rather than inculcating behaviors based on scripts. When monitoring calls, suggests Nancy Gates, vice president of marketing with HigherGround (Canoga Park, CA), "call centers should focus more on gathering valid and meaningful KPIs that will allow them to manage the entire customer experience in a positive and profitable manner." (HigherGround is planning to introduce new tools later this year that use KPIs as the basis for evaluating agents.)
These ideas aren't abstractions; they are emerging as the foundation of quality assurance in call centers. Kristyn Emenecker, product manager of contact center solutions with Mercom Systems (Lyndhurst, NJ), says that the clients she works with are demonstrating "more of an understanding this year that quality monitoring as a process allows for access to tremendous insight into customer attitudes, motivators, and the why behind the customer actions taken." Among these clients, she observes that "focus is beginning to be spread not just to what the agent said and did, but also to what the customer said and did, and even to what the supervisor said and did in coaching follow-up."
Outcomes of calls are also reflections of your hiring decisions. Several modules from call monitoring vendors, including Dictaphone's ContactPoint Recruiter and etalk's (Irving, TX) JASS, help you assess candidates for jobs as agents. We describe Dictaphone's latest assessment module in a First Look in this issue. Also in this issue, Jennifer O'Herron's feature article illustrates how real-life call centers that have large numbers of candidates to choose from select and hire agents who can serve their customers best.
