Author:  Gary Barnett

I recently read that quality monitoring (QM) is leading to a decrease in customer satisfaction.  According to the article that made the above statement, QM is making employees more stressed and unhappy, which in turn is resulting in less effective service.

I believe the premise of the article was wrong - it’s not QM that is the culprit, but rather its poor implementation.

So what should companies do?  In my travels, visiting customer sites around the world, I have come to realize that there are six QM-related best practices that everyone should follow.  Use these and you’re sure to improve employee morale and will likely send your customer satisfaction ratings through the roof.

1. Create an environment where agents are highly valued and respected – allow your agents to flag calls for their supervisor’s attention when they feel that they did a good job or want to point out areas where they need more training. And, always give your agents their quality scores and feedback in a personalized manner.
2. Establish front-line leadership that is dedicated to agent development – have your managers focus the majority of their time on providing ongoing feedback and regular coaching.
3. Use the QM tool to capture and publish examples of excellent service to help agents learn – use coaching features to publish real examples with documented comments so that your agents can learn from each other.
4. Provide immediate feedback – ensure that your supervisors are reviewing and evaluating calls in an expeditious manner, and notifying agents within minutes or hours of their interactions when an item needs their attention. The issue will be fresh in the agent’s mind if feedback is delivered within 24 hours rather than sometime the following week.
5. Utilize the QM tool to focus agents on their own development and motivate them to improve – allow your agents to access their feedback, scores, and recordings online, and enable them to score themselves to identify their own improvement areas and point out their own strengths.
6. Create evaluation forms with metrics that tie to the performance you want to improve – target evaluation forms to different agent skill levels and allow your agents to improve their scores to a superior level before they graduate to the next experience level with a more stringent set of evaluation criteria.  This process will motivate your agents to improve without making them feel like you expect too much from them too quickly.

It’s time for you to do a little soul searching.  Are your agents happy with your QM processes and procedures? Do you have a best practice to add to this list?  Let me know.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 12:32 pm and is filed under Performance Optimization, Customer Service/Consumer Demands, Contact Center Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.