QAQNA

QAQnA Mug Club Welcomes Jonty Pearce!

2009-11-11T08:11:05-06:00

This month, the Mug Club offers a hearty welcome to Jonty Pearce, editor of Call Centre Helper magazine. We wanted to honor Jonty for his faithful support, insightful comments, and kind encouragement over the past year. I had the opportunity to briefly meet Jonty and his family this past March and have enjoyed our correspondence.

Call Centre Helper is an excellent resource for people at every level of the industry. The content is first-rate and Jonty does a masterful job of addressing issues across the spectrum from training and QA to technology and management.

A QAQnA travel mug is on its' way across the Atlantic so Jonty can enjoy some coffee (or tea) with our Coffee Time Links!

The Call Center as Social Media Outpost

2009-11-04T07:07:28-06:00

At ICMI's ACCE 09 conference last month, the buzz was around expanding the call center to become a social media outpost. It is rapidly becoming clear that interacting with customers is no longer just through phone calls. Interacting with customers must happen through the emerging communication channels like Facebook and Twitter.

I recently had an article come across my desk from Keith Fiveson of ITESA. He agrees:

Agents can outreach and act as a “social media outpost” casting their net to capture conversations, hear, and deal with hearts, minds, problems and people that impact your business products or services. Problems are inherent, in any business and it is essential that you are diligent in addressing and resolving them. Using a contact center as a “Social Media Outpost” is a good strategy to address concerns, bad press or consumer affairs issues that can plague the best brand management strategy.

Here's the entire article: Download The New Frontier Your Call Center as a Social Media Outpost

Are you preparing your call center for the new frontier of customer communication?

Reminder: Quality Programs Need Someone in the Bull Pen

2009-10-29T06:39:24-05:00

You get what you measure. That's one of the fundamental truths of Quality Assessment. If people know they are being held accountable to a standard, they generally perform to that standard. By the same token, if they know they are not being measured, their behavior will often ease back into old habits (I've been able to quantify this effect with data). It's important for a quality program to keep momentum.

I was recently reminded how critical it is for smaller contact centers to be prepared for turnover in their quality team. It is quite common for call centers with less than fifty seats to have one person who handles the quality process. If tragedy strikes or that person suddenly leaves, the contact center can suffer an agonizing lapse in their process. As a new person gets up-to-speed, the floor eases back into old habits and, after taking three steps forward, you find yourselves two steps behind.

Wise King Solomon reminded us, centuries ago, that "two are better than one." If you are operating a quality program in a small contact center with one QA analyst, you might give thought to initiating redundancy. Make sure you have bench strength to carry you through, if and when you should need it. Have a person trained and warming up in the bull pen should you find your QA ace suddenly in need of relief.

Creative Commons photo courtesy of Flickr and 2eklectic

Allocating Time and Resources in Call Coaching

2009-10-27T08:45:28-05:00

A client called me yesterday to discuss some of the internal call coaching they are starting in their call center. The supervisor has limited time for coaching and has chosen to focus the coaching on just the Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) who are below goal.

Given the circumstances, I understand the focus on those who need a little extra motivation to improve their service delivery. If you're not careful, however, you'll end up with some of your best performers alienated and feeling left out. Everyone needs feedback. Everyone needs encouragement. Whenever you focus all of your time on one group of agents at the exclusion of another, there are all sorts of unintended messages sent and received. Some CSRs feel excluded while others feel that they are being singled out.

To minimize the damage, I suggest a few things:

Make sure everyone receives coaching and feedback, even if happens at different levels of intensity. You should still coach your best performers. They need to hear how they are doing. They need the affirmation and some one-on-one time. It will help them maintain, or even improve, on their already strong performance. You might coach your best performers once for every three or four sessions you have with your poor performers, but they still need to know you care.
Make call coaching a thread in the fabric of daily life in your contact center. Instead of doing ten sessions on one day every month, do one session a day for ten days. CSRs tend to feel a greater sense of anxiety when getting pulled off the floor for coaching is a "once in a while" event. If coaching is something that happens day-in and day-out, the opportunity for disproportionate fear and anxiety is lessened.
Communicate your plan of action to the entire team. Speculation is the root of all kinds of misunderstanding. In a team meeting, explain the plan so that everyone knows what is happening.

Iowa Telecom's Healthy Mix of Service & Sales

2009-10-23T10:38:52-05:00

I had a great time Wednesday at the Association of Contact Center Professionals (ACCP) get together at Iowa Telecom's (ITC) Newton, Iowa contact centers. ITC was a fantastic host and gave those of us in attendance a terrific overview of their contact center operations along with a tour of their facilities.

Our group has worked with ITC for many years providing Customer Satisfaction surveys. We also helped them start their QA process and get it off the ground. I have to admit that I felt some pride as I toured the facilities and saw what a great job their team was doing.

One of the things that I've witnessed ITC doing well is to merge cross-sells and up-sells into their customer service environment. It is an example of how the "cost center" mentality normally associated with Customer Service can evolve into a revenue generator for the company. A couple of high-points:

The CSAT research our team provides ITC clearly established that a good percentage of ITC customers are sometimes or always willing to hear up-sell or cross-sell offers if their primary issue has been resolved. This knowledge provided a firm foundation on which to build their up-sell process.
The management team has done a good job of establishing realistic guidelines for when CSRs should, or should not, present offers - and which offers to present.The up-sells are natural value adds to the customer's communication needs (not an irrelevant add-on like time-shares in Jamaica).
The QA team focuses on a healthy mix of customer service skills and sales skills. Sales opportunities are aggressively tracked right along with soft skills and resolution.
Utilizing a combination of outbound surveys and post-call IVR surveys, ITC is keeping their finger on the pulse of the customer. If there is a shift in winds of customer satisfaction, they should know and respond.

We all know that great customer service builds customer loyalty. Leveraging that into immediate sales opportunities is a delicate balance. Iowa Telecom is walking the tightrope well.

Thanks to Tim Lockhart and the Iowa Telecom team for being such generous hosts. Thanks to the local ACCP board for putting the event together. Thanks to Avtex for sponsoring the event.

Creative Commons photo courtesy of Flickr and jalexartis

Sore Throat Remedies for CSRs

2009-10-15T08:04:17-05:00

Here in the northern hemisphere, it's the beginning of cold and flu season. Everywhere I go I hear people coughing and wheezing as they speak with gravelly voices. My own household is a cacophony of hacking, sneezing, and snuffling. Colds can be killer for CSRs whose livelihood depends on using their voice all day (or all night) long.

So, thanks to the folks at Reader's Digest, I pass along four common remedies for those pesky sore throats that plague everyone in the contact center:

Tomato Juice
For temporary relief of sore throat symptoms, gargle with a mixture of 1/2 cup tomato juice and 1/2 cup hot water, plus about 10 drops hot pepper sauce.
See more uses for Tomato Juice.

Vinegar
Here are three ways that you can make a sore throat feel better:

If your throat is left raw by a bad cough, or even a speaking or singing engagement, you'll find fast relief by gargling with 1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar and 1 teaspoon salt dissolved in a glass of warm water; use several times a day if needed.

For sore throats associated with a cold or flu, combine 1/4 cup cider vinegar and 1/4 cup honey and take 1 tablespoon every four hours.

To soothe both a cough and a sore throat, mix 1/2 cup vinegar, 1/2 cup water, 4 teaspoons honey, and 1 teaspoon hot sauce. Swallow 1 tablespoon four or five times daily, including one before bedtime. Warning: Children under one year old should never be given honey.
See more uses for Vinegar.

Creative Commons photo courtesy of Flickr and andreanilsson1976

The Crystal Ball Approach to QA

2009-10-13T08:09:10-05:00

At last weeks' ACCE Conference, I had a number of conversations with call center professionals who reported that their Quality Assessment (QA) programs were making a major shift towards the subjective. My collective understanding from all these conversations is that companies are getting tired and frustrated trying to behaviorally define their expectations in a workable form and are weary of haggling in calibration over every jot and tittle. So, they threw away the form and asked supervisors, managers and QA analysts to simply listen to the call and answer a few questions like:

"Did you exceed the customer's expectations?"
"Did you represent the brand?"
"Did you resolve the call?"
"Did the customer have a good experience?"

On the surface it appears simple and less cumbersome. On the back end, I'm afraid it is rife with obstacles. Here are a few concerns:

Outcome is analyst dependent. Depending on where the analyst sits on the continuum between "QA Nazi" (e.g. "QA is my opportunity to identify and weed out every single flaw you have and ensure you submit to my personally unattainable high standards in the interest of an altruistic goal of exceptional service through call center domination.") and "QA Hippie" (e.g. "QA is my opportunity to build self-esteem, spread a positive attitude, and avoid any conflict by giving you glowing remarks on every call and politely ignoring those pesky 'rough edges' which I'm sure you'll change all by yourself without me having to say anything and risk you going postal."), the simple, subjective approach to QA will create radically different feedback to CSRs across the call center.
Crystal ball required. Trying to determine an individual customer's thoughts, ideas, expectations of a single call requires a magic crystal ball or ESP. Unless you have a specific customer IVR survey tied to the specific call you're coaching (which, some centers do), you don't know for certain what the customer thought (even if you do have an IVR survey attached, an individual customer's feedback to the agent can be highly correlated to their overall experience with the product or company - which could lead to unreliable feedback). The bottom line is that, in most cases, the QA analyst is just making an educated guess filtered through their own bias. Whenever you start guessing about what the customer thought, your analysis has lost any reliable objectivity. Any performance management data made on the analysts' subjective perception of the customer experience can create all sorts of HR problems.
You still go back to behavior. If a CSR gets poor marks on a call, he or she still wants to know "what do I specifically need to do in order to do a better job?" The analyst must still create a behavioral definition of what a "good job" is to them (i.e. "You need to be more polite by using 'please' and 'thank you.' You need to use the customer's name more often to make it more personable." etc.). However, now that behavioral feedback is analyst dependent. You have multiple analysts giving their personal prescriptions for what they consider a 'good job.' You haven't escaped the behavioral list. You just let each analyst create and control their own individual list. Now you have multiple people in the center applying their own personal definition of quality rather than driving the center to a unified understanding of quality and what is expected of CSRs.
You have poor data on which to make decisions. CSRs on the Inbound Order team are getting better QA marks this month, but why? What made the difference? Which behaviors did they modify to make the improvement and what percentage of the time are they displaying those behaviors? How do you know the supervisor isn't just in a better mood now that his divorce is final? If the Training team wants to know which service skills need remedial training and focus, they can see how many times a CSR did not represent the brand, but what specifically the CSRs are doing or not doing is up to the analyst's best recall, highly dependent on analysts definition of what represents the brand, and likely requires someone to go through every form and try to pull some kind of meaningful data from it. You may have simplified the front end of the process, but you have very little actionable data or information on the back-end to benefit your team.

This isn't to say that there isn't a silver lining to simple, anecdotal feedback. There is a place for listening to a call and providing an initial reaction based on what was heard. The approach does provide feedback. It does give the CSR a general idea of where they stand and provides an opportunity for communication about service and quality. The subjective approach is, however, a poor substitute for a systematic, data-driven, objective analysis of what CSRs are and are not saying across a random set of calls.

Creative Commons photo courtesy of Flickr and Kraetzsche

Great Week at ICMI's ACCE 2009

2009-10-08T17:59:34-05:00

I've enjoyed my week at ACCE 2009 in Las Vegas. I presented a half-day workshop on "Building an Effective QA Form" and appreciated the great participation and the kind response from attendees. While I've been tweeting up a storm from various sessions (you can follow me @tomvanderwell), it's taken me some time to sit down and write a post.

A couple of personal highlights:

Congratulations to American Express UK for winning ICMI's call center of the year award!
Contact Solutions motivated everyone to tweet up during the week.
I personally thought a few speakers fell in the "entertaining concept, no practical value" category, but I was pleased to connect with Bob Furniss who "leads with the heart" and is passionate about making a measureable difference.
While the call monitoring hard hitters were present with their "we can do everything and have the price tag to prove it" software, I was intrigued to hear how CXM is trying to make call monitoring affordable for the little guys.
Patrick Morrissey of Salesforce had an exceptional presentation and made an engaging case for why their web-based Service Cloud, which helps clients track customer engagement with social media, is an important part of cutting edge customer service.
It was great to meet Dustin Hou of ICMI China, and to learn about the excitement around the growing call center industry in China.

Most of all, it was great to network with some real call center pros who are passionate about their employees, their customers and making "quality" more than a buzzword. These exceptional professionals include, but are certainly not limited to Karen Reilley (MonaVie), Eddie Rios (Governor's University), G. Randall Sherwin (Beachbody), Tiffani Doherty (Progressive), Jennifer Fitzherbert (Virtual-Agent Services), Richard Gasbarro (APC), Michael Wishnick (AP), and Cindy Sheridan (Lincoln Military Housing).

Coffee Time Links 10-08-09

2009-10-08T16:56:24-05:00

The Coffee Time Links mantra:

15 minutes, 1 cup of javaaahh, 5 great links.

New Mug Club Member: Ann Onimous

2009-10-05T05:00:00-05:00

In a quiet little corner of the blogosphere, Ann Onimous blogs about her experiences as a call center Quality Assessment analyst on her blog Call Center QA Blues. Her blog provides an honest meditation from the eyes, ears, mind and heart of a QA pro. From her always humorous "QA word of the day" posts, to her customer service experiences, to her transparent thoughts about her job, Ann is one of my favorite bloggers.

Ann has been a regular around QAQnA for a long time. She comments often and we've exchanged email on numerous occasions. She's has a sweet spirit and has been a great source of encouragement for me.

Ann, welcome to the Mug Club! Enjoy your mug. We raise our coffee mugs in your honor.

Cheers!