Email UsHow Much Time Do You Need For Quality?
Rebecca Leonhardt, Operational Consultant
"Calls may be recorded for Quality and Training purposes". Is your organisation one of the many who has this message played to customers when they dial your contact centre? If so are you following through on the expectation you are implicitly setting?
There is nothing more frustrating than hearing this message and then experiencing one of those ?bad calls?, you know the one, where the agent is not equipped to help you and quite frankly does not care if they are helpful or not. Why give the impression that quality is important to you when quite clearly, in some cases, it is not?
And why is this the case? Well in my experience, it is that people invest heavily in call recording equipment only to use it to resolve complaints. Shutting the gate after the horse has bolted.
There is a somewhat false opinion that implementing a comprehensive quality programme is expense in terms of the time and manpower it requires. My response is two fold, first quality is always an investment worth making and second, implemented right, quality does not require a heavy investment of time.
Take a typical supervisor with 10 agents working for them, each handling around 50 calls per day of an average duration of 3 minutes. To listen to 20% of all interactions taken by their team for a particular day would take 30-45 minutes, about 6-9% of an average 8 hour working day. If you then compare this to the time taken by a supervisor in handling a customer complaint and you can at least double the time and effort required.
Even these very rudimentary figures place into perspective how little an investment is required to address the quality issue. If you then take into account that you do not need to sample 20% of every agent, but you can focus your attention on agents with the least experience, suspected issues, etc., then quality does not need to be a significant proportion of your supervisor?s time.
My supervisors are very busy, they need to handle exceptions, they need to coach and train the agents and manage the team. The answer to this is simple, quality assurance will improve the effectiveness of your contact centre and each and every agent. By taking the time to review the work of each agent, supervisors can quickly identify the strengths and weaknesses of each agent and then direct their coaching to where it is needed. In my experience, time spent by supervisors coaching can be reduced by more than 50% by focusing on the real issues that need to be addressed.
Second, through taking the time to understand what is making some agents more effective than others, you are able to raise the game of your entire team rather than just individuals. You will always have good agents and even better agents, but the secret is that there are different levels of good agents rather than good and bad.
Third, and often a key saving is in terms of process. Many organisations I have worked with have instantly identified major process issues when they systematically review customer interactions. These normally stick out like a sore thumb, but often are very simple to solve and can add significant productivity improvements.
I could go on further, but in essence, I think you can quickly see that where an investment in time is required to implement quality, the return can be significant and well and truly outweighs the investment.
If I walked into your contact centre today and stated that by investing less that 10% of the time of your supervisors on something that can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their agents by at least 10%, you will be begging me for the secret. The truth is, there is no secret; you are probably telling your customers you are doing this already.
If you want to find out more about how you can cost effectively implement performance changing QA in your contact centre, please visit www.infinityccs.com or contact us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it