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Performance Matters
Quality Monitoring: Back to Basics
Five QM practices that can help you to refocus your program on the
fundamental goal: improving agent performance.
By Rebecca Gibson, Learning Currents
Five Fundamental Back-to-Basics Strategies
for Your QM Program
It’s easy to get off track when managing quality monitoring. The
sheer volume of work to be done — evaluating interactions, analyzing data for trends and actionable information, delivering individual
feedback, maintaining consistency and fairness, and educating
stakeholders — is daunting, and each activity requires significant
attention and expertise to complete successfully.
So how do you bring your QM program back in line with agent
performance goals? The following are five fundamental strategies
implemented by Convergys that are appropriate for every QM program, large or small, regardless of technology, industry or regulatory
requirements.
1. Focus on the human and performance
connection
QM technology can increase the effectiveness and the efficiency
of your program, that’s for sure. But without a focus on the basics
of performance management — creating validated performance
standards, educating staff and managers, consistently evaluating
performance and providing face-to-face feedback — the best technology won’t help you to meet your goals any more than the keys to
a Formula One racing car will win you a race.
Convergys‘ contact center management took this belief to heart,
expanding their coaching conversations into regularly scheduled
“triad sessions,” in which a quality assurance (QA) manager, a team
lead and an agent come together to discuss the agent’s telephone
performance. They review calls that were monitored jointly by QA
and the team lead (for consistency) and, together, work to pinpoint
areas for improvement. Iacobellis explains that these sessions focus
on providing a forum for meaningful open communication and the
delivery of both positive and constructive feedback. “You want your
top agents to be recognized,” he says, “and you want your critical
feedback to be constructive and useful.”
Bob Furniss, president of Touchpoint Associates, concurs that
focusing on the meaningful elements of your QM program is the key
to ensuring that you see real results (see his article on communicating better with frontline staff on page 15). “Many companies implement QM technology without the proper planning and programs in
place,” he says. “The technology should be seen as the tool for supporting the process, NOT the solution. Companies must study which
quality program model is best for their center. Will frontline supervisors handle QM and coaching? Or will there be a quality group
that handles monitoring and scoring while the frontline supervisor
handles coaching?“
2. Position monitoring as a competitive
advantage
Hang out with your quality assurance team for an afternoon, and
you’d probably hear comments like: “I have 200 calls to get through
this month,” or “She knows she has to get her score up to 90%.”
Focusing on scores and numbers is a common QM program pitfall.
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Performance Matters
Continued from page 1
Since scores are used as an indicator of success, it’s easy to mistakenly
assign meaning to them when there is often very little.
Convergys addressed this pitfall headfirst. “Companies have the
opportunity to transform QA from an administrative requirement into
an important and effective competitive tool,” says Iacobellis. “A great
deal of time and expense goes into it. If it’s just a task, where is the
value in that?” Convergys’ leaders created an expectation at all levels
of the organization to go beyond the checklist to create meaningful
conversations among QA managers, team leads and agents, and to
position the service that agents deliver as a competitive advantage.
Furniss no doubt approves. He advises companies that “the most
important thing is to keep the focus on behaviors, not on scoring.
Coaching sessions must focus on specific behaviors and, specifically,
what needs to improve to affect the score.” In addition, he recommends
that companies “choose a week or month several times each year
where NO scores are calculated. This requires the coaches and frontline
supervisors to focus on behaviors.”
QM programs should temper the tendency to reduce every call to a
score. Instead, they should encourage quality monitors to listen with
discernment and have authentic discussions with agents about how
their minute-by-minute decisions affect caller perceptions, about their
role and responsibility for providing quality service to callers, and how
to maintain a passion for service in their hearts. These things are not
measured by checklists, but they are the key to making quality monitoring and the service that is delivered part of what sets a company
apart from its competitors.
3. Schedule “purposeful” conversations
Call monitoring and associated one-to-one coaching conversations
are time-intensive processes, and they’re often the first thing to go
when adequate staffing and service levels slip. But when coaching and
development are sacrificed to meet operational goals, performance
flatlines and eventually decreases. It also sends a clear message to
agents that their performance development isn‘t a priority.
Convergys addressed this problem by working with the workforce
management team to carefully plan for coaching conversations in the
daily schedule and to protect this time whenever possible. By scheduling and planning for agent performance development, Convergys
sends an unequivocal message to their agents: Our primary goal is to
support your performance so that you can provide the highest level of
service to our clients and their customers.
In addition to protecting coaching time, Iacobellis adds that team
leads and the QA team are advised that the conversations should be
“purposeful and customized for the individual agent.“ Creating clear
expectations and educating coaching staff about the quality of the
coaching that occurs is an important aspect of increasing quality. If
calls are monitored accurately, consistently and fairly, but the quality
of the feedback and coaching is poor, it’s unlikely that the performance
needle will move in a positive direction.
Quality Monitoring: Back
to Basics
4. Increase collaboration
and communication
Convergys’ QA team and team leads have joined arms in supporting agent performance through their quality monitoring program,
increasing their collaboration and communication to create a stronger
program and better results. While they used to each listen to and comment on calls separately, today they ensure consistency by monitoring
the same set of calls and validating their ratings. By doing this, they:
●●
●●
Spur ongoing dialogue about what they’re hearing and
how they’re interpreting the performance standards, further
increasing consistency.
Demonstrate a consistent, unified interpretation of calls and
coaching to agents.
Each share their unique perspectives and expertise. QA has the
benefit of listening to a wide range of calls and focusing solely
on quality issues. Supervisors know their team members and are
aware of operational issues that may affect interaction quality.
Clients are included in this collaborative, communication-rich
approach. From the time the call quality criteria is created through full
implementation of call monitoring, clients are included in the process
every step of the way to ensure that their expectations, as well as their
customers’, are being met. In fact, it’s very rare for a client not to monitor
calls during a site visit since it’s a great opportunity to provide firsthand
feedback to team leads and QA.
Agents are involved, too. According to Iacobellis, they are instrumental in “giving us feedback about what the callers are asking and why
customers are calling in.“
Creating an environment in which the stakeholders — clients,
agents, quality, management — are continuously discussing performance and quality inevitably leads to increased understanding at all
levels about what is expected and how to know when it has been
achieved. With the entire team focused on the same goal, the likelihood of achieving that goal is substantially increased.
●●
5. Make performance count
In many organizations, individual performance is only talked about
behind closed doors. As a result, performance discussions, even discussions about the right way to do something, become fraught with
emotion and only occur within specifically scheduled windows. When
it comes to assessing call performance, Convergys doesn’t shy away
from the tough aspects of performance management. Employees
are “stack-ranked” based on their performance results (see the box on
page 6), which are largely based on call monitoring results, and staff
rankings are common knowledge within the teams and the call center.
Convergys sees this is a critical aspect of rewarding top performers, and
incenting poor performers to step it up a notch. All of this comes, of
course, with copious amounts of support, coaching and feedback.
This approach may startle some, though, without a doubt, it
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Performance Matters
Quality Monitoring: Back
to Basics
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demonstrates Convergys’ unequivocal dedication to high levels of
performance and to holding employees responsible for the quality
of their work. Regardless of how transparently you decide to measure
performance, what is important is that you establish a clear picture of
what is means to be successful and regularly provide each agent with
information that clearly shows whether he is performing to that standard. Every agent should understand that his or her performance does
count and that there are corresponding consequences — positive and
negative — to different levels of performance.
Rebecca Gibson is a workplace
learning and performance
consultant and Principal of
Learning Currents.
[email protected]
443-254-3750
In 2008, Convergys found that
— nine out of 10 customers surveyed considered service ahead of brand and price
when considering how loyal they were to a product or business. —
According to John Iacobellis, VP of North America Operations, this reinforces the key role that the contact plays
in customer loyalty. “Our goal is to add more value than ever before to our clients and their customer experience,” he says. “Our agents are the direct link to move the needle.”
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