29 Quality Assurance Mistakes to Avoid eBook & Self-assessment

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7 Keys to Employee Engagement @BeyondMorale A selfassessment guide to creating a more customercentric contact center by transforming quality. © Customer Relationship Metrics, LLC. www.metrics.net

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Contact center leaders love this simple and easy-to-read guide (with pretty pictures too) that includes insights and a self-assessment that is used to deliver greater customer experiences. This tool will help you to finally put to rest many of things you were unable to put your finger on with your quality assurance program. Virtually unheard of until recently, quality assurance transformation has quickly become one of the hottest activities in contact centers. In the past six months, quality assurance transformation has become a big topic of discussion in the press, blogs, social networks, industry events. But here’s the problem: even world-class contact centers are struggling with getting real value from their quality assurance programs, primarily because benchmarking is holding innovative practices back: the skills necessary to analyze and understand what’s wrong with quality assurance is constrained; translating practices into behavior that drives bottom-line results; and providing the proof of value in contact center quality assurance programs. Dr. Jodie Monger, founder and president of Customer Relationship Metrics, said, “Contact center quality assurance transformation has now become a necessity. Everyone in contact centers knows that they must deliver exceptional customer experiences. They also know that there has been a problem with quality assurance programs for decades but very few understand how to actually transform it to better serve their customers.” Dr. Monger continued, “Ironically, reports of the widening of the gap between what customers perceive as quality and what contact centers perceive as quality has done little to bring about significant reform with quality assurance practices.” So contact center leaders are stuck: they need to close the gap, but are not aware of how to go about transforming quality assurance. Increasingly, these enterprises are turning to the advisory services of Customer Relationship Metrics. Dr. Monger continued, “Customer Relationship Metrics serves many recognizable brands across numerous industries. We help these companies identify behaviors for transformation, revealing practices that are undermining their customer experience objectives.” By focusing on analyzing data in conjunction with quality assurance practices, contact centers can easily identify those practices which erode the customer experience. Once these problems are fixed, experience levels increase and costs decrease organically. Dr. Monger added, “Analyzing contact center quality assurance can be overwhelming. But we make it simple for clients by pointing our focus at the most meaningful practices that can deliver the most significant customer experience results in the quickest timeframe possible. We eliminate blind spots and avoid time and resource failures, while making quality assurance transformation easier to implement.”

Transcript of 29 Quality Assurance Mistakes to Avoid eBook & Self-assessment

Page 1: 29 Quality Assurance Mistakes to Avoid eBook & Self-assessment

7 Keys to Employee Engagement

@BeyondMorale

A self‐assessment guide to creating a more customer‐centric

contact center by transforming quality.

© Customer Relationship Metrics, LLC.www.metrics.net

Page 2: 29 Quality Assurance Mistakes to Avoid eBook & Self-assessment

90 percent of contact center budgets are negatively affected due to outdated quality assurance practices 

90%

29 Mistakes to Avoid with Quality Assurance eBook

© Customer Relationship Metrics, LLC.www.metrics.net

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Wow Customer Experiences from Contact Center QualityDo you want to deliver better customer experiences in your contact centers? Do you want customers to be wowed? I know, these seem like stupid questions to actually expect a response. Really, who in their right mind would answer “no”? This is exactly why I did not ask these questions while at a contact center conference a few weeks ago. At this event I had the opportunity to meet with over a hundred contact center practitioners, all there trying to gain more knowledge and skills. Just like so many of us, these people want to do a better job, and were investing time and effort to do so. No time for stupid questions!

Honestly, I think we all have the same desire to progress and to do a better job. We definitely do not want to fail. It’s these desires that can also lead us to temptation in contact centers. We have to face the fact that at some point we were new to contact centers. Despite a few stories I have read, I do not think people were born to work in contact centers. It is a learned skill. And for most of us, it chooses us, we did not choose it. When each of us start something new we naturally look to see what others are doing to determine what we should do. A somewhat structured approach of “what are others doing“ is called benchmarking. One thing that may not clearly be understood is that benchmarking actually meets a fundamental human need to avoid risk and to find comfort in familiarity.

People find comfort and an increased sense of well‐being when they can tell those in authority that others are doing this and therefore it must be the right thing to do or this is why we did it this way. People feel more confident because it is perceived that there is less risk of failure when you follow in the steps of others. In the social science world this is called social proof. Social proof has been well researched and is used in marketing and advertising and in the home. My kids are always trying to use social proof to get that new electronic device (Eleanor has it!) or to keep from being in trouble for bad behavior or poor judgment (Alex does it). The latter is why adults look to use benchmarking to make decisions (Well, Acme does it). Everybody wants to stay out of trouble. But we are no longer new to the industry.

© Customer Relationship Metrics, LLC.

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Contact centers must undergo a dramatic change in priorities, processes, and metrics to correct this industry customer experience downslide. One of the greatest opportunities to impact this downslide is with the traditional contact center quality assurance practices. If you want to impact the customer experience in the contact center, this is the best place to start.When you review investments made in contact centers, here is where benchmarking can help us. Quality Assurance represents approximately 20% of a contact centers budget. This investment impacts the employees in contact centers and they, in turn, represent approximately 70% of a contact centers budget. So in essence, 90% of a contact centers budget is impacted by the quality assurance program in contact centers. Put this in context. Little changes can have a significant impact with Quality Assurance and big changes can be epic.

If I were to rewind my contact center career and go back to my operations days at AutoZone in 1995, I would find many of the quality assurance practices we did back then still in full deployment today. Not much has changed in QA, except that the gap between what contact centers think is quality and what customers think is quality is widening at an increasing rate. The qualityassurance model used in the 1990s is still the common practice of today, perhaps with a bit more polish. We must leave it in thepast.

In the contact center industry (other areas too), benchmarking is not as safe as it’s perceived. Changes in customer behavior and expectations are requiring organizations to make dramatic shifts in how it engages with and serves customers. Unfortunately, organizations are not changing nearly fast enough. As a result, benchmarking the processes in the contact center industry has become a reflection of what NOT to do. How is this so? When people interpret benchmarking data they look for the common practices and target these for replication. Well, in an industry that is lagging in performance, as reported in the continual decline in customer satisfaction ratings, the average is far from being good enough. In fact, it represents pathetic performance based on customer standards.

Wow Customer Experiences from Contact Center Quality ‐ Continued

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As I began this story I mentioned two stupid questions. Do you want to deliver better customer experiences in your contact centers? And, do you want customers to be wowed? I know you want this or there is no way you would have read to this point. You also know that it’s insane to follow a contact center quality assurance model that is two decades old. Remember the definition of insanity, originally given to us by Dr. Albert Einstein. Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Unfortunately, this is the definition for quality assurance in the contact center industry.

This insanity is something I am passionate about ending. For the last few years Customer Relationship Metrics has been advising clients on the implementation of a modern quality assurance model called impact quality assurance (iQA). The impact quality assurance model delivers an optimal customer experience while controlling costs with a do‐it‐right focus instead of a do‐it‐fast focus.

Wow Customer Experiences from Contact Center Quality ‐ Continued

We recently created the visual model of this methodology in order to educate the entire contact industry about impact quality assurance. The model creates a more clear line between the company’s evaluation of service referred to as internal quality monitoring (iQM) and the customer’s evaluation of service referred to as external quality monitoring (eQM). The metrics in this model are more balanced to reflect their ownership to the agent and the company with iQM and eQM. A key factor is the linkage to desired business objectives. The final element, emotional intelligence (EI) is rooted in the science of engagement and influence. Emotional intelligence covers elements of influencing the customer experience and influencing employee engagement and behavior change.

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In order to focus these elements in a customer‐centric way, we incorporated the 4 Vital Questions of Contact Center Quality developed by Dr. Cliff Hurst of Westminster College. The four questions help to focus and assign the proper resources and prescriptive actions for improvement. The 4 Vital Questions that must be answered by any effective contact center quality assurance program are:

1. How are we, as an organization, doing at representing our company to customers?2. What can we, as an organization, do to get better at representing our company to customers?3. How is this particular agent doing at representing our organization to customers?4. What can we, as managers, do to help this agent get better at representing our organization to customers?

Common contact center industry practices result in a nearly exclusive focus on Question #3: How is this agent doing? The insights used to answer this question most often are sourced exclusively from the iQM practices. With the exclusive source being from iQM the quality assurance program developers and analysts create iQM scoring criteria to evaluate agent performance by simulating the customer evaluation of service. In essence, they are attempting to read the mind of customers. The “we think thisis good, so will the customer” assumption is a large contributor to the gap that exists between what customers think is excellence service and what companies think is excellent service. Many contact centers that report 95% iQM scores find themselves losingmarket share and battling to overcome a very bad reputation on social media. Here, the gap exists between the company score of 95/100 and the negative customer view out in the marketplace.

In a misguided attempt to narrow the gap, some contact centers invite customers to evaluate their service experience. They realize the importance of the customer assessment to validate and enrich their internal view of quality. The most successful contact center leaders realize when adding the eQM segment they need to remove the assumptive criteria in the iQM segment of their quality assurance program to prevent conflict and waste.

Wow Customer Experiences from Contact Center Quality ‐ Continued

© Customer Relationship Metrics, LLC.

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The leaders with customer experience strategy also realize the demonstrative difference between voice of the customer (VOC) and customer feedback program and eQM. In comparison, eQM has the same elements as iQM, for the same reasons. Employee engagement is ultimately the most important aspect of any quality assurance program. When employees have positive feelings and trust the quality assurance program the road to being more customer‐centric is accelerated. 80% of contact center agents arevery dissatisfied or dissatisfied with quality assurance programs in contact centers. When contact center agents associate trustand fairness with their quality assurance programs, you will find iQM, eQM, and linking metrics with a focused effort to positively impact the well‐being (EI) of employees and customers in the process. You will also find all of the elements focused on answering the four vital questions.

Wow Customer Experiences from Contact Center Quality ‐ Continued

Big Picture

Savvy contact center leaders realize that only evaluating the level of performance of individual agents (Vital Question #3) doesn’t get them very far. They have come to learn this is not where their biggest improvements come from.

Bigger improvements come from improving processes, systems, training, policies, and leadership practices. The cross‐functional and change effort is launched in response to Vital Question #2. And to answer Vital Question #2, you need first to answer Vital Question #1.

Vital Question #4 is an organizational development question. It is not answerable through statistical analysis. It is answerableonly by providing the needed leadership and coaching by frontline supervisors. The role of supervisors as coaches must be to conduct call coaching to increase agent development. This element positively impacts the employee experience and the customer experience simultaneously.

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The Impact Quality Assurance (iQA) model involves a paradigm shift from the traditional contact center quality assurance approach found in the vast majority of contact centers today. The contact center industry is currently at a tipping point with their quality assurance programs. The tolerance level of these traditional quality assurance practices amongst contact center employees has run its course and with an economic upturn we’ll see a mass exodus of skilled talent from contact centers, never to return. In addition, customers are finally in control as judge, jury, and executioner and have the upper hand with quality assurance program evaluating (your entire program assessment) when they leverage social media. So your choice is to make a positive impact with quality assurance in your contact center or wait until customers make the choice for you.

Related Articles:Quality Assurance Optimization Requires TransformationQuality Monitoring Calibration the Worst Call Center Common PracticeInternal Quality Monitoring is Unable to Answer the Quality QuestionQuality Assurance Transformation Charts and Graphics5 Reasons Not to Create a VOC Program

Wow Customer Experiences from Contact Center Quality ‐ Continued

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Gallup survey shows that only 31% of employees are "actively engaged," 52% are "not engaged," and 17% (over 23 million U.S. workers!) are "actively disengaged.“ Disengaged employees costs the US economy $370 BILLION annually.  

Employee Engagement Levels

Not EngagedDisengagedEngaged

“Contact center quality assurance practices contribute greatly to low contact center agent morale and low employee engagement.”

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Get these graphics that explain the practices of the best in the contact center industry

Build a Path to Customer‐centric Quality Assurance!

http://metrics.net/contact‐center/impact‐quality‐assurance‐graphic/Go to:

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Turbo charging  your customer experience strategy by transforming the way you measure and manage quality. 

Leverage your existing investments Implement leading practices Engage staff and customers 

REQUEST A CONSULT

Less Waste

CLEANData

FixProcesses

BuildLoyalty

ReduceNOISE

LOWER Costs

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7 Keys to Employee Engagement

@BeyondMorale

A self‐assessment guide to creating a more customer‐centric

contact center by transforming quality.

Instructions:  Keep track of your “No” responses

© Customer Relationship Metrics, LLC.www.metrics.net

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1. Does your quality team include customer experience experts?

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3. Do other parts of your business take responsibilityfor FCR performance?

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Register now for the CIA (Customer Insights to Action) newsletter.  Here is what you need to know…

1). As a member, you’ll get access to special briefings on the latest findings on customer experience research, free training resources, and insiders’ insights into the myths and mysteries in contact center technology, operations, and it’s role on the entire customer experience.2.) Frequency only 3‐4 times per month. (We won’t bother you with dirt that won’t grow anything. This will be the good stuff that creates big blooms).3.) We guard your secrets better than the real CIA. No double agents or lost laptops here; your info is never sold to anyone. Only an act of Congress will open our vault.4.) You can unsubscribe anytime. Use the link at the bottom of your emails to go back to being lonely citizen.

Ready to get the inside stuff? Go…© Customer Relationship Metrics, LLC.www.metrics.net

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4. Do you have less than 20 scoring criteria to grade onyour internal quality monitoring form?

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5. As part of your QA process, are yougenerating a score for the “company”?

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6. Do you conduct inter‐rater reliability testing?

Too many say “Yes” here without knowing what is it…

Continue to learn…

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7. Are your customers evaluating their “level of confidence” inthe information provided to them as part of your qualityprocess?

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8. Do your customers rate their confidence in the answer provided by the agent as part of your quality process?

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9. Do you include the customers’ rating of agents’ empathy to their situation as part of your current quality process?

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11. Do your customers rate your agents’ level of professionalism as part of your current quality process?

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12. Do you include the customers’ rating of being treated as valued in your quality process?

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13. Does your quality department have the authority to makechanges to your knowledge base platform?

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22. D

Rent the customer experience analytics experts and tools.

Less than 60 days No IT integration Immediate returns

REQUEST A CONSULT

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17. Is your assessment of the customer experience moreimportant than your marketing department’s?

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20. Can you easily identifyunintended consequences of your quality metrics?

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21. Do you have quality metrics forall of your service channels?

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22. Would your agents say they are satisfiedwith your quality assurance program?

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23. Can you prove that your quality program produces a positive ROI?

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25. Do senior‐level leaders describe your quality assuranceprogram as being a “valued asset”? 

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26. Are FCR results included in corporate objectives?

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27. Do you leverage your quality assurance program results for making process changes?

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28. Do your existing processes support your agents to achieve First Call Resolution?

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29. Are agents provided training on how quality assurance generates coaching opportunities?

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(BONUS) 30. Do agents spend at least 15‐minutes each week with a call coach? 

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Number of “No” Responses:

0‐3: EXTRAORDINARY and rare 4‐7: BEST of the best, a role‐model8‐12: ABOVE average, keep striving13‐16: AVERAGE, yet high competitive risk17‐22: RISK of business failure23‐30: RUN  

Get the assessment as a FORM

Total your Score

GET IT…

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…no obligation

Avoid the mistakes and build a COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGEthrough Quality and InsightsIT’s NOT ABOUT TECHNOLOGY!Those that focus on technology are losing out in the competitive race.  Get an advantage…we guarantee it. REQUEST A CONSULT

STOP, BEFORE YOU PASS UP ON YOUR CONSULT,  ASK YOURSELF THESE QUESTIONS:? Is what we are doing now setting us 

up for future success?? Am I just dealing with our problem  

and increasing burden?? Does waiting cause us to be 

standing still and get passed by? 

Less Waste

CLEANData

FixProcesses

BuildLoyalty

ReduceNOISE

LOWER Costs

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GUARANTEED VALUE

Our Risk‐free 2‐10 GuaranteeOur work is guaranteed to deliver results.

We can guarantee value that software can not and WILL NOT.

Within six months of working with us, we guarantee you will experience a minimum 2% decrease in costs or an improvement in sales and a 10% improvement in customer experience scores or we will, at your option, accept the portion of those fees that reflects your level of satisfaction. Guarantees are based on project scale and scope and will be outlined prior to the start of your project.

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