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- Monitoring Isn’t Enough to Answer
the Quality Question
- By Dr. Jodie Monger – President
Customer Relationship Metrics, L.C.
We are continuously asked how well the
contact center is serving the corporate asset – how well is service
delivered to customers who call to resolve a problem or to ask a
question? In many centers, we must rely on a summary of operational
metrics with the assumption that certain metric levels answers this
critical question. We also rely on quality monitoring scores to answer
the question.
If your monitoring program is like
most, you have to conclude that most customers are extremely satisfied by
the telephonic service experience. Scores naturally migrate to the upper
part of the monitoring scoring scale. If you have 100 points available,
the majority of your scores are probably 92 or higher, or even 95 and
higher – essentially you use the top 10 points on the scale.
When attempting to answer the service
quality question, basing such an important assessment on quality
monitoring when it has the bias mentioned above diminishes the
effectiveness of the response. All other departments within your
organization can report on success with numbers that are not questioned.
The contact center needs such a response – one that is accepted as valid
unlike the monitoring results.
Let’s review your Quality Monitoring
program and begin the evolution toward providing a better answer. Who is
doing the monitoring? Avoid the fox guarding the chicken coop. What
items are scored? It’s best to focus your monitoring form on objective
issues related to call control, providing the correct response, and
effective relationship building criteria. Why shouldn’t the monitoring
form include customer subjective assessments? Guessing at how the
customer perceived the experience is not accurate and contributes to the
inflation of the monitoring scores.
The customer is the best one to answer
how their experience went. From a scientific standpoint you should
immediately assess the level of service delivered on a particular call.
While this rating appears to be subjective because it is not a hard metric
such as ASA or a monitoring score related to the effectiveness of the
response from the company’s perspective, the customers’ perceptions are
the reality that we must deal with in our centers. If your customers are
not satisfied all of those metrics are meaningless. But yet, if you know
how the customers perceive the service delivered and you have a good set
of metrics and monitoring scores, the answer of how well your center is
performing becomes balanced and valid.
Customer Relationship Metrics
conducted a research project that provides proof that monitoring scores do
not equal the callers’ perception of service. The monitoring form
included 17 items, seven of which could be directly compared to the caller
evaluations. We examined the monitor and caller evaluations over a
five-month period. As presented in the table below, there was virtually
no relationship at all between the caller evaluation of the experience and
the monitoring evaluation. The only statistically significant
relationship was related to perceived interest in helping and tone, and
this was not a strong relationship.
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The results of this research had a
dramatic effect on the Quality Program. The proof from the customers’
perspective that the call monitoring form was not effective underscored
the need to have a valid answer to how well service was delivered. In
addition to a better answer, a significant savings was now possible.
The original monitoring program
included 17 items scored per call, 5 per month for 2000 agents. This
equated to 170,000 scores given per month, with 4 completed per hour,
taking 2,500 hours (not including the feedback time). To complete 2,500
hours of scoring, 63 FTE were used at $45,000 per year for a grand total
of $2.8 million (again, without feedback and coaching time). With the
results of this research, the monitoring form was revamped to focus on
objective measures. Scoring eight items allowed six to be completed per
hour, requiring 43 FTEs at $45,000 per year for a net personnel cost of
$1.89 million. The improvement in the process yielded a savings of
$910,000.
Your own situation may be on a smaller
scale, however the relationship of the direct benefit would apply.
Savings from the actual time spent on scoring is compounded by the result
of having a more effective definition of quality. Your three part answer
needs to include: 1. Call Metrics, 2. Quality Monitoring, and 3. An
Immediate Evaluation by the caller regarding the call.
Dr. Jodie Monger, PhD is the President
of Customer Relationship Metrics, L.C., (www.Metrics.net).
Prior to joining Metrics, she was the founding Associate Director of
Purdue University's Center for Customer-Driven Quality. Her expertise is
working with Fortune 1000 companies to help them quantify the Voice of
their Customer.
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