Mind your language! Monitor, evaluate, improve!

Jan 4th, 2012
by Liam Anderson.
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Many contact centers provide multilingual services, and monitoring the quality of the languages agents are speaking becomes a priority, especially when they have to rely on agents who may speak the target language, but are not necessarily native speakers of that language. Customers frequently complain about the level of these agent’s languages criticizing their accents, grammar and choice of words.

You donThe challenge for contact centers is that their supervisors are unlikely to be linguists themselves, even if they are native speakers of the language, so they have little or no expertise in language testing or evaluation.

How can supervisors be given at least a framework to evaluate an agent’s language quality?

The first stage is to define levels, the highest level will be that of native speaker. This does not necessarily mean no mistakes. How many native speakers do you hear who actually make no grammatical mistakes at all when speaking their own language? The lowest level will be that of a complete inability to convey any meaning at all.

“Define the levels – from native speakers to non speakers.”

It’s essential to put one or two levels in between the two extremes to enable supervisors to allocate their non native speaking agents to realistic levels. The upper level should be based on agent’s being able to be understood without effort by a native speaker without necessarily being at a native speaker’s level of accuracy. The lower level should be based on the agent being able to be understood by the native speaking customer, but only with some effort.

In addition to defining levels, we can complete the matrix by defining evaluation criteria within the language framework. The most important will be an overall assessment of comprehensibility. The reason why our agent speaks or writes is to be understood by the customer. If our agent cannot achieve this, then having a richer vocabulary than Shakespeare or Dickens won’t be much use to our customer.

Below this level would come grammar. Again, the native speaker level does not necessarily mean that the agent’s language is error free, but it must have at least no more errors than that of the native speaker. The two levels below are more difficult to quantify and may depend on how long an average phone call is likely to be. One method might be to count the number of errors per minute and decide what numbers you can use for each of the two lower levels. For written communication, you could set a limit based on the number of error divided by the total number of words in the e-mail. This does not mean that your evaluators will count the word length of every e-mail, but if a rough sample of 20 e-mails shows an average length of 100 words per e-mail, then you can make decisions on how many mistakes are acceptable limits for each level.

A similar rationale can be adopted for vocabulary. Here, the test is whether the word is appropriate. Aproppriacy is not always an easy thing to judge, and for this reason, regular and frequent calibration meetings will be needed to ensure that all evaluators are on the same page.

“Sum up those mistakes and calculate the agent’s score.”

For pronunciation, the test to define the levels will reflect the test for “comprehension”. How much effort is it for a native speaker to understand what the person is saying? This does not always mean that a native speaker’s accent is comprehensible, in the United Kingdom, there are many people who find it hard to understand what people from Scotland or the North East of England are saying, but they are all native speakers of English.

In the written language, pronunciation can be replaced by spelling. Here, a numerical approach similar to that for grammar and vocabulary can be adopted. Evaluators can afford to be harder on agents too, since many aspects of e-mails can be handled with templated answers or parts of answers which should therefore reduce the scope for spelling errors.

This framework, while greatly simplified, is based on the same principles that language examiners, such as the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate, use when evaluating how well examination candidate do when writing and speaking English and other languages. They use their frameworks for the same reason, do define levels to measure their candidates against and also as a common yardstick to ensure that they are all judging according to the same standards.

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Posted in: Business issues, Coaching, customer experience, KPIs, Quality Management, staff management.
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Control charts – what they are and what they can tell us

Dec 12th, 2011
by Liam Anderson.
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Control charts are one of the main tools that quality managers in manufacturing use to conduct and present statistical analysis. To date, they have not been very popular with contact center quality managers. Is there a place for control charts in the contact center?

The control chart was originally used to present how a particular statistic varied over time. This is a very important measurement for production managers in the automotive and other engineering industries where machines produce parts that must fit together with a high level of precision. The chart shows the stability of a series of measurements carried out over a period of time. The more stable the measurement is, the more predictable the process is.

It goes without saying that contact center agents are not machines. Call quality cannot be measured anywhere near as precisely as tolerances in a machine part produced by a computer controlled lathe, so how can control charts be of any use to a contact center manager?

Would you believe this team managers' sales forecasts?

The control chart above shows the daily results of a contact center’s sales team for a month. The blue line represents the actual sales results for each day of calling, while the green represents the average, and the yellow and red represent 1 or 2 standard deviations above and below the average. The width of the band represented on the chart by the standard deviation lines is a pretty good reflection of how stable the sales process is and therefore how reliable the sales managers’ promises are to head office.

A quality manager might be very interested in the result where sales went more than 2 standard deviations above the average. They might reflect a rare moment of inspiration in the sales team, or they might reflect a new and convincing lie that a sales agent has started telling the customer. Needless to say, the days where the sales results fall below the average will also need to be investigated.

Is this quality process working?

Quality management and feedback is also a process which can be shown on a control chart. The illustration above shows a control chart for a contact center providing customer support. The blue line represents the actual quality scores over the month, the black line represents the overall trend, the green line represents the average, while the yellow and red lines represent 1 and 2 standard deviations below the average respectively.

What is very noticeable is how far 1 and 2 standard deviations are from the average. This shows that the quality process is not particularly stable. If each data point represents a quality evaluation, it is not hard to see which evaluations are pulling the score down and to investigate what happened and find out what corrective measures can be taken to follow up.

These charts can also be used for educational purposes to show agents and operations team leads the effect poor results have on the team’s overall performance. The visual impact of the chart is likely to be more meaningful than a dry recital of figures and will enable everyone in the contact center to see, understand and act on the “big picture” better.

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Agent empathy, how on Earth can you measure that?

Dec 2nd, 2011
by Liam Anderson.
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Contact centers, despite the technology, are very people oriented organizations. Their purpose is to service, acquire or retain customers for the organization through personal contacts with the agents. One of the major challenges contact center agents have is sounding genuinely interested in their customers’ problems even when they have already handled dozens of calls about the same subject on the same day. This is the holy grail that is known as “empathy”. Customers buy on emotion. Emotion frequently plays a role even in business to business situations, which is why promotional gifts and corporate hospitality are big business.

 

Not a good approach to customer relations

The Cambridge English Dictionary defines empathy as “the ability to share another person’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in their situation”. I would suggest that agents are not required to feel empathy for the customer, but they have to be able to demonstrate empathy.

First of all, this means recognizing how the customer feels. This is sometimes easier to understand when the customer is on the phone than when the customer is communicating through e-mail or chat. The agents then have to respond appropriately to the customer’s needs and the feelings they have expressed.

To measure how empathetic an agent is, the first question on an evaluation form would be to ask how upset the customer appeared to be. The evaluator will consider the customer’s language including the tone that the customer adopts. In written communications, this can be understood by obvious signs, such as the use of capitals and explanation marks (“!”) or strong language. There are also less obvious signs that might be lost on agents who are not native speakers of the customer’s language. These include the use of adverbs or sarcasm. (“I am just asking you to fix my product” – in this example, the word “just” speaks volumes about how the customer feels.)

The second question is whether the agent’s response was appropriate to the customer’s feelings. For example, if a customer is angry about his product not working, the agent might firstly respond that he sees why the customer is angry and then reassure the customer that he is working on his problem. Many times, when a person shows that he recognizes why the customer is angry, this will reduce the customer’s level of aggression. The customer feels his grievance has been recognized, even if the agent does not necessarily admit responsibility on the company’s behalf. On the other hand, telling a customer to “calm down” will rarely if ever solve anything. The agent who says this is showing that he does not understand why the customer is upset and is, in effect, dismissing his feelings as irrational behavior.

To drive the desired agent behavior, you will need to give agents high scores for correctly identifying when a customer is angry and further high scores for giving responses that show an understanding of how the customer feels. Low scores on these questions will lead to conversations about how to recognize customers’ feelings or how to respond correctly to specific situations where a customer is angry or upset. These conversations will focus agents on how they can handle customers’ feelings as skillfully as they handle the customer’s issue with the product.

 

 

 

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Posted in: KPIs, Quality Management, Uncategorized.
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Selling quality management – to your agents!

Nov 22nd, 2011
by Liam Anderson.
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When quality monitoring schemes are introduced in contact centers, agents’ reactions are rarely positive: “This is just another way for the bosses to withhold our salaries.” “More numbers for the bosses to make our lives miserable with.” “Why do we have to speak and write according to these stupid templates and rules?”

Change management back in the days of the French Revolution

For the supervisors, trying to implement the quality monitoring scheme in the face of such complaints becomes an uphill task. Supervisors find themselves unable to face the prospect of hostile feedback sessions with agents who were, in many cases, their co-workers and colleagues until they were promoted. Without the supervisors doing the vital work of evaluating and giving feedback to the team, the quality process will grind to a halt and call content will not improve.

This is the classic change management scenario, but transferred into the contact center setting. The answer to this issue is also the classic way to manage change, don’t order it, impose it or decree it. Sell it!

When you start a sales conversation with a customer, you start with a short introduction of what your conversation is about. It’s a good idea to have the change announced by the most senior member of the company that is available. This is a very visible way to show everyone how seriously the company takes the project.

The next step is to give the agents the chance to react. Their reactions will probably not be positive, but they will give the agents the chance to express their views immediately and get them out into the open. They will give you, the person “selling” the new program, an insight into their “objections” which you will need to overcome. You may find that agents start asking questions. Questions are a “buying signal”, they show that the agents are engaged with the idea. They are starting to imagine what it will be like working in the contact center after the change has been made.

It is a very good idea to analyze their reactions and tailor elements of your presentation to answer agents’ objections and questions. Where possible, emphasize the benefits of the new way of working to them. If calls are going to be recorded, tell agents that this will be for their protection, since if any customer accuses an agent of lying, they can now check the call and conclusively prove to the customer that this was not the case. There may be some questions you cannot answer, either because you have to trial the program to see what will happen, or alternatively because you are waiting for decisions from other parts of the organization. To retain the trust of your “customers”, the agents, be as transparent about this as possible. Good decisions do not need to be supported by lies. At this point, it also helps to get the agents involved in the transition process by asking for their feedback. There is nothing wrong with promising that adjustments will be made as a result of their feedback, but never give your staff the idea that their feedback can lead to the cancellation of the project.

Once the “go live” date has been reached, don’t stop engaging with your staff. Ask them for feedback once it has started and involve them in review meetings. Follow up is vital, not only for the agents, but also the supervisors, whose workload has probably been increased and who now find their roles have become more confrontational as they hold their agents to account more often. In many cases, this will be the first time they have found themselves in such a situation and they may either not raise the issue at all or act aggressively to their agents unless they are supported properly. At this point, supervisors will need additional support as they learn how to really lead their agents and drive performance, in many cases, for the first time in their lives.

A lot of effort goes into getting the technology right when introducing quality programs, but often getting the people right will have an equivalent, if not greater impact.

 

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Posted in: Business issues, Coaching, Quality Management, Uncategorized.
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Old evaluation forms: vintage or vinegar?

Nov 12th, 2011
by Moses Velasco.
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Just because your agents start to score better using your evaluation forms, don’t be tricked into thinking your job is done! Letting your evaluation form become outdated is a typical quality assurance mistake. A great evaluation form will mature over the course of time based on how you and your team learn, improve and drive to meet your goals across various KPIs. How do you ensure your evaluation forms help drive your goals and keep up with your progressing work force? What do you need to consider in building an evaluation form, grading form, or questionnaire?

Your evaluation forms, are they vintage or vinegar?

Identify what the key drivers of your targeted KPI are. For example, we know that average handle time can be effected by product knowledge, script adherence, system use and call handling skills. These drivers may change as your agents become efficient in meeting them and require updating.

Group structure and group related questions. Key drivers should be broken down into groups containing related questions and given a weight of importance depending on how importantly that group effects performance or meeting your KPI goals. For example, “Product Knowledge” will be the title of one of your question groups for addressing AHT. Additional groups and questions may be added as important areas are discovered. Group weightings may also shift as agents become efficient in specific areas. When agents become very efficient in System Use, shift the weighting of importance to Call Handling Skills.

Questions should have more than two possible answers that provide scoring depth and allow for richer analytics. Questions should directly assess a targeted area. For example “Did the agent understand the customer’s needs by restating the customer’s issue?” Using answers such as Yes -100% No- 0% leaves very little area for analytics. If the answers had various scoring such as Yes-100%, Partially 50%, No-0% this will indicate that the agent can easily be coached to correct behavior instead of needing modular training which saves time for everyone. Taking it a step further by providing four answers will eliminate the option for the evaluator of just taking a middle ground stance. This will push them to provide an answer that can truly identify root causes.

Design each group and question not only for analytical scoring structures but also for coaching feedback and maintenance of historical feedback. When evaluations are completed, agents should have access to them and be able to take in valuable constructive feedback, aligning their work with the QA standards. This will enhance any coaching or one to one sessions that may be necessary to correct behavior. Users should see a track record of improved performance across the key drivers of any KPI.

The evaluation form is the back bone of all quality assurance campaigns. Using this as a foundation to address your KPIs will provide a solid starting point for your path of continual improvement. Ensure your evaluation form matures along with the improvement which will drive your goals.

 

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Posted in: Business issues, Coaching, KPIs, Quality Management.
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Self-evaluation: critical, empowering and creating ownership

Nov 8th, 2011
by Moses Velasco.
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If you have thought of something, you will own it, believe in it and make the changes necessary to achieve it.

When it comes to motivating an agent to change their behavior, if they come up with the idea to make change on their own they are more likely to do it. I’m specifically talking about agents self-evaluating their own interactions. I, as well as my peers, have found that coaching, training and prescribing techniques or changes to agents is met with open arms but quickly fades as the coaching or training session closes. They can walk out of the meeting with all the best intentions, but as soon as that first call comes through, somehow that previous discussion is a distant memory. This is only to be proven through countless feedback forms going back, in some cases for years, that address the same issues.

I have seen agents come in bright eyed with ideas of their own on how to improve their call handling or sales performance following self-evaluations and make those changes. They were empowered, enlightened and willing because it was their own idea, their own realization! Our jobs are much easier then. I would rather praise an agent every time for making a change they decided to make themselves and coach them to support their goal than to have those discussions that disciplinary action may be required if they don’t correct their behavior.

Some will argue that agents would score themselves intentionally high with hopes of increasing their QM statistics. Some will argue that it is too expensive or time consuming to take the agent off the phones to conduct their own evaluations. I have found, more times than not, that people are fairly self-critical and judge themselves with higher expectations. If there is any question, that is what the calibration process is for. I personally have found that agents can complete self-evaluations during idle time and make changes in their behavior without as much input from coaches or supervisors.

"The unexamined life is not worth living." Was Socrates the father of self evaluation?

When an agent uses a grading form designed by the key stakeholders in QM, they instantly have transparency about what is expected of them. They have the rules of engagement. They will work with the understanding of what is important to the company, to customers and where the important changes are needed and they make them.

Don’t get me wrong, coaching and training maintains its high level of importance and is extremely necessary. Why not supplement it with an additional tool? For those of you whose agents don’t conduct self-evaluations, I highly recommend giving it a shot. It will give them insight into company expectations, empower them to make change, and give them ownership!

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Quality management. It’s not just about saving money!

Nov 1st, 2011
by Liam Anderson.
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Technology vendors in the contact center market frequently sell their technology by presenting their clients with a Return On Investment (ROI) calculation. This is usually along the lines of how much money an organization can save by reducing Average Handling Time or increasing First Call Resolution.

Contact centers are service delivery organizations, so are airlines and hotels. Airlines usually buy their aircraft from the same manufacturers. They all fly similar routes and at the same speed. Most hotel rooms contain an en suite bathroom, TV and double bed. Breakfast is usually served as a buffet. The differentiation is in the service. It’s the service and positive customer experience that keeps customers loyal to brands when there are cheaper alternatives.  It’s the service and positive customer experience that turns customers into fans.

Great service that sets an organization apart from the rest is not achieved by good luck, nor is it achieved by magic. Good service is achieved by developing a robust and rigorous set of standards,  making sure that staff are trained to handle all eventualities in accordance with these standards and running frequent checks and feedback sessions to ensure that standards are properly adhered to.

Excellent service: technology, passion and hard work combined

To achieve this in the contact center environment, the contact center needs the right technology to enable them to monitor interactions, evaluate them quickly, impartially and accurately and deliver the feedback to agents.

What the contact center also needs is hard work from the management team itself. Success in contact centers comes from what people do. Someone has to listen to and evaluate the calls, and then give agents the appropriate feedback and follow up. Missing evaluations is like taking your eye off the ball when playing competitive tennis. It will result in failure.

Petra Kvitova, Wimbledon women's champion 2011, keeping her eye on the ball.

Like most matches, the battle to achieve great service is won by a little bit of technology and know how and a lot of determination and persistence.

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Posted in: Business issues, customer experience, KPIs, Quality Management, Uncategorized.
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Size does matter! The case for short evaluation forms

Oct 25th, 2011
by Liam Anderson.
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Contact centers that measure quality often use a very long evaluation form that probes every aspect of an agent’s performance during a call. These forms have more than 20 questions, with a selection of 6, 7 or 8 possible answers for each question. The contact center manager will tell you that he “scores” 1 call per agent per week. At the same time, he will also complain that nothing appears to be happening, call quality does not appear to be improving. The quality management process becomes a routine that does not deliver any results.

Sounds familiar? Maybe there is another way.

A quality management process does not work because calls are scientifically evaluated. It works because agents are told where they need to improve and given the necessary coaching, training or additional motivation to do so. The number of evaluations and feedback sessions is a greater factor in changing agent behavior than the depth of analysis.

Why not change the way calls are evaluated? Have a generic short evaluation form with a maximum of 10 questions, with a maximum of 4 answers each. It is designed to monitor the key drivers of agent performance and spot issues, nothing more. With the right technology, evaluators can listen to a call and grade it using a shorter questionnaire in the time it takes to find and listen to the call plus an extra 2 or 3 minutes to grade it. With the right technology, the time needed can be reduced to the length of the call plus those 2 or 3 minutes to grade it, the call will be found and attached to the evaluation automatically. Evaluators can easily evaluate 2 or 3 calls per agent per week using this form. The generic form works like an air traffic control radar that can spot an aircraft 100 miles away.

Long range radar screen - gives advanced warning of issues

When they encounter issues, supervisors coach the agent and give them additional evaluations, using a shorter form with 4 or 5 questions that is tailored to the specific driver of operational success where the agent is having challenges. This specialized form will lead the evaluators to give specialized coaching in the areas that the agents need to fix. This works like the shorter range approach radars that they have at airports that give a much more detailed view. They enable the airport’s air traffic controllers to bring the plane in to land safely, even in thick fog.

A safe landing in the fog.

With this approach, maybe more contact center managers can bring their agents in to a safe landing when they are having issues instead of having to clear up the wreckage afterwards.

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Posted in: Business issues, Coaching, Quality Management, Uncategorized.
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Average Handling Time – What goes up, must come down!

Sep 29th, 2011
by Liam Anderson.
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Average Handling Time (AHT) is frequently the most important KPI a contact center can monitor. It is very closely related to the cost of a call. Staff wages are the main variable cost of a contact center, they make up 70% of contact center expenses. If the call is longer, it costs the organization more to provide it.

So what drives AHT up and how can we bring it down? Here are the “drivers” of AHT:

  • Script adherence. When an agent follows a script, the call has a “road map” that enables him/her to complete the transaction in a quick, pre planned way ensuring that all requirements are covered as quickly as possible. When agents don’t follow the script, AHT will increase.
  • Product knowledge. It doesn’t matter whether the agent handles customer enquiries or sells outbound, s/he needs to know what s/he is talking about. In this way, s/he is more likely to complete the transaction successfully and quickly.
  • Application/System use. Inbound customer service programs often use complex CRM systems which take considerable skill and experience to handle quickly and effectively. An agent who is “all fingers and thumbs” can slow the call down considerably because he will not be able to process the customers transaction as quickly as possible.
  • Call handling skills. We talked about agents following scripts. The other participant in the conversation, the customer, never follows the script! An agent who is skilled in handling diffcult or upset customers can solve their problems more quickly and get the required result, because s/he knows the techniques to deal with him quickly effectively and politely.
  • Escalation. There are 2 ways this can increase call length. An agent can escalate a call he could have handled himself. This can increase the call costs not only because of the extra time the customer has to spend talking to the higher level agent, but also because that agent may well be paid at a higher rate. On the other hand, if the agent does not escalate when he needs to, he may spend a lot longer trying to solve a problem he doesn’t have the knowledge and skills for than a higher level agent who is better qualified and more experienced.

So how can we bring AHT down? The way that works is to set up a quality improvement project along 6 sigma lines, including the 5 phases of Define, Measure, Analyze, Design and Verify (DMADV).

AHT reduction project process diagram

Having defined the issue as the need to reduce AHT, a specially written questionnaire can be used to measure the influence of each of the drivers on the overall situation. The statistics are then analyzed to identify which of the drivers above are pushing AHT up. Once the numbers are in and the drivers have been revealed, further questionnaires are designed to form the backbone of a cyclical improvement program where agents are evaluated and receive feedback on their performance in this area. The effect of the project is verified by monitoring both the AHT statistics from the CRM system, and also the scores from repeated administrations of both questionnaires.

Such programs usually prove to be hard work. Changing habits is not always easy, but the rewards for even a modest reduction in AHT can be quite substantial.

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