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.

Portrait of Admiral John Byng by Thomas Hudson, 1749

It’s not uncommon for some contact center managers to adopt a similar principle for resolving issues. An employee is found, made responsible and dismissed. The unfortunate employee is not always the cause of the problem.

In the name of both fairness and effective problem solving, other methods of investigating issues have been developed. A common practice in industrial quality management is root cause analysis. The principle behind this is that the cause of an issue is likely to be a process rather than an individual. There are many techniques, but two can be easily applied to the world of contact centers.

The first is to create a detailed timeline of the events leading up to the issue. Where issues are related to calls or customers, the specific calls can be identified easily and played back to see what was actually said to the customer. At this point it makes sense to look back at training materials and coaching records. This may contain clues to explain aspects of agents’ behavior that contributed to the problem.

The second technique is often called the “5 Whys” technique. Let’s imagine a case where a number of agents have knowingly registered an outbound sales call as being a sale, even though the customer made no commitment. The first “why” would be asked of the agents: “Why did you register the call as a sale when you knew it wasn’t?” The agent’s answer might well be: “To get the commission.” The second “why” might seem obvious, but it serves a purpose: “Why did you risk losing your job to get the commission?” The agents might well answer: “Because we don’t get paid a basic salary.”

The third question might then be to the contact center management: “Why don’t you pay the agents a basic salary?” The contact center management might answer: “Because we have a risk and reward contract with the client.”

The fourth question would then be to the senior management: “Why did you agree to a risk and reward contract with the client?” The answer to this might well be: “The client told us this is what they were offering, it was a “take it or leave it” situation.”

The fifth question at this point would be: “Why did you take on a contract at such disadvantageous terms?” The answer might then be: “Because we needed the work.”

The fundamental root cause of the issue is the risk and reward contract the contact center agreed with the client. This cannot be changed at short notice, if at all. What can be addressed is the fact that the agents don’t get paid a basic salary. They have no incentive to be honest. Failing to sell will have the same result for them as being dismissed from the company, a loss of income.

There is no doubt in this case that the agents should be dismissed. They deceived their employer in order to get paid. To reduce the chance of the issue recurring however, the organization would be wise to look into how their agents are paid.

Next time you face an issue in your contact center, it might be worth finding out the root cause before dismissing someone.

It would be safe to say that the idea of quality management was born out of war. The war in question was the American Civil War, when both sides started manufacturing rifles with interchangeable parts. This required high quality machining on a large scale to ensure that the individual components would fit together and work correctly and safely for the operator.

Quality management developed significantly in World War II, when British manufacturers improved their process investigation methods to solve production issues related to ammunition manufacture. NATO’s requirement for common standards among its multinational membership led to the development of today’s globally recognized ISO 9001 standards. These were initially based on the British Standards Institution’s BSI 5750 standard.

Rebuilding after World War II, the Japanese famously adopted the US quality management methods developed by W. Edwards Deming and Joseph M. Juran in the 1960s. This turned their manufacturing industry into a global leader for the following 3 decades and created many of the world’s leading brands.

Today, contact centers and shared services centers are transforming many aspects of office work into industrial processes. Now the quality management methods which won World War II and turned Japanese corporations into world leaders are being applied to make organizations more competitive in the information based economy of the future.

This partnership is the result of Genesys’  decision to provide a full suite of workforce optimization technologies (WOTs) for contact centers. Genesys Quality Management will offer call and screen recording (CallREC and ScreenREC), live monitoring (LiveMON) and quality and performance management (ScoreCARD).

Contact ZOOM for more information.

Every contact center should have defined goals and  is expected to operate according to their defined goals.

Examples of these goals are usually found in the following categories:

• To provide the best customer experience possible
• To increase the company’s revenue
• To minimize operational costs
• To provide valuable business insights and are prioritized depending on the type of contact center you operate.

Priorities set to achieve these goals will vary according to the contact center’s focus:

• Cost-oriented contact centers focus on efficiency
• Service-oriented contact centers focus on delivering the best customer experience possible
• Sales-oriented contact centers focus on bringing in leads or sales
• Market-oriented contact centers focus on understanding the customer and gathering valuable information

For most contact centers, the need to define and prioritize these goals and measure the company’s performance is understood as fundamental to their business.

If this need is clear and defined, ZOOM truly wonders why only half of the existing contact centers have the right tools in place for evaluating call handling and assessing the customer interaction skills of agents.  Call handling and interaction quality determine the success or failure of a contact center to achieve their business goals.

The most common response we hear is: measuring quality and using scorecards to measure our performance is “overly complex” or “we don’t have time to do so”.

To break down these perceived barriers and to convince a contact center manager of the value a quality management solution can bring, an offered solution has to satisfy a number of criteria:

• Simplicity – make the usage barriers as low as possible
• Speed – not wasting time and therefore money!
• Complete – allowing for a combination of objective and subjective measures
• Purpose – providing options to define and use weightings in line with the company’s goals
• Applicable – providing detailed and applicable information to improve operations immediately

ZOOM ScoreCARD together with ZOOM CallREC forms the heart of the new ZOOM QM Suite and has been developed with these criteria in mind.
The new and completely rebuilt version of ZOOM ScoreCARD, released today, provides you with a tool that is easy to use and makes your contact center quality management as simple as A-B-C:

A. Create custom questionnaires with weighted scoring criteria which match your defined business goals and priorities for targeted levels of efficiency, customer service and/or sales
B. Schedule and execute the evaluations using a system-generated set of calls based on your criteria
C. Extensive reporting and graphs show exactly where you can improve your agents’ and business performance, starting today

New ZOOM ScoreCARD offers a simple, fast and powerful web-based solution that is seamlessly integrated with ZOOM CallREC and is in the new version enhanced with:

• An improved evaluation planner supporting multiple sub-criteria
• Enhanced permissions and roles
• Questionnaires with enhanced parameters and call selection criteria
• User management supporting synchronization and authentication between CallREC and Cisco UCC Enterprise
• Trend reports and graphs
• Full audit log

Start achieving your goals: measure and pro-actively improve your business today with ZOOM ScoreCARD!

For more information about the features available in ZOOM ScoreCARD, please check our website.