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Quality vs. Quantity?

by Susan Leighton - July 13, 2017

Quality vs. Quantity?
 
As a former call center veteran I have been influenced by quality either as a phone representative, a manager, or a quality analyst.  Some corporate leaders consider quality to be a necessary evil while others embrace the opportunity to use monitoring suggestions to empower their relationships with their customer base.   Much like their customer service counterparts, quality analysts have metrics that they must meet on a daily and monthly basis to be considered “effective” in their roles.
 
One of those metrics is the daily call monitoring expectation. This score is weighted heavily and factors in to the analyst’s annual review.  When I evaluated agent phone calls, I would routinely be tasked with reviewing hundreds of calls over the course of a month.  For my particular group, the length of those customer conversations could be anywhere from three minutes up to ten minutes.  Quality analysts were expected to evaluate a certain amount of short calls and a certain amount of long calls.  Some analysts based on what lines of business they monitored could be expected to listen to calls that were twenty minutes or more in length. 
 
In order to achieve a “meets goal” expectation, an analyst would have to hit the benchmark of listening to and evaluating thirty calls per day.  On the surface, this does not seem like a daunting task but if you are listening to several calls with a ten-minute or plus duration, it may be impossible to achieve that metric.  The next question that springs to mind is if you are tasking quality analysts with this goal, how many of their monitors will actually be done correctly?  For example, if an analyst is listening to a difficult customer interaction resulting in multiple play backs of the phone call, if they are held to a rigid standard of thirty calls per day, will they be effective at offering suggestions on how to improve customer relations?
 
Will they just be trying to inflate their statistics so that they don’t land in the “does not meet” expectations category and possibly fall under disciplinary action?  The potential problem in having a metric such as evaluations per day is that you are sacrificing quality for quantity.  A quality department is supposed to uphold company customer relations standards.  If quality agents are more concerned with meeting an unrealistic metric they are not going to be paying attention to whether or not a phone representative is truly listening to a customer and taking care of that customer’s concerns.  Let’s face it, the reality in today’s business world is this, if a corporation does not care about customer service, then that corporation will fail to retain customers thus impacting revenue.  If a company’s bottom line suffers, that can cause reduction in the work force and the end result is one huge snowball effect.
 
Not only are quality analysts held to the daily monitors standard, they also have to ensure that phone representatives are notating customer complaints and that they are filling out service recovery forms. Both are expected tasks but in some cases, if a phone representative is negligent in reporting customer complaints or filling out service recovery forms then the quality analyst must complete the tasks for the associate.  If quality analysts are constantly filling out forms on top of having to meet the expectation of thirty call monitors a day, they are going to want to ensure that they do not lose their jobs.  What does this mean for the business?  It means that close attention to how phone representatives are doing will be bypassed in favor of meeting quality analysis metrics.
 
Quality representatives are the policy watchdogs in most organizations.  They usually work hand in hand with compliance to ensure that corporate standards are upheld.  If quality departments are tasked with too many additional responsibilities, will customer service get lost in the shuffle?
 
I agree that quality analysts need to have standards.  However, thirty monitors a day is not the answer.  Perhaps monitors should be based on how many associates are in an analyst’s assigned queue.  Of course, taking in to account that two monitors should be done on each representative in that quality analysts queue. This approach would ensure that quality agents are truly listening to calls and providing the best feedback possible to promote exemplary customer service.
    
Another suggestion would be to create alerts for team managers to let them know that their representative has not completed a service recovery request or has not notated a customer complaint.  This is something that could be set up by the IT department and if a quality agent determines that a representative did not follow through with acknowledging a customer complaint or service recovery request then they could send an alert to that employee’s manager.  The manager could then coach his or her employee.  The phone agent would then be responsible for completing the complaint notation or the customer service recovery. 
 
Quality monitoring should be quality monitoring and not quantity monitoring.  The end game is customer satisfaction and that is a metric that should be the responsibility of everyone.
 

Susan Leighton is a former quality data analyst and collection manager for major financial institutions.  She is currently a freelance writer for various business and entertainment publications.  

 

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