CUSTOMER CENTRIC QUALITY MANAGEMENT – PERFORM 360

What do customers want from a call?
This is not a trick question but it’s much more difficult than you may think. A customer’s needs vary depending on the reason for call, the desired call outcome and the customer’s situation at the moment the call is being made – the customer may be busy, confused, angry etc. However there are two basic needs which should be met in each and every call:

1. Resolving the call to the customer’s satisfaction (the transactional need).
2. Tailoring the dialogue to match the customer’s emotional need.

Item 1 is the easiest to get right, especially if the agent has the skills, processes and technology to resolve a large percentage of calls. If the call cannot be resolved then the next best thing is for the agent to make a realistic promise of what will happen next and accurately set the customer’s expectations regarding timescales.

Different calls have different drivers
In the following example the three tables show the key drivers for three different call types. In each case we have shown only the dominate drivers and their relative weightings.

The first is simple, short, transactional calls where the level of technical skill required to resolve the call was relatively low. Resolution and Correct Advice accounts for 48% of the customer satisfaction contribution whilst the agent soft skills account for 31%. This is still a significant contribution even for a transactional call.

The second table shows the drivers for more complex and longer calls where the emphasis was on correct diagnosis of the problem or issue before moving on to resolution. Here we see Resolution and Correct advice drop to 29% of the contribution with the communication skills accounting for 61% of the contribution.

Finally the third table shows the drivers for escalated calls that can’t be resolved at the front-line. Here the dominant driver is ownership and keeping the customers informed.

The point of this illustration is to demonstrate the inadequacies of a “static” scoring sheet that is not calibrated to specific call types. With Perform 360 the identification of the dominant call drivers is an inherent part of the process and typically we find you only need to monitor between 3 and 6 parameters to ensure the quality assessment is aligned to the customer’s perception. This means:

• Less time spent on evaluations.
  
• There is an implicit link between call quality and customer satisfaction.
• Quality can be optimised at a major reason for call level.
  
• Agents have fewer things to focus on to deliver a great experience.

Precision call monitoring
The other major innovation with Perform 360 is what we call “precision monitoring”. Because we are using customer feedback captured directly after the call, it is possible to decide which calls to monitor based on:

• Customer scores.
  
• Verbatim comments.
  
• Agent comments (agents have the ability to tag a call for subsequent evaluation).
  
• Call outcome and or reason for call.

We have found that the calls that contain the most value are the ones where the customers are at the extremes of satisfaction/dissatisfaction. Focussing on these calls and being able to select and drill down by call attributes adds significant value to the monitoring process and makes it much more cost effective.

Personal development
Perform 360 provides clients with an environment where they can extend the call quality evaluation scorecard to include personal development objectives and targets for the next period. This means there is one place to store and retrieve scores, 1to1s and personal development plans.

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Benefits of Perform 360
• The quality monitoring framework is tied to corporate objectives and customer perceptions not an arbitrary static call score card.
• Calls can be selected based on their scores and characteristics to ensure only high information value calls are evaluated.
• The sample size can be increased as fewer but more significant parameters are evaluated.
• Quality frameworks can be developed for specific call types and customer profiles.
• The drivers are capable of being fine-tuned on a continuous basis.

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