QA (Quality Assurance) Done the Right Way in Your Call Center

00:00Tom Laird here. You've, heard me, break down contact center technology on the podcast time and time again. Now Welcome coming back everybody to to grind it a little, and focus on quality and quality assurance and how to make sure we can try to improve the quality of your associates, aq, a program, and make sure that if you don't have one, we're going to try to help you set one up, and if you do, we we So I had improved the program so I want to kind of jump into this because I think this is a bit longer episode because there's a lot to cover here. And the first thing is you know that they is kind of QA done the right way and the when we do our consulting when I go out to other contact centers and most companies put all their education all their training.

02:14know, how to run a specific program, you know, skill or channel. You know, they're looking for things, you know, really where to click, what to click, and when the customer says that you should go to this, a lot of them do not do a very irritating tone, delight, empathy, and engagement in their calls. So, you know, most companies that have poor customer service and don't know why, because they say, you know, we educate all of our reps, they should know will remember that old saying that we had a couple of episodes back when we talked about education of the reps where the the tone is the message and most of the times the tone is off the light is off the engagement is off and we just have some robots or some people who really really aren't interested in servicing a customer doing a good job

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03:11You know, that's a really important piece of this because remember we are in the age of social media. You know, your customers are all going to talk to each other on good experiences and bad and, really in those two two extremes only so you know we really want customers to be evangelists for our brand and that's kind of the kind of the core that MPS that that net promoter scoring system so turning them to evangelists for a brand not having them go out on the social media and say something that because I did because our customer service associates were either. aloof didn't really care just kind of went through the motions we need to flip this whole education this QA system on its, head where we focus mostly on the tone and then we focus on where to click. We need to get our agents to to speak properly, to really interact with the with the customer on a personal level. So, we're going to talk about some of the ways to do that, how we can score it, how we can educate to do that to improve the quality. So, just start with this, because I think it's important, you know, one of the things that we do in our contact center at Expivia that is totally overhauled our QA and I know there's probably not a lot of you or, you know, maybe 25-30, 30% of the call centers out there that have previous a podcast but we are able to look and literally score the sentiment or the tone of our agents and also of the customers.

04:41We can also, when a customer calls in angry, how many of those or what percentage of those

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05:18So, again, all calls coming in, you know, you're currently and most really How do we make sure and raise our quality with that? The first thing that we really need to look at is do you listen to focus on. So start listening to calls get super frustrated. It's okay. It's okay. You're going to get frustrated. Remember those are the things that we need to fix. We're no longer going to make it you know deem, those things acceptable, but Then we get we're kind of showing a little bit of empathy towards so what we want to do is then educate each of these pieces to our associates. This is even before we score. So again, let and again, let's say that one more time. We have an opening a,-

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08:34Thank you for watching, and I'll see you in the next video. You get my point here. Go through each of those steps. Train exactly how you'd that tone to be. How it needs to be spoken, to the associate or to your customer. Where are some places that and you know pain points. When you're resolving issues, you know your top five issues if you've been listening to calls or have any idea of what's going on in your center. So talk those through. Have your associates understand how to deal with those. What are some of the words that they need to say to kind of call the customer. Now let me I'm so sorry to hear that, sir. Let me see if I can help you. Oh, you know that fake I'm I've heard about this from a couple of the customers. I really like to help you today. Let me see if way better than saying, I We're going.

10:05We're going to educate. We're to get these guys on the floor. We're not even going to score anything yet. We're not going to score anything. We're training them. We're holding now everyone. We're holding them to a standard.

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10:34close. And what you want to do is you want to score these. Now I don't care how you score them. We have clients that, you know, we have to adhere to their scoring system that use A, B, C, D, F, right? We have one that's go one through 10, one through five. Some of them, you know, have to add up to 80 to 100. It doesn't really matter as long as there's a standard in your benchmarking to that. So let's just say for this that you're going to take each of those segments, you're going to kind of break them out and do a one through five well then you have to find out what's acceptable and what's a one what's a two what's a three what's a four what's a five so again listen to calls I would highly suggest that you're recording these calls and you can be able to train what a one what a two what a three what a four what a five is and I would also tell you that only a four or five is acceptable you know three being average for our center average is below average but you know that's up to kind of you with with the quality standard that you're looking So what we will do then, once we have that set up, we'll educate them into how the scoring system is going to work.

11:41If for us, we get a client, this is kind of done in our initial training. So it's a little a little bit ramp of for us other that kind of setting it up in training. But we're training all the way through as you guys have seen in our education podcast. I think it was number four and number five. the whole way through we're educating on delight, the whole way through we're educating on tone. A module that we have that we're just saying click here, click here. You're gonna click here and then you're gonna talk like this, you're gonna say this, start to anticipate these types of questions so that you can respond like this. That's how you get really good customer service really quickly. Once, that goes out, start to score your reps and then have and your supervisors all start scoring reps so that you can start to benchmark across the board what a one, what a two, what a three, what a four, what a five is.

12:33So we, all kind of understand that, we-all agree to it, and this is a process. Now with our clients, we benchmarked this at least once a week. So we'll either send our clients recorded calls calls that they'll score ahead of time, We'll do a live- So start scoring your I would tell you that once you feel really comfortable You start topload your reps based on their QA. Every larger call, call center or any, especially BPL, where we focus on customer support, that's such a big, big KP.I. quality piece that all to our associates are bpl. And again, that goes to our attitude and everything that you guys have heard prospective. The. Our process of this though is when we are listening to a So let's say they're a one, two, or three.

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14:19The rep's gonna go back on the floor and within 30 minutes, we're gonna listen. and the expect improvement, and we're going to head back to the progressive discipline You start to really drive the quality aspect. You have to hold people to a standard, but first, you have to tell them what that standard So many of be incented off of things that a lot of your do naturally and then the ones that don't do naturally, you got to help a little bit. I like again, people do the CSAT scoring, they do the NPS scoring, and a lot of, if people talk about QA, they're going to talk about those two things. [QA coverage remark omitted] CSAT scoring or surveys after after, a call you're only gonna get the two extremes right I call them that you know you're, gonna get the conservative or the a great experience and they're gonna do a survey or you're gonna get the person, maybe they didn't even dislike your rep, but they just disliked the answer that they got.

16:19So you never get those people in the middle. never get. you don't really get a true feeling for what really happening in your call center. So that is why I personally like the speech analytics. If you're going to go to that, you're going to be pretty polarized with a lot of those things and that's what we have found when we do consulting. I know people will disagree with me to the hilt on that but I think there's better ways And then the other question that I get a lot is, Tom, what kind of calls should, should we be recording and I should say what kind of call.

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17:05if you're in a game and you're So when you a So listen to them for some specific reps or associates and make those

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18:27I do not believe that you can just use recorded calls if you had if I- had. A choice and you said, said Tom you could only do a recorded calls or live calls I'm going, live calls. All day cause I'm, any issues that are rising my call center instantly and excuse me me and making sure that you know the days going the right. So I hope that's helpful. I hope that this can improve what you're doing or at least make you think. Think. and Hold them to a experience, but a lot of them don't know and a lot of them, just need push just like,- just like any coach were a player, you know, to provide or to do their best. And that's kind of what we're talking about here is a team oft team of managers and supervisors as well so. Again, b the more reviews we can get, the, the more people the more people that we can reach through iTunes and through spot-. Again I We're going to talk a little bit about outsourcing and, things to look for Thanks for listening.

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