Agent Performance

1 Jan, 2006

By: Anne Nickerson,Dr. Jon Anton

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Part 1: Best Practices = Best Agents

What will it be: Butterfinger? Baby Ruth? Or maybe a Reese’s Cup?

It’s hardly the sort of question you’d expect your CEO to be asking. But buying staff members their favorite candy bars is just one example of a world-class approach when it comes to quality monitoring and coaching.

In today’s fiercely competitive market, the ability of your contact center staff to meet and surpass customer expectations is often the only way to differentiate between your product and your competitor’s. The question is how?

It’s now widely accepted that the quality monitoring process, when done well, is an organization’s best shot at delivering service that delights the customer. But the key thing here is “when done well.” We believe that using identified best practices—those planned process delivery steps that have proven to achieve the highest effectiveness and efficiency (a balanced score approach)—is the way to start down the right path.

Of course, the truth is that there is seldom one company that is better in all areas than all other companies. Instead, companies are doing one or more steps really well. To discover the “best of the best” practices, the BenchmarkPortal team with their HyperQuality counterparts studied organizations that are known to be world-class in handling inbound customer service calls. It was here that we discovered our candy guy, who would listen in on calls and then seek out the staff member—with favorite bar in hand—to talk about the experience. And it is from these results that we have been able to identify best practices for quality monitoring and coaching that is driven by both caller feedback made available directly to the agent that handled the call, plus the Quality Assurance (QA) team scores that result from monitoring the recorded call.

World-class Call Monitoring and Coaching
So what do world-class contact centers do that sets them apart?

It might sound like stating the obvious but the fundamental best practice among world-class call centers was one of two approaches: an internal QA team that performs the call monitoring process or an outsourced QA team that performs virtual call monitoring and scoring. We found advantages and disadvantages to both methods.

For centers that have an internal QA team that performs the call monitoring process, three advantages emerged.

1. They can use experienced agents to monitor and score.
2. The QA team is potentially a career track for existing agents.
3. The function is locally managed.

Among the disadvantages discovered:

1. QA monitors may have “friends” among the agents they are monitoring, thereby impacting objectivity.
2. Best agents make the best QA monitors, thereby negatively affecting available contact center staffing.
3. The QA process is often relegated to an “as available” staffing activity, and therefore often understaffed, meaning the work does not get done properly, if at all.

For centers using an outsourced QA team that performs virtual call monitoring and scoring, these advantages were discovered.

1. Using an outsourced team can result in a substantial reduction in the cost per monitored call, especially if the function is outsourced nearshore or offshore.
2. The monitoring can be performed by a dedicated staff that can produce the required number of audits per agent in a timely and consistent manner.
3. Because of the lower cost per audit, outsourcing allows for more audits per agent per month, thereby increasing the possibility of finding something worth coaching the agent about.

Among the disadvantages discovered:

1. A virtual QA team can be more difficult to train on scoring procedures.
2. This approach requires a higher focus on the “consistency” of the QA audit.
3. A virtual process makes it less possible to have the QA monitor do both call scoring and agent coaching.

We also found that these companies share a strong corporate culture, which focused on doing more than just satisfying customers. The goal was to delight. Top leadership “walks the talk” by actively listening and responding to the voice of its internal customers (frontline agents) as well as the voice of the external customer. Each recognized the importance of achieving employee satisfaction, and each committed the resources necessary to meet its customer service standards. Ultimately, each world-class center placed importance on knowing what their customers thought.

As for some of the practicalities, to gather information in the first place, world-class centers employ a combination of call recording and side-by-side monitoring, which, when done effectively, enables agents to receive well-rounded feedback. The recommended practice is to record all calls, and then intentionally pick the calls that have the highest potential for agent learning through coaching.

The most productive way to do this is to implement a software system to select only calls with a noteworthy aberration, such as:

• agent talk time on a call was double the normal average
• agent transferred the call more than two times
• the volume of the caller’s and agent’s voices was such that it indicated disagreement, or even anger

One crucial question is: who should do the monitoring? Again, a combination approach works best—consider including the following groups.

• Dedicated QA teams
• Direct agent supervisors
• Other agents or peers
• Third-party outsourced companies that specialize in scoring recorded calls remotely

When it comes to coaching, however, the direct supervisor should do that. What’s more, the supervisor needs to be both credible and dedicated to the team development rather than project management and subject-matter expert (SME) activities. In fact, we found that frontline management (i.e., supervisors) should be dedicated to the teams, spending more than 90 percent of their time with them. Each supervisor should have no more than 13-15 team members reporting directly to them, and should be hired for their leadership skills, rather than just promoting the best or more experienced customer service agent.

Throughout the process, it’s also fundamentally important that the coach understands how essential the need is for agents’ “self-discovery.” The coach must not force feed the agent, but instead, guide them to self-discovery through strategically asked questions.

Where there are multiple monitors, it’s necessary to build consistency in the evaluation process. How? Well, typically this can be taken care of by periodically having all monitors score the same call, and discuss those that show a high degree of variance.

When it came to giving information to agents, providing a printed sheet with feedback on predetermined categories worked best. But here, less is better and specific is good; that is, make the feedback actionable for the agent. Be careful not to overload the agent with too much information. Whatever you do, don’t become so focused on rating the call on a granular level—for example, did the agent say the script without missing a word?—that you miss the bigger picture, namely what did the customer think?

A further best practice is to include some sort of self-assessment. We were very impressed that some world-class contact centers were harnessing the “voice of the caller” to send customer feedback directly to the agent for powerful self-assessment. There is nothing like asking your caller to coach you on what you could better.

Have the agent listen to the call and score his or her own performance, and then also listen to specifically what the caller said about the call. To get agent buy-in, it is also critical that they have the ability to appeal evaluation scores. Timing, too, is definitely important; it’s best to review a call within 24 hours.

Finally, keep in mind that what’s said does matter. The actual words spoken by a coach have a significant impact on whether the agent “hears” the message. One world-class company specifically opens a feedback session with the question: “After listening to the call, would there be anything you would change?”

Basics of an Emerging Model
Following these sorts of best practices is a great start down the path of differentiating yourself from your competitor. However, our findings also helped us to shape an Emerging Model for quality monitoring and coaching.

The model acknowledges that, to be effective, we must recognize that customer service is both an art and a science. As such it must be measured like an art for certain aspects and like a science for other aspects. The “artsy” measurement of the service experience acknowledges how essential it is to capture the caller’s perception of their service experience. As shown in Figure 1, it is much better to let the caller evaluate their own “service experience” through a post-call IVR or e-mail survey.

The “scientific” measurement considers the accuracy of the answer. Was the correct answer given? It might seem obvious, but it’s no good delighting a customer but giving the wrong answer. So, harness your QA team (either in-house, or outsourced) to focus on the accuracy of the answer plus adherence to policy and/or procedures. Then combine both the caller’s perception and the QA team’s perception into one coaching session with the agent. From our observations, the time needed to audit a call for accuracy and adherence to policy and procedures is much, much shorter simply because there is no qualitative judgment needed, i.e., the answer is either accurate or it is not. This focus lends itself especially to outsourced QA monitoring, because of the dichotomous nature of the scoring required.

One last thing, even with the best practices in place, the sad fact is that sometimes the job just doesn’t get done. A major problem encountered during our study was that supervisors simply did not have the time to coach based on monitored results. In fact, we found “time” to be the major crunch factor that those aspiring to best practices need to address.

Quality monitoring and agent coaching has evolved over the past five years from the most basic techniques to highly specialized and technology-enabled processes. At the same time, few, if any, organizations have figured it all out. The establishment of best practices allows centers to learn from their counterparts and to choose the path that will most likely result in an increasingly effective frontline staff.

If your goal is to build and maintain a customer service contact center that is regarded as world-class, adopting best practices should be your aim.

Want to Know More?

The full report—Best Practices in Quality Monitoring and Coaching—is available at www.BenchmarkPortal.com.

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Part 2: Do You Really Know Your 50+ Customers?

“The 50+ market is large and lucrative. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of persons over the age of 50 will increase by 30%. Compare that to those younger than 50 whose ranks will only grow by 1.8%. The 50+ population earns half of all the discretionary income and owns more than 77% of all assets in our country today." -- An Introduction to the Challenging World of 50+ Marketing" by Kurt Medina, President, Medina Associates, 2002.

Despite the compelling statistics, many companies fail to leverage this golden opportunity. Why? They fail to recognize that this is a unique market with unique needs. They also believe inaccurate age-related stereotypes and therefore communicate in inappropriate and ineffective ways. These beliefs result in lost sales, lost customers and lost profits.

Throughout our lifetime, we have all been exposed to many images of aging. These images come from experiences within our own family, interactions at work or at school, the portrayal of older adults in movies and on television, and the media. And stereotypes abound. Consider the following exercise.

If you were asked to draw a picture of an older customer, what would it look like? Take a moment and think of how you would portray this person. Think of the clothes, the posture, the level of activity, the facial expression. Have you got your picture in mind? When this exercise is conducted in training sessions, the pictures are often very similar: older adults with glasses, hearing aids, canes and walkers. Men who are bald and women with flowered dresses and “old lady” shoes. The perception is that older customers are very much alike—frail, sick, inactive and out-of-date.

These are inaccurate, age-related stereotypes. And when we have incorrect misperceptions about older customers, our ability to meet their needs is negatively impacted. We all lose!

What can help change these stereotypes? Knowledge. Those with more knowledge of aging and older adults have a more positive and balanced view of older customers and will be much more successful in selling to and providing extraordinary customer service to this critical market. An accurate understanding of older adults is essential to business success. Try this picture exercise at your next staff meeting and discuss the results from the perspective of broadening these perceptions.

Another excellent exercise to challenge staff perceptions of an older customer is the True/False Quiz on Aging.

Ask yourself, what are your own personal images of aging? Be careful not to generalize your own experiences of an active 92-year-old great grandmother or a frail 61-year-old uncle to the entire population. Inaccurate images of aging decrease our effectiveness and, in the business world, lead to costly bottom-line mistakes.

Consider this case study and determine how your associates might have handled this customer.
Two weeks after the death of her husband, a 62-year-old woman called an insurance company with questions regarding her automobile policy. She seemed apprehensive and mentioned that her husband had taken care of their insurance issues over the years and that she had a few concerns. The representative responded by asking, “And what is your policy number?” The customer was upset and angry that there was no acknowledgement of the loss she had so recently experienced. As a result of this one mistake on the part of the employee, the customer switched insurance companies.

Was the representative purposefully insensitive? Probably not. It was more likely a misperception that to mention the loss might be upsetting to the customer, or the need to meet the monitoring standards, without regard to the customer’s concerns. According to Target Training International, more than 60 percent of all customers stop dealing with a company because of perceived indifference on the part of an employee. The result: lost loyalty, lost business and a perception that customer needs are not important.

Prepare A 50+ Strategy Now
There is no time like the present to review your company’s 50+ strategy for customer service, sales, products and services. There is some pre-work involved to first identify your target populations, and what specific needs they have.

The Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats (SWOT) analysis is a good tool to help you begin this process. The first question to contemplate using the SWOT analysis is, how are our products and services positioned to meet the unique needs of our target market based on their age? Are we missing any core product or service that would add value to our target market, thus adding to our market and wallet share of our business? Have we anticipated the future needs of our target market?

The next step is to determine how employees are prepared to work with the specific needs of the aging market. How do we increase their sensitivity to the unusual needs of different populations, and explore their own stereotypes? Are we acutely aware of how our stereotypes play out on specific contacts?

At the other end of the spectrum, we know that there will be fewer workers to fill job needs over the next 20 years. Are we prepared with alternative hiring policies, benefits and training to utilize the aging worker? Or are we stuck in the incorrect belief that older workers are either unwilling or unable to learn emerging technology or adapt to the rapid rate of change in business today? Unless businesses are proactive, they will miss the opportunity to tap into the considerable value of aging workers, resulting in a decline in workplace productivity and a negative impact on U.S. business.

By taking a look and preparing now for the 50+ market, we are doing ourselves and our customers a great service. Businesses that fail to understand the complexities of or recognize the opportunities associated with the aging marketplace will risk their ability to remain competitive. An African proverb reminds us: “For tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.” The future is now—are you ready?

True/False Quiz on Aging

1. True/False? How much do you know about aging?
2. True/False? Older adults are incapable of learning new information.
3. True/False? Chronological age is the most important determinant of age.
4. True/False? A person who is warm, sociable and outgoing at age 20 is likely to be the same at age 80.
5. True/False? If a customer has a hearing impairment, it’s best to repeat what you have said quite loudly so you can be heard.
6. True/False? Seventy percent of those over the age of 65 feel they are in good health.
7. True/False? The 50+ age group is the fastest growing segment of Internet users in the United States.
8. True/False? Customers 65+ prefer to be called by their first names.
9. True/False? Older adults are set in their ways.
10. True/False? If a customer mentions the death of a spouse or loved one, always acknowledge the loss before addressing the business issue.
11. True/False? Members of the 50+ population are more diverse than any other age group.

Quiz Answers

1. False. Learning patterns may change and the speed of learning may slightly decrease, but the basic capacity to learn is retained. Business implication: Don’t assume older adults will not understand your products and services.
2. False. Individuals age in many different ways, with one’s chronological age being the least important. Functional age—how well one is able to function in society—is a more critical determinant of one’s age. Business implication: A person’s age only tells you how many birthdays he or she has had—nothing more.
3. True. As we get older, we become more of who we are. In other words, our personalities do not change much as we age. Business implication: Difficult, grouchy and stressed customers are found at all ages. Don’t expect a customer interaction to be more difficult just because the person is older.
4. False. Rephrase rather than repeat and lower your pitch rather than raise your voice. In most cases, hearing loss is a problem of clarity, and added volume can actually worsen the quality of the conversation. Business implication: When customers have difficulty hearing, you must modify your method of communication to meet their needs.
5. True. Most older adults are healthy enough to enjoy their daily activities. Business implication: Most of our customers are living full and satisfying lives. Never assume that because they are a certain age, they are frail and sickly.
6. True. They spend more time online, visit more Web sites and spend more money online than those in younger age groups. Business implication: Older adults are constantly learning and willing to try new things. It also has a major impact on the goods and services your company may offer online.
7. False. Customers over the age of 65 grew up in a time when it was disrespectful to call someone you did not know by their first name. Business implication: Always use, “Mr.,” “Mrs.,” “Dr.,” etc., unless given permission to do otherwise.
8. False. Older adults are no more rigid than younger adults. This tends to be more of a personality characteristic. Business implication: Customers’ personalities vary. Life stresses can affect emotions and thinking at all ages.
9. True. Never proceed with the business at hand until a loss has been acknowledged. A simple “I am so sorry” or “On behalf of our company, please accept my condolences” will show that you have heard the customer. Business implication: You will build loyalty with this type of extraordinary customer service.
10. True. The 50+ population comprises three generations: the GI Generation, your oldest customers; the Silent Generation, ages 60-72; and the Baby Boomer Generation, ages 41-59. Business implication: Do not make the incorrect assumption that older customers are all the same.
     

Coach Tips
Attracting and Hiring the Older Worker

America is experiencing a major demographic shift. The birth rate is decreasing, we are living longer and millions of baby boomers will soon be eligible to retire. Add to this that the number of contact centers continues to expand, we are more and more seen as a strategic asset, and we will continue to be among the largest employers. Who will fill these jobs? Older workers.

These demographic changes are demanding new views about how to utilize aging workers in the contact center. What is your view? What does your contact center need to do to expand on the value of the older worker?

Are these untrue stereotypes/myths about older workers a belief in your center?

1. Older workers can’t or won’t learn new skills.
2. Older workers will not stay on the job long.
3. Older workers take more sick days than younger workers.
4. Older workers are not flexible or adaptable.
5. Older workers are not as creative or innovative as younger workers.

Common personnel issues in the call center include adherence to schedule and absenteeism. Offset these issues by hiring older workers, because:

1. Older workers have lower absenteeism rates than younger employees.
2. Older workers have lower turnover rates than younger employees
3. Older workers are generally very loyal employees.
4. Older workers bring a wealth of experience and work history with them.
5. Older workers generally have a strong work ethic.

So, you’ve determined that you need to be proactive about strengthening your work force options. How do you attract older workers to consider your contact center environment as a potential and attractive place to work?

1. Provide flexible work schedules or allow some telecommuting options.
2. Offer job sharing or be creative in designing part time jobs to manage your peak call periods.
3. Offer extended computer training programs-an investment in the future
4. Reward programs that validate work ethic, experiences, and loyalty.
5. Offer phased retirement programs.

Older Americans remain a vastly underutilized resource. While age bias is still alive and well, it is becoming less so. More businesses are realizing the value and necessity of hiring and retaining the older workforce.