Assessing Employee Performance Gaps With a Call Quality Guide

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This is Part 2 in a 3-part blog series about how to assess call cen­ter employee per­for­mance gaps. The first post dealt with how to cre­ate a form to mon­i­tor per­for­mance Stan­dards and Objectives.

Your mon­i­tor­ing form is the cor­ner­stone of a pro­gram to iden­tify and cor­rect employee per­for­mance gaps. But to help you in your quest for con­sis­tency and fair­ness, you also need to have a Call Qual­ity Guide. This is a one or two page doc­u­ment that pro­vides a brief expla­na­tion of each Stan­dard and Objective.

What if you’ve con­sis­tently scored an employee a 2 in pro­fes­sion­al­ism and the employee wants to know what, specif­i­cally, he or she needs to do dif­fer­ently in order to score a 3? As noted in the first post in this series, the ideal sit­u­a­tion is that all agents as well as those mon­i­tor­ing calls agree on what “pro­fes­sional” sounds like. That’s where your Call Qual­ity Guide comes in handy.

Here’s a sam­ple of how two Stan­dards noted on a mon­i­tor­ing form might be reflected on the cor­re­spond­ing Call Qual­ity Guide:

Stan­dard

Yes

No

Gathers/verifies caller data Fol­lows sys­tem branch­ing and ver­i­fies data ver­bally; uses appro­pri­ate script if caller refuses to give information Does not use sys­tem; does not ver­bally ver­ify data; does not use appro­pri­ate script if caller refuses to give information
Gives accu­rate and com­plete information Gives infor­ma­tion which accu­rately and com­pletely answers caller’s ques­tion; con­firms caller’s under­stand­ing; fol­lows instruc­tions given in CSR notes. Gives inac­cu­rate or incom­plete infor­ma­tion, and/or does not con­firm caller’s under­stand­ing; does not fol­low instruc­tions given in CSR notes.

Defin­ing employee per­for­mance Stan­dards in this man­ner makes it easy for any trained observer to iden­tify per­for­mance gaps.

When mea­sur­ing Stan­dards, you deter­mine gaps in per­for­mance in terms of whether or not the Stan­dard was met. When mea­sur­ing Objec­tives, how­ever, you assess how well the Objec­tives were met.

Use a range to score Objec­tives. Here’s an example:

Objec­tive

1
Needs Improvement

2
Satisfactory

Excel­lent or N/A

Uses script well Does not fol­low script or instructions Reads script, fol­lows instruc­tions, sounds nat­ural, not rote Fol­lows script & instruc­tions but per­son­al­izes for caller; sounds natural
Iden­ti­fies a spe­cific ques­tion to answer Attempts to answer a gen­eral question Uses script to change gen­eral ques­tion to a spe­cific one Per­son­al­izes script to caller to elicit a spe­cific question
Uses pro­fes­sional tone of voice Tone is impa­tient or condescending Tone is neu­tral or pleas­ant but lacks confidence Patiently and con­fi­dently deals with all issues

Devel­op­ing a Call Qual­ity Guide may take some time, but it is well worth it. You’ll be able to clearly com­mu­ni­cate Stan­dards and Objec­tives to your agents, and with ongo­ing cal­i­bra­tion (stay tuned to post 3 in this series), you’ll be able to mon­i­tor them in a con­sis­tent manner.

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Peggy Carlaw
Peggy Carlaw is the founder of Impact Learning Systems. Impact helps companies develop and implement customer service strategies to improve the customer experience. Their consulting services and training programs help organizations create a customer-focused culture while producing measurable business results. Peggy is also the author of three books published by McGraw-Hill including Managing and Motivating Contact Center Employees.

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