Tom Vander Well
An Airplane on the Tarmac Profits You Little
I had an interesting conversation with a call center manager the other day over breakfast. I asked him how things were going at work. After a pause and a long sigh, I wondered if our breakfast was going to become an informal counseling session....
In Customer Service, Improvisation is Sometimes Necessary
from henriqueiwao via Flickr My colleague was scheduled to present a training session to one of our client's teams this morning. I was scheduled to attend and observe. While I was aware of the general topic being presented in the training, this was my colleague's...
QA is Important: You Get What You Measure (or Don’t)
I was proofing the monthly SQA reports for one of our clients last night. This team has had a tenacious supervisor. He held a high standard for his team and used our monthly reports, both team and individual CSR reports, to hold his team...
Quality is for Internal Customers, Too!
from andrewscott via Flickr Our group just completed two pilot Service Quality Assessment projects for a client. We've been providing QA services for this company for several years, but our work was confined to the front line Customer Service teams. Earlier this year, the client...
The Truth of the Tape
Image via Wikipedia Since Prohibition, when recorded phone conversations with a bootlegger were first used in a criminal prosecution, the taped phone call has had a colorful history. Movies and television have made familiar the image of FBI agents hunkered over spinning reels of tape...
The Check-Out Line and Hold Button Have Glaring Similarities
The Wall Street Journal had a great article this morning about the science of finding the best check-out line. Within the article, it talked about what happens when you are in queue for a period of time: Envirosell, a retail consultancy, has timed shoppers in...
Year-End QA Considerations
Image by studiocurve via Flickr For many companies, the months of November, December and January signal the end of a fiscal year. With the end of the year comes annual performance management reviews which often include a service quality component. It is quite typical for...
Podcast: Discipline Issues That Effect Your QA Program
Image via Wikipedia The data and reports coming out of many QA teams is both inaccurate and invalid because of discipline problems underlying the process. In this short audio Service Quality Central podcast, Tom Vander Well explores three common discipline problems and provides simply solutions...
Getting Started with QA: Getting Your Feet Wet
On the workbench in my garage is a router and router table. I bought it several years ago. It's a nice one. I even bought a bunch of jigs for creating different kinds of edges. In all the time I've had it, I've turned...
Beware of “Metrics Deception”
Image via Wikipedia When talking to managers about their contact center's quality program I'll often ask what they are currently doing to measure quality. "Well, we generate reports each day that give us various quality metrics which we then track. Those metrics then go into…
Defiance is More Work Than Behavior Change
Image by PaulDCocker via Flickr Years ago I went back to visit some old teachers and to thank them for their influence in my life. I enjoyed some great conversations. When I asked one teacher how things were at my alma mater, he sighed and...
New CSRs and the QA Question
The other day I received an email from a subscriber asking about my thoughts on how to transition new employees into the Quality program. For every Customer Service Representative (CSR) there is a period of training prior to getting on the phones to work...
Podcast: Motivation & Your Call Center’s QA Program
Image via Wikipedia Service Quality Central has entered the world of podcasting! Enjoy Tom’s very first podcast as he takes a few minutes to consider the importance of exploring the motivations behind your call center’s quality program!
Addressing Team Differences in QA
Standardization can sometimes be a bit of a holy grail for corporations. We have several corporate clients who have multiple divisions and teams across one or more contact centers. It is understandable that a company would want to have a common scorecard by which...
The Social Media Buzz; Time for Decaf?
I was part of a great ACCP event last week sponsored by Avtex and hosted by Pella Corporation at their headquarters. There was a wonderful presentation made on the subject of monitoring and responding to customers through social media by Spindustry and their clients...
Things You Learn Capturing Calls
As the QA provider for some of our clients, c wenger group employs a small group of dedicated specialists whose job it is to weed through all of the phone calls recorded by the client's recording software, determine which calls are usable for analysis,...
Angry Customers Part 4 – Do the Opposite
It was brought to my attention that this post had gone missing from the archive. Thanks for bringing it to my attention! Angry customers will often come at you with a negative tone and accusatory language. They are convinced, before they even picked up...
Self-Serve Success Means Changing Metrics
Just read a great post over at Customer Experience Crossroads reminding us all that the boon in customer self-serve options means that a greater percentage of the calls which do get through to live agents tend to be those which are more complex. This is...
QA Today:The Human Element
There are a growing number of companies who are scrapping internal call monitoring programs and Quality Assessment initiatives. One noticeable trend is the shift toward after call satisfaction surveys to replace traditional call monitoring. In most cases, the customer is asked to rate their...
QA Today: Pondering Some Foundational Thoughts
This is the first part of a series of posts regarding the state of Quality Assessment (QA) in the Call Center or Contact Centre. I've been on a sabbatical of sorts for a few months. My apologies to those who've missed my posts and have...