QA Today: Pondering Some Foundational Thoughts

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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 emailed me to see if I’m okay. We all need a break from time to time and after almost four years I gave myself a little break from posting. While on sabbatical, I’ve been watching the trends in the call center industry and, in particular, what others have been saying about Quality Assessment (QA). I’m finding a sudden anti-QA sentiment in the industry. One client mentioned that the call center conference she recently attended had no sessions or workshops about QA. I then had an article sent to me by a client. It bemoaned the failure of QA and called for QA to “modernized.” At the same time, I’m hearing about companies who are shutting down their QA operations and turning to after call surveys and customer satisfaction metrics to measure agent performance.

I’ve been in this industry for almost twenty years. And I’d like to take a few posts to offer my two cents worth in the discussion, though more and more I’m feeling like a voice crying in the wilderness. First, I’d like to make a couple of general observations as a foundation for what I’m going to share in subsequent posts.

  • QA is a relatively new discipline. It has only been in the past 15-20 years that technology has allowed corporations to easily record interactions between their customers and their agents. In even more recent years, the profusion of VoIP technology in the small to mid-sized telephony markets has proliferated that ability into almost every corner of the market place. Suddenly, companies have this really cool ability to record calls and have no idea what to do with it. Imagine handing an Apple iPhone to Albert Einstein. Even the most intelligent man is going to struggle to quickly and effectively use the device when he has no experience or frame of reference for how it might help him. “It can’t be that hard,” I can hear the V.P. of Customer Service say. “Figure out what we want them to say and see if they say it.” The result was a mess. Now, I hear people saying that QA is a huge failure. This concerns me. I’m afraid a lot of companies are going to throw the QA baby out with the bathwater of trending industry tweets rather than investing in how to make QA effectively work for them.
  • We want technology to save us. We are all in love with technology. We look to technology to help us do more with less, save us time, and make our lives easier. We like things automated. We have the ability to monitor calls and assess agents because technology made it possible. Now I’m hearing cries from those who’d like technology to assess the calls for us, provide feedback for us and save us from the discomforts of having to actually deal with front-line agents. This concerns me as well. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my career it’s this: Wherever there is a buck to be made in the contact center industry you’ll find software and hardware vendors with huge sales budgets, slick sales teams, and meager back end fulfillment. They will promise you utopia, take you for a huge capital investment, then string you along because you’ve got so much skin in the game. Sometimes, the answer isn’t more, better or new technology. Sometimes the answer is figuring out how to do the right thing with what you’ve got.
  • The industry is often given to fads and comparisons. Don’t get me wrong. There’s a lot of great stuff out there. We all have things to learn. Nevertheless, I’m fascinated when I watch the latest buzz word, bestseller and business fad rocket through the industry like gossip through a junior high school. Suddenly, we’re all concerned about our Net Promoter Scores, and I’ll grant you that there’s value to tracking how willing your friends and family are to tell others about your business. Still, when your NPS heads south it’s going to take some work to figure out what’s changed in your service delivery system. If you want to drive your NPS up you have some work ahead of you to figure out what your customers expect and then get your team delivering at or above expectation. And, speaking of junior high, I also wonder how much of the felt QA struggle is because we spend too much time worrying about comparing ourselves to everyone else rather than doing the best thing for ourselves and our customers. I’ve known companies who ended up with mediocre QA scorecards because they insisted on fashioning their standards after the “best practices” of 2o other mediocre scorecards from companies who had little in common with theirs.

Know that when I point a finger here, I see three fingers pointing back at me. We’re all human and I can see examples in my own past when I’ve been ask guilty as the next QA analyst. Nevertheless, I’m concerned that the next fad will be for companies to do away with QA. I know that there is plenty of gold to mine in an effective QA process for those companies willing to develop the discipline to do it well.

Creative Commons photo courtesy of Flickr and striatic

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Tom Vander Well
Vice-President of c wenger group. In 29, Tom was named as one of the top 1 people in the call center industry by an industry magazine. He works with our clients as a senior SQA data analyst, training development leader and Quality Assessment specialist. Tom holds a B.A. degree in speech/communication from Judson University and has been with c wenger group since 1994.

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