Talking to customer service reps when you dial that 1800 number is hit or miss when it comes to tone and quality. From what I have seen most reps MISS! There really does not seem to be a great deal of effort put in to have world class calls. Now every call center manager ALWAYS says that quality is the number on goal, if this is so why are the experiences overwhelmingly bad? I'll tell you why.
Most companies put all their training in how to run the program. What to look for, what screen do you have to be on, who button do you have to click. They do NOT do a great job in training DELIGHT in their calls. Most companies want to train as fast as they can so they can have reps producing as quickly as possible even to the detriment to their client or customer.
DELIGHT for me is that certain element that makes great customer service representatives. It's the tone in the voice that wants to give quality. Most are not born with it but it can be trained in reps.
This is an easy way to train DELIGHT in your calls. This also will set you up with a baseline monitoring program as well to team with the way you have trained.
I call this method/technique to fix quality "You Own the Call".
The first thing that you would look to attack when looking to change the quality of your calls would be to listen to as many reps/calls you can, make no changes, just listen. It is OK to get frustrated here with what you hear. Remember this is the stuff we need to fix.
So many call center managers don't monitor and many do not know what they are listening for. You want to get a good feel for the different types of calls that you take and how your reps respond to these calls. This would include meeting with all call center management as well to get as much feedback as possible and to get them on board to understanding how we are going to up our quality.
What you need then to get started is after you understand your calls you break down each vertical by call flow. You would also want to know what your main goals to focus on are. Where are you weak, where do you need to focus the quality effort? Is it overall rep satisfaction, one call resolution, length of call satisfaction, things of this nature?
Let's say for our example we are having many rep complaints so we are looking to get our rep satisfaction scores to come up. Using the "You Own the Call Method" we would break down the call into segments.
For Example:
Opening/Greeting
Verification
Issue handling
Resolving stage
Call to action
Close
You would then come up with a training plan to train all of these areas separately from a DELIGHT standpoint. How are we greeting customers, are their specific words to use during the verification, how is our tone when we resolve their issue, are we empathic to their need no matter if it was out fault or not, do we know of lag times during calls where we MUST make small talk. Small talk is huge in engaging your customers if done well. How do we form a relationship quickly with each call? All these segments need to be trained so the rep understands how the customer should be treated during each segment.
If you have major issues then you need to be more specific with what a rep says (more scripted) and make them focus solely on their tone. You all have heard it's not what you say but how you say it. The better they get with tone the more freedom they get to go off script.
TONE IS VERY IMPORTANT. It's the number 1 factor to a high quality call center.
The next step would be to come up with a QA monitoring form to score all of our calls this way. You then do weekly benchmarking sessions to make sure you are all in agreement with the scoring. Your form should break down the segments and score each one from a delight factor. I like a 1-5 scoring but it doesn't really matter as long as you score and you are benchmarked.
The last step is the one that will make a huge difference. You must make sure that you are giving instant feedback to the supervisors and reps. All scored calls need to be sent directly to the floor from QA right after the law score, do not wait! Develop a simple rule as well to make sure that we all reps are heard in a certain period. Any rep that fails the minimal level of satisfaction is pulled immediately and retrained on the specific areas that have opportunity. This need to be done in a positive way. They are also then re-monitored within a half hour of going back on the phones. That is very important.
If quality is what is needed to be improved then you should post daily and weekly quality ranking in the center as well. You can do some daily team and weekly center motivations around this topic as well.
Something cool that I have seen was well was putting up quality posters in the room based on actual things that a rep has said. This means much more than a random "Quality is our job" poster. Get the reps to buy in.
This is the first thing that I would do in coming into a new center with quality issues. There are many other things that we can do to help with quality but this get right to the heart of how we train/monitor/treat our reps and customers.
Most companies put all their training in how to run the program. What to look for, what screen do you have to be on, who button do you have to click. They do NOT do a great job in training DELIGHT in their calls. Most companies want to train as fast as they can so they can have reps producing as quickly as possible even to the detriment to their client or customer.
DELIGHT for me is that certain element that makes great customer service representatives. It's the tone in the voice that wants to give quality. Most are not born with it but it can be trained in reps.
This is an easy way to train DELIGHT in your calls. This also will set you up with a baseline monitoring program as well to team with the way you have trained.
I call this method/technique to fix quality "You Own the Call".
The first thing that you would look to attack when looking to change the quality of your calls would be to listen to as many reps/calls you can, make no changes, just listen. It is OK to get frustrated here with what you hear. Remember this is the stuff we need to fix.
So many call center managers don't monitor and many do not know what they are listening for. You want to get a good feel for the different types of calls that you take and how your reps respond to these calls. This would include meeting with all call center management as well to get as much feedback as possible and to get them on board to understanding how we are going to up our quality.
What you need then to get started is after you understand your calls you break down each vertical by call flow. You would also want to know what your main goals to focus on are. Where are you weak, where do you need to focus the quality effort? Is it overall rep satisfaction, one call resolution, length of call satisfaction, things of this nature?
Let's say for our example we are having many rep complaints so we are looking to get our rep satisfaction scores to come up. Using the "You Own the Call Method" we would break down the call into segments.
For Example:
Opening/Greeting
Verification
Issue handling
Resolving stage
Call to action
Close
You would then come up with a training plan to train all of these areas separately from a DELIGHT standpoint. How are we greeting customers, are their specific words to use during the verification, how is our tone when we resolve their issue, are we empathic to their need no matter if it was out fault or not, do we know of lag times during calls where we MUST make small talk. Small talk is huge in engaging your customers if done well. How do we form a relationship quickly with each call? All these segments need to be trained so the rep understands how the customer should be treated during each segment.
If you have major issues then you need to be more specific with what a rep says (more scripted) and make them focus solely on their tone. You all have heard it's not what you say but how you say it. The better they get with tone the more freedom they get to go off script.
TONE IS VERY IMPORTANT. It's the number 1 factor to a high quality call center.
The next step would be to come up with a QA monitoring form to score all of our calls this way. You then do weekly benchmarking sessions to make sure you are all in agreement with the scoring. Your form should break down the segments and score each one from a delight factor. I like a 1-5 scoring but it doesn't really matter as long as you score and you are benchmarked.
The last step is the one that will make a huge difference. You must make sure that you are giving instant feedback to the supervisors and reps. All scored calls need to be sent directly to the floor from QA right after the law score, do not wait! Develop a simple rule as well to make sure that we all reps are heard in a certain period. Any rep that fails the minimal level of satisfaction is pulled immediately and retrained on the specific areas that have opportunity. This need to be done in a positive way. They are also then re-monitored within a half hour of going back on the phones. That is very important.
If quality is what is needed to be improved then you should post daily and weekly quality ranking in the center as well. You can do some daily team and weekly center motivations around this topic as well.
Something cool that I have seen was well was putting up quality posters in the room based on actual things that a rep has said. This means much more than a random "Quality is our job" poster. Get the reps to buy in.
This is the first thing that I would do in coming into a new center with quality issues. There are many other things that we can do to help with quality but this get right to the heart of how we train/monitor/treat our reps and customers.
If you need help in getting your customer satisfaction scores higher visit us at
http://www.expivia.net
Contact me at tlaird@expivia.net
We are reshaping customer interactions. This is EXPIVIA
http://www.expivia.net
Contact me at tlaird@expivia.net
We are reshaping customer interactions. This is EXPIVIA
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