Executive Summary
Customer contact executives know that call quality monitoring and the coaching of call center agents is one of the best ways to improve a call center. A relocation company with five call center locations and 500 agents wanted to find a partner to increase call monitoring, assist with improving customer service, identify ways to prevent order cancellations, create third–party objectivity to produce data to manage partner relationships, and garner additional intelligence from their customer interactions. Sound impossible? Not hardly!
By engaging HyperQuality as a partner, all of the company’s objectives were met. Agents were evaluated more frequently, on a more complete list of attributes, and the call centers started to produce improved quality scores and fewer “broken” orders. Empirical data has been provided to manage partner relationships and Quality Assurance scores on critical issues have improved 300%. Finally, a series of special projects, including a Time & Motion study, have provided critical data to support the company’s strategies and improve the customer experience.
Company Background
The relocation company provides an easy and convenient method for movers to get connected to utilities and home services in their new communities. With one call to the company, customers can simply and efficiently sign–up for services including telephone, Internet, gas, cable and Satellite TV, waste removal, local newspaper service and more.
The company’s operations include approximately 500 call center agents in five call center locations. Agents handle a total of 525,000 customer contacts per month whereby they assist movers in establishing services at their new home and assist with post sale support. The calls run in length from 02 to 30 minutes depending upon the type of call.
The relocation company contracted with Seattle–based HyperQuality, Inc., to conduct agent evaluations in its call centers. The special challenge? The company had recently made the decision to outsource a portion of its call center operations. The company wondered if they would have to suffer through months of poor quality scores while making the transition from in–house to outsourced call handling. The results were surprisingly clear: with a partner like HyperQuality, a company can make the transition to outsourcing with barely a noticeable dip in quality — and then watch as quality scores get even better.
The first challenge: improve call quality — and ease the transition from in–house to an outsourced call center.
The relocation company had several goals for improving its customer contact services.
First, the company was transitioning from a 100% in–house call center to a partially outsourced call center over a two–month period, and the company wanted to limit any negative affect on agent performance and customer experience during the transition.
Another of the company’s primary objectives was to increase the frequency of their agent evaluations. On their own, the company was completing an average of four evaluations per agent, per month. Managers wanted to increase that rate to one evaluation per agent, per day.
Prior to contracting with HyperQuality, the company felt their “breakage” levels were higher than they should be — customers were not completing connected service with their orders. In addition, the company wanted to increase the frequency of their agent evaluations in order to increase order accuracy and improve compliance with mandatory disclosures and other legal obligations.
Finally, the company suspected that getting agents more involved in evaluations, rather than simply waiting on the receiving end of “report cards,” would result in more “ownership” of the process — and greater rates of improvement.
Like many companies, the relocation company’s own internal teams, using QA tools and procedures developed by supervisors, handled the monitoring and evaluation of phone calls. However, when contemplating a dramatic increase in the number of evaluations, the company knew from the beginning that they lacked the capability and could not afford to grow their QA program by themselves to reach their goal. First, with supervisors evaluating an average of four calls per agent, per month, evaluations were too infrequent to meet the company’s goals: it would be impossible to increase that number to the goal of one evaluation per agent, per day, without a massive (and expensive) increase in staff. In addition, the small number of evaluations created a statistically invalid sample size for evaluating center–wide trends. Also, scores and comments were subjective, with little opportunity for calibration from supervisor to supervisor or from week to week. Finally, the schedule challenges and day–to–day reality of a busy call center meant that supervisors’ availability — and thus, evaluations — were inconsistent.
Solving the problem required the perfect partner.
The relocation company had two main options for tackling its call monitoring and evaluation challenge. First, the company could have continued its efforts to develop an internal monitoring process and system, and undoubtedly would have fallen far short of their goals. For a company of their size and scope, this would have required the investment of millions of dollars more in technology and personnel. This simply was not possible. The second option was to explore outsourcing their call centers’ quality monitoring and evaluation.
The most basic benefit of outsourcing call quality monitoring is simple: it gets done! Setting aside the cost savings (which can be substantial), simply increasing the number of evaluations will give you a much more accurate report of your call center’s performance.
When considering outsourcing options, it is vital that your partner be completely objective. This is the only way to get an accurate picture of your call center — and each and every agent’s — true performance. In addition, make sure your potential partner is truly focused on quality, rather than simply on “workforce management.” While many workforce management solutions will deliver some level of improvement in most call center environments, to achieve truly substantive improvement that is long–term, that builds customer loyalty and that delivers a positive impact to your bottom line, your partner must focus on quality.
The relocation company tests HyperQuality — and gets results fast.
The company contracted with HyperQuality to develop a custom monitoring program, which focused on evaluating critical quality and revenue–generating attributes as well as situations that directly affect customer satisfaction. For example, the company’s original scoring form did not include some important attributes, nor did the forms give the opportunity for agents to receive useful information and tips for improvement. In addition, the company’s original scoring form allowed for an agent to conduct a call that was not inline with the desired customer experience, and yet the agent still could achieve a quality score of 90%. The company wanted its evaluation forms to more completely reflect the company’s customer experience goals.
HyperQuality’s custom–designed solutions were built to be standardized and consistent, so they could be easily scaled and maintain consistency of evaluations and reporting over a number of call center locations. And as always, HyperQuality functioned as an extension of the company’s business, with a dedicated Account Executive as a primary point of contact.
Over the course of the initial program, HyperQuality conducted 2,285 evaluations of 128 agents. Company agents and supervisors were set–up with HyperQuality's performance and workflow management SaaS solution accounts, each with their own login and password. Calls were monitored daily by HyperQuality staff, and the evaluations and scores were entered into HyperQuality's performance and workflow management SaaS solution, with reports able to be generated “on the fly” for managers, supervisors and individual agents. These reports went well beyond merely compiling data or verifying compliance with a laundry list of requirements. Instead, the reports included useful direction and real advice for agent behavior that could deliver measurable improvements in customer care. Agents and/or supervisors were able to login to HyperQuality's performance and workflow management SaaS solution at any time and review agent evaluations, listen to recorded calls and review up–to–the–minute reports, including: Quality Evaluation (displays overall quality results and call category results), Total Quality Trend (allows the agent to monitor his or her progress and see how he/she stacks up against other agents on the team), Performance By Threshold (displays number of agents performing within each score threshold, emphasizing what percentage of agents need improvement) and Scorecard Report (a detailed analysis of statistics of # of calls, minutes and agents monitored in a given month along with quality scores and top three EvenBetter Opportunities).
Results you have to see to believe...delivered by HyperQuality.
The company’s initial program with HyperQuality yielded extremely positive results. First, with HyperQuality, the company was able to meet the goal of an increase in the number of evaluations — by up to 500%. After 2 months, HyperQuality was conducting an average of 17 evaluations per agent per month. In addition, the company improved up to 300% on critical quality issues, including saving orders from breakage and improving the customer experience. More frequent monitoring by HyperQuality improved compliance on critical attributes up to 75%.
In addition to the improvements in quality scores, HyperQuality's performance and workflow management SaaS solution has provided valuable reporting on the attributes that matter to the relocation company’s management. Agents can easily review their scores and listen to monitored calls. The result has been a significant decline in CARE events, wherein an agent can submit an evaluation for review if he or she questions the score or sees a discrepancy in the score. In other words, agents appear to be satisfied with the way they are being scored and have shown complete confidence in HyperQuality’s evaluations.
And, finally, one of the best results experienced by the relocation company is in how HyperQuality helped ease the transition from a 100% in–house call center operation to a partially outsourced business. Through the tools and consistent platform HyperQuality provided, the company did not suffer through months of lower quality while the new team got up to speed. Instead, new agents were on track with quality scores above the previous internal team’s scores in just 30 days.
The next step: keep building on success for EvenBetter performance.
Having HyperQuality in place already monitoring calls has allowed for easy, cost–effective and successful customer service projects. A recent Time & Motion study helped the relocation company learn more about the company’s talk time and identify opportunities for improved times and greater profitability. The goal of the Time & Motion study was to learn:
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How often particular products were pitched to customers |
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How much time it was taking to pitch products |
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How long it was taking to enter orders into the system |
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Average acceptance rates |
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Based on the data collected in the study, the relocation company was able to assign costs to each of the above activities and, subsequently, to determine profitability bases. The company received a clean view into increasing profitability by:
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Reducing/refining pitch time by reviewing the company’s sales strategy and scripting |
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Reducing/refining the time it takes to enter orders by reviewing, validating and revising questions and scripts |
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Renegotiating contracts with product partners to align commissions with the costs required to make the sale |
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In addition to the Time & Motion study, HyperQuality quickly, easily and cost–efficiently partnered to implement several additional company initiatives to improve customer service, including: revamping QA guidelines, revising existing sales guidelines, introducing new auto–fail parameters, and identifying a method to quality assure new post sale programs. Overall, with HyperQuality partnership and execution, the relocation company has been able to consistently and repeatedly realize opportunities for improved customer service and bottom line profitability beyond the scope of the original project.
Call quality monitoring is one of the best — and fastest — ways to improve any call center.
In the pursuit of better customer service, call center managers naturally want to evaluate the performance of their center’s agents. And when companies make the decision to outsource all or part of their call center operations, the need for quality monitoring is greater than ever. Unfortunately, while most call center managers agree on the importance of call monitoring, whether onshore or offshore, the average call center evaluates far too few calls–an industry average of just five calls per every 1,000 calls per month, for each agent. Monitoring five calls per agent per month may be “average” for the industry, but how effective is that rate? Using the 1,000 calls per agent per month assumption, a call center would have to monitor 350 calls per agent every month to reach a 95% confidence level. There isn’t a call center on earth that can devote the time and resources required to ensure this level of statistical reliability! However, increasing the frequency of call monitoring even by just a few calls per agent per month can have a dramatic impact on a call center’s quality and profitability in both the short term and long term.
For real success, use the power of call center monitoring.
This relocation company knows that in today’s competitive marketplace, successful companies have learned that superior customer experience is often the only way to differentiate between your product and your competitor’s. Since your call center is the primary touchpoint between your company and your customers, it goes without saying that improving the quality of your call center’s service will improve your company’s relationship with customers. In fact, your call center’s quality directly impacts every customer’s perception of who you are, the customer’s loyalty to your company and your products and your bottom line. That’s why successful call monitoring is one of the most powerful tools in any call center manager’s toolbox. All you have to do is use the tool and use it often.
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