Call monitoring leading to call coaching.
Though this is more Tom’s area of expertise, I’d like to write about call monitoring and quality assurance.
I have been working with a rapidly growing technology company over the last couple of weeks and one of their internal customer service focuses is on call monitoring. They’ve previously found it hard to set aside the time to monitor calls and have only recently developed formal customer service standards, so I’ve been helping them with it and they’ve been learning a lot and applying a lot of my suggestions.
And something I’ve learned in the process and from my other experiences with call monitoring and other types of customer service auditing is that all companies of all sizes and at all stages of customer service mastery can learn a lot from listening to their own calls.
The company I am working with has decided to keep the purpose of call monitoring mostly constructive. If anything particularly bad is noticed, they take more serious action, but most of the time, the results and findings of the call monitoring are used to coach and assist the employees in question. They meet with supervisors (and oftentimes me) and everyone goes over what the employee does well, what he or she does not do so well, and how he or she should work on improving. At the end of the meeting, the employee hopefully leaves with an idea of how best to improve. A follow up is usually scheduled to see if the employee has taken the suggestions to heart and to practice.
I’ve talked about the importance of coaching employees before and I stand by my original post – coaching is extremely important and necessary for customer service success. Making coaching a regular constructive, instead of a disciplinary, process will help to improve customer service. The company I’ve been working with has committed to coaching all new employees two times before their six month reviews and every six months after that. It’s going to be a lot of work for the company, but it is also going to be a process that they will learn a lot from.
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Larry Streeter said:
Jul 14, 08 at 8:03 amInternal call monitoring is an effective way for us to provide real time feedback to our customer support associates on the basics of call handling. Our program is designed to measure the fundamentals reps learn through their initial training around product support, customer service skills, and company policies and procedures.
What’s unique about our internal call monitoring program is that we also use it to support our external customer satisfaction survey program. Every customer who contacts Support via phone, chat, or email is sent a brief survey asking for feedback on the interaction they had with the Support associate (we only survey a customer once every 90 days to avoid “spamming”
.
Internal call monitoring programs are an effective way to evaluate how we think the call went, but the true test is what the customer thought of the interaction. By merging the two independent results (call monitor score and customer satisfaction survey) we not only provide accurate feedback to our reps but also find ways to “fine tune” the internal monitoring program that will help drive a higher level of satisfaction from our customers!
Service Untitled said:
Jul 14, 08 at 10:45 pmLarry,
Thanks for your comment!
Great points and suggestions. I’ve listened to calls that I thought were horrible and I call the customer afterwards and the customer gives the agent and the experience all of the top ratings. Sometimes there is a disconnect between the two standards, but it is the customer’s opinion that counts.