Closing the Call Centre Quality Gap - Part one:
Minding the quality gap: I'm a customer, not a number!

by Jeff Austin

A call centre that delivers poor quality customer service can cause irreparable damage to a business - yet many call centres do not fully deliver quality interactions to their customers. In this article, the first in a three part series looking at how to close the call centre quality gap, Jeff Austin, Managing Director of Siyandza Skills Development Training, shares his insight into how to improve service and how quality is integrated within a call centre to deliver a higher quality interaction with customers.

As customers, we all know what good quality service is. We also know what poor quality service is and, unfortunately, we experience it more often than we perhaps should. The disconnect between the quality of what the customer expects to experience and the reality of what is experienced, is known as the "quality gap".

In the ever increasingly competitive modern marketplace, many call centres recognise the importance of good quality service but fail to provide it consistently. In this article, we look at some of the possible reasons for poor quality experiences and the possible solutions.

Quality as a process, not a result

In order to deliver quality to customers, an organisation must define what quality is and at what levels it will maintain that quality throughout the organisation. As call centres are the customer facing portion of many organisations, the quality goals within the call centre should be focused around the customer experience. In other words, it is a gauge of both the customer's experience and the call centre's effectiveness.

As a simple example - a business may want to deliver low cost shoes to the public. In a simple business model, it may have a factory, a sales mechanism (i.e. a call centre) and then administrative functions. The organisation may decide that quality is not as important as delivering a low cost product, so it may use cheaper materials in the shoe construction and may only have one quality check at the end to ensure that the shoe meets a certain level of "quality".
In the call centre context, "quality" is the measurement of how effectively and efficiently a customer's query is handled.
If the organisation provides direct sales through a small call centre they may not have the optimum number of staff in place to service all calls in 20 seconds or less and the people that staff the phones may only take orders as opposed to making the experience brilliant for the customers. At the end of the day, the organisation has met its goals of delivering a low cost product and maintained the quality that it wants.

Conversely, another company that makes shoes wants to deliver the highest quality shoes so they may use top end materials in the construction of the product and ensure that the sales mechanism is focused on the customer (so the people that take the orders are trained how to give the customer a brilliant experience). In this company, the organisation made the decision to maintain a certain level of quality in both the factory and the sales mechanism to ensure that the level of quality is maintained.

This is why I say that quality is "a conscious decision with tangible costs" that an organisation must realise and drive through all levels of the business. If one business unit does not do their part to achieve the level of quality desired by the organisation, the overall customer experience will not be as positive and the overall quality will drop.

There are many guidelines or best practices that can be used when determining how quality will be measured within a call centre. Critical to setting up the assessment criteria for measuring quality within the call centre, is to ensure that the internal call centre metrics are supported by the corporate goals of the business, as well as the organisation's culture. As an example, call centre performance metrics, such as average speed of answer and hold time, should be aligned to and managed to meet the quality standards of the organisation.

Seeing "quality" as a process requires fully integrating the Quality Assurance (QA) and Training Teams with the Operations team, ensuring that the teams are working together towards a common goal and not independently of each other.

In practical terms, this means that assessments performed must be promptly evaluated and effectively communicated back to agents to prevent gaps from occurring. There needs to be a clearly communicated (and executed) process for how and when coaching and feedback on quality will take place, so that Team Leaders can coach their agents timely and in an effective manner. The longer it takes to give the agent feedback, the less effective the process is.

Training is also a critical part of the solution and a highly effective way of ensuring that "quality gaps" are closed once they have been exposed through QA. Training utilises the information from QA to provide targeted services to Agents and their Team Leaders.

Be Critical of Benchmarks

In today's highly competitive market, the customer's experience can be a key factor to an organisation's long term success or failure. In order to be successful in today's marketplace, a call centre should transform itself into a "quality organisation" - a business that is committed to delivering genuinely superior customer service.

Achieving this starts with a clear vision of what "quality" means to your organisation. This vision must then be documented in detail and translated into a lucid plan of action, which is clearly supported by all levels of the organisation.

It also requires becoming more critical of "benchmarks". Benchmarks are tolerable in themselves, provided the same calculations and processes are used when comparing internal performance to benchmark standards. For example - if a benchmark report shows that an average quality assessment score should be 90% but does not show the criteria and questions within the assessment, it is very difficult to ensure that one is comparing like with like. It is not uncommon for someone within a call centre to receive a benchmark report that states that quality needs to be at a certain percent for them to be considered successful, which prompts them to develop an assessment form and target the benchmark as the result. A good rule of thumb is to develop interactive assessment forms that are aligned to best practice as well as being aligned to the quality standards in the organisation.

When it comes to putting "quality" back into your organisation, there are many guidelines, benchmarks and "best practices" available, but the most critical step is to determine what "quality" means to your organisation in providing real service to your customers and to align your assessment process around that.

The Internet, for example, is a great resource if used effectively. There are various industry leading websites that have contributions and resources available to end users, as well as benchmark reports and best practices. Additionally, I believe there is a lot of value in partnering with companies that perform similar work to discuss how things are done and compare notes.

When I work with people in the call centre industry, for instance, I encourage them to discuss business ideas and compare notes with their peers in other organisations to find how their organisations have tackled certain problems since there are many good ideas that, if shared and implemented, will improve the local industry as a whole. It is also good to join any organisations or associations that act as "flagships" for your industry. For the call centre industry in Gauteng, for example, there is Contact in Gauteng, which provides people in the industry with a lot of good information concerning benchmarks, best practices, as well as access to people that may provide assistance to businesses with questions.

The problem of managing to a number

Many organisations the world over tend not to see the measurement and management of quality in the call centre as critical to overall business success. Unfortunately, the measurement and management of quality is often seen simply as a transactional process and a target number that the business needs to attain. When this occurs in a call centre, quality is not enabled within the business and it instead becomes yet another target that is chased instead of necessary behaviour being embedded. In other words, you should always manage to the required behaviour and not the specified number.

For example, if a Team Leader (TL) coaches an agent on a quality assessment that did not attain the target and simply goes to the agent and tells them that they did not hit target, the behaviour that caused the agent to not attain target is not addressed. Instead, the TL should discuss the assessment with the agent to find out why they believe they missed the target and this "why" should then be coached. This way, the behaviour that caused the assessment to not be passed is addressed and understood by both the TL and the agent, making it easier to rectify if it occurs again.

At the operational level, "managing to numbers" or chasing a target number is one of the key contributors to the lack of quality delivered by call centres worldwide. Even if there is a clear vision of what quality means to the organisation, and quality has been included as a dimension of how the business is measured, it is not uncommon to find call centres hitting their "benchmark" while visibly failing to deliver a quality experience to their customers. This often occurs when a quality assessment process is in place and customer interactions are assessed, but the results are simply passed on to the agent verbally or as a signed off document.

In other words, quality has to be more than a measurement on an agent level. It must actually be seen as a continuous feedback process that is bought into and supported by the entire business.


In part 2 of this series, we will discuss how to define and measure "quality" and how to determine what your organisation's specific quality goals should be.