Closing the Call Centre Quality Gap ─ Part Two:
How does training integrate into a quality approach?

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 second in a three part series looking at how to close the call centre quality gap, Jeff Austin, Managing Director of Siyandza Skills Development Training, discusses how to determine what your organisation’s specific quality goals should be and the important, pivotal role training plays in adopting a "quality approach".

In last month’s article we defined "quality", in the call centre context, as the measurement of how effectively and efficiently a customer’s query is handled. In other words, "quality" is a gauge of both the customer’s experience and the call centre’s effectiveness. We also discussed the need to see "quality" as an integrated business process and not a benchmarked ‘target number’ that the business needs to attain.

In this article, we are going to look at how an organisation can determine appropriate, specific quality goals and the important, pivotal role training plays in adopting a "quality approach".

Benchmarking and customer surveys

Starting the process of ‘putting the quality back in’ requires determining what "quality" means to your organisation ─ specifically ─ and then aligning your assessment processes around that. The first point to make is one that bears constant reiteration: as a measurement of the overall customer experience, "quality" has to be determined by the business and the call centre together, not just the latter in isolation.

When it comes to determining what "quality" means to your organisation, there are numerous methodologies and two of the more common and useful tools are benchmarking and customer surveys.

Benchmarking can be very constructive, if used with caution. It can help an organisation establish what other businesses are doing to achieve certain measurements or standards of quality, but these should only be used as a guideline and not an absolute because quality goals are very specific to each organisation.

Customer surveys are also useful because they measure specific customer ‘touch points’ and the questions asked can be tailored to assess the specific quality outcomes of the organisation. For instance, how long a customer will wait for an answer and what agent behaviour will convey the organisation’s desired quality perceptions.

Quality has to be monitored and assessed internally, of course, by measuring performance against defined goals, but customer surveys are a great way of understanding and establishing what acceptable performance levels should be, as well as finding out whether you are actually satisfying customers.

Adopting a "quality approach"

The next step is to convert what "quality" means to your organisation into a set of specific, measurable goals. For example, your definition could be translated into how quickly calls should be answered, what percentage of queries should be resolved on the customer’s first call or an average ‘score’ that an agent needs to achieve during each call.

If the call centre acts as the "face" of the business, in other words, the channel of communication between the various back office units and the customer, then it might also be appropriate to set and measure "turnaround times" ─ how quickly queries are resolved and their status is reported back to the customer.

Converting your organisation’s specific definition of quality into measurable, goals and implementing these consistently is adopting a "quality approach". The term is used to illustrate the fact that successfully achieving the business’ expectations of quality is only possible if these are converted into precise, measurable criteria that can be integrated and ingrained into every aspect of the way the organisation functions ─ from induction and new hire training, through to ongoing day-to-day operations.

In other words, adopting a "quality approach" requires an understanding of how each area or division within the call centre impacts and contributes to organisational quality:

Organisation ─ the business itself must determine what levels of quality (i.e. customer experience) it wants its customers to receive.

Workforce Management (WFM) ─ the WFM department plays a critical role in ensuring that the right number of staff are in the right place at the right time to achieve service level targets. Making sure the organisation is staffed correctly requires:
being able to forecast call volumes to +/- 10 percent variance of actual volumes received; creating staffing schedules that correctly account for overheads (shrinkage) and planned occupancy (to minimise costs and get the right number of staff on the phones to handle the call volume fluctuations throughout the day/week/month)


Quality Assurance (QA) ─ the QA team must have an assessment form and processes that measure against the organisational goals and compliance requirements, as well as processes to provide feedback to the business and continually improve the business.

Operations ─ this division needs to set up defined inspection points, at every level of the organisation, to measure delivery of services to the customer. Operations should also engage in continuous feedback with the other departments in the call centre and organisation, to continually deliver and improve on quality standards.

Training – all training material should be designed to achieve the organisation’s vision of quality and customer service, from induction to product training to ongoing development training. Training staff also need to be well trained in facilitation skills, to ensure that the message is delivered effectively.

Again, a "quality approach" cannot simply be an expectation of the business. Its goals must be bought into and effectively communicated by every level of leadership and management throughout the organisation, from the MD and senior executives to front line supervisors. Once defined, it must be given life and embedded within the organisation’s culture.

The role of training

Training has an important, pivotal role to play in ensuring your organisation successfully adopts a "quality approach". It can take ownership for delivering the quality message throughout the organisation, which is a responsibility that companies, especially large ones, often find difficult to assign.

In many respects, training is the perfect vehicle to drive the overall quality message because of its inclusive, encompassing communication role within most organisations. It is usually the first point of contact with new employees during induction and impacts on most employees at one time or other during their tenure as skills are naturally broadened and developed. It is a great way of ensuring the quality approach bridges company departmental silos and infuses the entire organisation.

Obviously, this requires incorporating the organisation’s quality objectives into the training and there are two, interrelated undertakings to achieving this. The first is to ensure your training provider is customising their training materials accordingly and the second is to adjust the overall approach to training.

Your training provider needs to ensure they are training to meet your specific quality requirements and culture. This requires that the provider understands your requirements and uses them to inform the way the training program is designed. It entails building the quality message into the training materials and instructing facilitators to reinforce the message regularly and consistently.

The other important aspect is to adjust the overall training approach and ensure the ‘why’ and not just the ‘how’ is communicated to the learner. In other words, not just training an employee to use a system, an application or a process correctly, but also explaining to them how doing so will help achieve the required quality of customer experience.

In part 3 of this series, we will look at ways organisations like yours can close the "quality gap" ─ the discrepancy between the "quality" the customer expects to experience and the reality of what is experienced.