Devoted to the call center industry, the agents on the phones, and their managers

* This post has been provided by Tom Vander Well, author of the Call Center Guy and is part of the C Wenger Group.  Thanks Tom for being part of Know More Media's Guest Blogger Week.

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I'm always struck by the mixture of motivations underlying many call center QA scorecards.  Companies love to give lip service to delivering excellent customer service and improving satisfaction.  Their QA scale, however, may reflect the designs of a cost-sensitive management team (driven by lowering costs with no regard to impact on the customer) or a sales-drive management team (driven by increasing sales with no regard to impact on the customer).

This mixture of messages frustrates front-line agents who see the hypocrisy: "You say you believe in customer service but all I'm told in QA is to keep it short or push the cross-sell." It also frustrates the QA coach who must try to justify or explain the obvious, mixed message. Of course, it is possible to have a balanced methodology in which you satisfy customers and look for ways to be efficient and opportunistic. The key is to make sure the customer is not left out of the QA equation.

If you really care about keeping your customers coming back, you should start your entire QA program with a valid, objective customer satisfaction survey. The results can give you the data you need to impact Customer satisfaction and retention. Find out what is really driving your customer's satisfaction and loyalty. Then use that information in building and weighting your QA score card. In fact, we’ve done some surveys that have measured the customer's willingness to hear up-sells and cross-sells in a customer service interaction. The results are often surprisingly positive, and the data can be a powerful tool in building buy-in among the front-lines for your sales drive.

Oh, and by the way, it's possible that your company already does customer sat research and you've never seen it. Just the other day we provided a call center manager with a copy of a survey our group had done for his boss a few years ago. He was never aware that it had been done and had not been given access to the information, even though it was critical for driving tactical decisions in his call center. I wish that this was an isolated incident, but my gut tells me it happens more often than not. It may be worth it to ask around. Of course, trying to decipher the data in many customer sat surveys we've seen can be a mind-numbing task.

by Tom Vander Well