The Ascent Group, Inc.

Measuring the Customer Experience

An extract from Call Quality Practices 2010

While companies can measure customer satisfaction through customer focus groups, customer contact follow-up telephone surveys, and written satisfaction surveys, the results are often not timely enough or detailed enough to help individual agents understand their impact or contribution. A call monitoring session on the other hand, if done correctly, can instantly deliver a wealth of customer information, gauge individual agent performance and reveal a lot about your business processes and policies. Call quality monitoring refers to the process of listening to or observing an agent’s phone conversations or other multi-media contacts with customers. Not only can it improve the customer experience, it can also improve overall call center performance, reduce callbacks, focus training efforts, identify process improvement opportunities, and facilitate employee development. Call quality monitoring can be one of the most effective methods for improving the level of service you provide to your customers.

Many companies have created specialized Quality Assurance groups to monitoring agent performance, in an effort to supplement supervisory effort or offload some of the burden. There are advantages and disadvantages that must be understood.

The industry has witnessed a proliferation of call-monitoring technology, as companies search for ways to make the call monitoring process more efficient. Industry consolidation has reconfigured vendor offerings and combined technologies to provide more robust solutions. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is also opening new doors. Recent incarnations include technologies that mine call data for keywords and others that interpret speech patterns and evaluate calls without human intervention. More features are being incorporated into technology solutions for call monitoring, making these systems more attractive to call center management and more challenging to implement.

New technology and dedicated QA groups have made it possible to conduct more monitoring sessions per month per employee than were possible in the past. Has this led to higher customer satisfaction, improved call center performance, or more effective agents? Our survey reveals that there are no guarantees. Some companies have experienced great success while others are struggling. As most have found, call quality assurance is a highly complex process—from both a people and technology standpoint. Call quality monitoring is one of the most effective methods for improving the level of service you provide to your customers. Call quality monitoring refers to the process of listening to or observing an agent’s phone conversations or other multi-media contacts with customers.

Quality Monitoring programs can be challenged by many factors, including:

• Difficulty in designing evaluation criteria

• Lack of buy-in or credibility

• Insufficient resources or time

• Lack of automation or poor system reliability or support

• Inadequate training for coaches and supervisors

• Inconsistent evaluation results

• Lack of support from management

With all this in mind, the Ascent Group’s conducted research during mid 2010 to better understand how companies are monitoring the quality of customer calls and other customer transactions. We asked companies to share their call monitoring experiences to help us identify the practices that make or break a quality monitoring process. We also asked them to provide their plans moving forward as well as lessons learned along the way. The results of this research are contained in the following report.

What Did We Learn?

Companies who have implemented call quality programs have realized significant improvement in call quality, customer satisfaction, employee performance, and overall call center performance. Companies report specific improvement in call quality ranging from two-to-six percent. Attributed gains in customer satisfaction ranged from five to twelve percent. Some report significant reduction in failure rates, handle time, and callbacks. Other improvements mentioned included: higher first call resolution, fewer customer complaints, fewer errors, improved overall call quality, improved service level, reduced turnover, and higher employee morale.

Call quality monitoring must be reflective of customer value and expectations—it must truly measure the customer experience. Measuring the customer experience is the primary purpose of a call quality monitoring process. Do you know what your customers’ expect? If you don’t then find out though customer research—interviews, focus groups, expectations surveys, or even calibration sessions—take the time and spend the money to understand how customers’ want to be served. Keep in mind that expectations vary from segment to segment and that expectations change over time. Calibrating your call quality program with customer expectations is an ongoing effort.

Call quality monitoring is a performance measurement tool. Like any measurement tool, you have to be careful about what you are measuring. While the measurement process in and of itself produces change, you’ll also want to make sure you’re measuring the right behaviors.

Emphasize the Customer Experience

If call quality is intended to measure the customer experience, make sure your evaluation measures represent your customers’ expectations, not what you think is important to your customers. This is one of the biggest mistakes made. Measuring call quality through call monitoring is a labor-intensive process; it’s also high risk, in terms of human factors. Call monitoring is a key determinant of stress in call centers—especially if it’s perceived as being inaccurate, untimely, too frequent, or too intense. So in other words, if you’re not truly measuring what customers’ value then you might just be wasting your time (and money) and placing your agents under undue stress.

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