Good Practices of Quality Assurance

Considerations when purchasing and implementing a call recording solution

 By Chris Derickson

You’ve come a long way baby…

             Remember when telephones had some numbers, an asterisk key, a pound key, and the button to hang up the call?  A mere 13 buttons were used to form the first telephone-accessible helpdesks, based on the frustrations of office workers trying to cope with the integration of desktop computers into their standard professional lifestyle.  The helpdesk would sit in unbroken silence for what seemed to be hours, until a server process would fail, at which point each phone would begin to ring without pause.  Three computer adepts would then answer their phones, opening with the question, “Is your e-mail down?” and a follow-up statement that they already know about it.  Short responses that eliminated the standard niceties of everyday conversation were seen by some as efficient and others as impolite.  Professionals demanded a higher level of performance from helpdesks, and we responded.

 Many of you can recall this as a time of confusion and frustration.  Processes were spoken and rarely written outside of a single memorandum that would be forgotten in less than two months.  Agents approached each call with their own array of experience and logic, making each call a gamble for the most capable technician.  Customer complaints were the only way to find out how an agent treated their callers. 

            Thankfully for us all, times have changed.  Processes are documented in Standard Operating Procedures and related materials, increasing efficiency and accuracy.  Resources are available to allow agents to share knowledge, reducing training and call times.  Investment in training and supporting analysts has increased in amount, efficiency and gain.  Most importantly, customer service has been brought up to a higher level of standards.  Though each topic of processes, resources, and people hold their own dynamic challenges, they all share a common bond, which is the need to deliver quality.   Thus, Quality Assurance was born.

            Although many support centers are in a position to live monitor their analyst’s calls, there comes the day that the growth of the center demands a more reliable means of ensuring customer service and technical accuracy.  At this point, the implementation of a call recording software package may be the appropriate solution.  The purpose of this article is to share some good practices and lessons learned from the implementation of two such call recording solutions during my career.

Phase One:  Planning

            As with anything, we want to provide a clear and justifiable description of the necessity of purchasing such a comprehensive resource.   Though options of measurement may vary, one should begin with compiling metrics from available sources.  Tracking customer complaints versus customer praise, results of live monitoring evaluations, and customer satisfaction surveys are all highly valuable metrics to apply to this topic.  Other options may include showing the variance from the highest average handling time versus the lowest and information gathered from incident evaluation.  Each of these topics can show some very compelling evidence that supports the need for better analysis of agent performance.

            Next, plan out how you want to use the software.  This is the time to determine how many calls you want to evaluate, and on what time scale.  It is difficult to determine what percentage of an agent’s calls can truly be interpreted as statistically relevant.  Many centers find themselves agreeing on the need to evaluate 1%-5% of calls, depending on their complexity.  In some cases, monitoring 1% of calls (per agent, per month) is a workload that can be managed by supervisors or team leads.  If the need arises to exceed that, additional head count may be required in the form of Quality Assurance analysts.  It is important that you assemble this information in the planning stage and document your plan of action.  Your first draft it will likely undergo certain changes in the future, however, ensuring that your implementation plan has considered as many different perspectives as possible could mean the difference between a smooth versus costly rollout.

            The last step in this phase is to create the first draft of your evaluation.  First, list the concepts of an agent’s performance that are important to you.  By focusing on the concepts before the actual evaluation statements or questions, we can ensure to cover the necessary spectrum of skills.  Next, research example evaluations that you are able to obtain from the internet or your network contacts and integrate the applicable concepts into your evaluation.  Once your homework is complete, write down all of the evaluation questions that can cover the concepts that you’ve listed to be important.  Finally, assign a resource to write the thorough explanation, scope, reasoning behind each question, and how it will be graded once the process meets the production environment.  It is recommended to keep your first evaluation draft limited to, “Yes or No,” questions in order to reduce any overt interpretation.  This entire process should support and be governed by your Standard Operating Procedures.  If, during this phase, you realize that the Standard Operating Procedures need heavy revision (or even creation), the best thing to do is focus your resources on doing so before considering the investment in a quality assurance tool.  The expectations that you will grade an analyst on should be clearly documented, communicated, and reviewed regularly in order to properly enforce those standards.

Phase Two:  Communication

            During your planning stage, it is vital that the plan be kept confidential amongst key members of the support center.  The reason for this is the second step, which we’ll call the communication phase.  Most of the analysts that will contribute to the success of your support center can attest to a nightmare experience of a call recording solution that was used improperly, resulting in low morale, high attrition, and increased costs as a result.  Once these individuals hear that there are plans being created to implement just such a process, the rumors and assumptions will begin.  From that, it is best to have a clear and reasonable plan established and communicated to your team so that they may participate in, and therefore better understand, the adjustments that will come as a result of such a venture. 

By e-mailing the message to the entire team with the promise and delivery of follow-up team meetings, the analysts may better express their concerns and find answers to questions that they may have in a positive and constructive setting.  Realistically speaking, there will always be resistance to such quality control practices, and it is vital to mitigate as much of that impact as possible.  Keeping your agents informed of the initial plan, and changes to the plan as time goes on, is a good practice to accomplish just that.

Phase Three:  Shopping

            Though not as exciting as shopping for new clothes or a television, comparing your options can save tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.  The best approach to this is to begin with networking.  If you speak to individuals in other companies through industry associations such as HDI or even organizations within your corporation, you can quickly attain some very valuable insight into the effects of utilizing a call recording solution, both positive and negative.  You may then list the different vendors throughout the market that are able to meet your group’s needs.  During this process, you may wish to construct a list of the items that are important to your center (e.g., Screen Recording, Archive Capability, User-Friendly, et cetera), separating wants versus needs.

            Now that you have your options and some first-hand feedback about those options from a consumer’s perspective, you may approach the vendors directly.  Speak with the vendor directly, and establish a single person to handle your potential account.  Explain the scope of what you wish to do, and that you would like to see a comprehensive quote showing various options and the associated prices for such options.  After getting such information from each vendor, you may take your list of requirements and compare which vendors meet which requirements.  Often, you will find that the most expensive solutions will meet most or all of your requirements, while the less expensive will meet fewer requirements.

            The primary thing that you might notice at this point is the staggering difference in cost between a voice-only recording solution versus software that can record both voice and the analyst’s actions on the computer during the call.  If monitoring the efficiency of how an analyst is performing their role is of roughly equal importance to how well they treat the customer, then a solution that includes computer activity recording may be worth the investment for your center.  If the need is primarily regarding the voice interaction, and the computer recording is an area that is nice, but not vital, you may wish to consider going the less expensive route of recording only voice.

            After narrowing down the possibilities of which vendor suits your needs, take any warnings that you may have heard from those in your network about the software, and present them to your sales representative, asking for details of the issue where necessary, but more importantly, their plans on rectifying the issue.  Throughout the shopping process, you will want to document information provided by the vendor, when it was given, and who relayed the information.  If you ask if the software can do something specific, and your sales representative assures you that it can, hold them to that promise. 

            The next step is to negotiate.  Vendors in this market are willing to make a deal on different aspects of the package, from overall price to features provided, in order to make the sale.  After finding the best deal you can get on the vendors’ packages respectively, you may find that your initial assessment of which vendor to buy from may change dramatically.  This is the part of the process that you want to determine on which of your wants or needs that you are willing to compromise in order to achieve maximum value.

Phase Four:  Implementation

            With a decision made for which vendor to deal with, we then will consider the implementation phase.  If the organization provides project managers, or any other Change Management services, allow their professional experience to aid in the implementation of the software.  As so many incidents and problems occur within IT infrastructure occur due to improperly managed changes, having a reliable process prior to purchase is the best approach.  Another concept to helping to move the installation along smoothly is to arrange meetings between the vendor’s IT professionals and your own in order to reduce the possibility of miscommunication.  This first step in the implementation phase should cover all aspects of installation and user acceptance testing before proceeding.

            As soon as you have an agreed upon date for the software to be running, schedule your training courses.  During the negotiation step in the Shopping phase, you will want to ensure that you obtain a commitment to training your software administrators, evaluators, and analysts.  One or more trainers should be included in the evaluators and analyst courses in order to write internal curriculum that will allow the training to remain consistent and thorough for future employees.  If you have a great deal of analysts, it is often beneficial to simply have trainers attend the analyst course, write your curriculum, and then provide the modified training to the analysts. 

Step 5:  Calibration

            With your new software package implemented and your professionals trained on its functionality, the calibration phase may begin.  The use of a call recording solution in a support center will quickly illuminate the areas within your policies that require clarification, which may not have been apparent during their authoring.  This phase will also show the differences of opinion amongst the leadership team as to what will or will not warrant a deduction. 

The primary purpose of the calibration phase is to allow all those involved in the quality assurance process (typically Managers, Supervisors, Team Leads, and Quality Assurance Specialists) to collaborate and align their perspectives on the evaluation process.  This can be done by taking a sampling of two or three calls, having each person review and evaluate the calls individually, and meet afterwards with a report that compares the differences in scoring and reasoning.  By holding these meetings two or more times per week in the early stages of the software’s use, and before it is used in any official capacity, the feedback from the evaluators will be more accurate, concise, and most importantly, fair. 

One option that we may wish to consider is to begin the formation of process with a period of self-evaluation.  By allowing analysts to have some responsibility to judge their own actions against documented procedures, we may attain a higher understanding of the evaluation process across all positions within the support center, and a lower amount of negativity that is typically a product of assumptions and confusion.  Though this is an effective method of ensuring a smoother transition, it does require careful planning in each phase mentioned in this article as well as the active management of the related expectations placed on analysts.

Once your reports indicate a minimal margin of difference between the evaluation scores of calibration calls, you may move towards using the software in a more official capacity.  If time allows, it may very much behoove the center to allow for more calibrations to occur amongst analysts.  By allowing them to participate in this phase, the analysts will be more likely to accept the feedback that is produced as a result of the software.

Step 6:  Maturity

            Every process must go through stages to meet its maturity, and quality assurance is no different.  By approaching this process from a standpoint of continual improvement, the quality assurance process will be enabled to grow alongside with the rest of your support center. 

You may choose to use such methodology as Six Sigma’s DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) in order to continually evaluate the process itself.  Whatever you choose, remember that telephones weren’t always as complex and useful as they are today.  Just as we can with such a piece of technology, we can Define the current state of a process, Measure its efficacy, Analyze root causes of poor performance, Improve the process by addressing such root causes, Control the improved process, and repeat this highly effective method of continual improvement to meet the evolving needs of our customers.