• The Next Frontier of Rep Performance—when we heard from our members that rep performance was stalling despite continued investments in talent, we decided to take a closer look at what drives performance in the service organization today. What did we find? While traditional skill sets are still important, most reps were missing a crucial piece of the rep performance puzzle—one that has more than twice the impact on performance as any other factor. We call this set of skills and behaviors the Control Quotient (CQ), which quantifies a rep’s ability to exercise ownership over their day-to-day work, as well as to remain in control over themselves in stressful situations. In today’s quality-driven world, CQ is the number one lever that companies can pull to boost performance in their frontline.
• Training Resources—as mentioned above, 2011 was a big year for upskilling staff and renewed efforts to drive performance across the service organization. To help members teach our ideas as easily as possible to their staffs, we’ve developed a full suite of ready-to-use training resources based on our best practice insights. These modules are designed to fully introduce and reinforce the concepts of experience engineering, personality-based service, and world-class coaching to frontline staff and supervisors.
• Managing Multichannel Contacts—continuing a trend we’ve observed across the last few years, our members today are serving customers in more channels than ever before. To help them strategize about the right channels to enter, as well as the best way to manage these diverse service channels, in 2011 we published new research on social media, customer communities, and e-mail, as well as proactive alerts to help our members stay one step ahead in serving their customers.
• Modernizing the Quality Assurance Function—as we looked across the CCC membership to gauge how companies are assessing quality today, two things were clear. One: delivering high-quality customer experiences is more important today than ever before. And two: for the most part, companies have yet to evolve their traditional QA processes to keep up with this increased focus on quality. We’ve learned how progressive organizations are taking a new approach to quality assurance and, in doing so, ensuring the best possible outcomes for staff and customers alike.

Here’s to a successful end to 2011 and a Happy New Year from CCC!

Customer Service Buzz Readers—what other topics were on your mind in 2011? What was your favorite CCC insight or blog?

By Corey Stout

The News of the World’s voice mail hacking scandal signifies not just the importance, but also the need for greater customer privacy in our increasingly exposed world.

The News of the World scandal showed the world that the personal information of both private and public figures was easily accessible. News of the World, a British tabloid owned by media magnate Rupert Mudoch, was accused of spying on celebrities, politicians, and victims of tragedy—including a murdered teen and families of dead soldiers.

With the rise of new, faster, and more sophisticated technology, companies have greater accessibility to information, as does the average consumer thanks to social media. Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, even famously stated this year that he “doesn’t believe in privacy” and that privacy was no longer “a social norm.”

Well, Mr. Zuckerberg, I beg to differ.

As information becomes increasingly accessible, customers want greater security over their private lives and personal information. And now it seems that The News of the World scandal is the icing on the cake (…or maybe pie to the face).

The reactions to Murdoch and News of the World are proof that customers want greater privacy. A flash mob occurred outside the House of Parliament when Murdoch testified. Protestors gathered in front of Murdoch’s New York City home. Even just shifting through the countless articles about Murdoch on the Web – Rupert Mudoch and Media Corruption: Silence No More, Rupert Mudoch: Stubborn, Stupid, or Greedy? You Be the Judge, Murdoch: Liar, Lair, Pants on Fire! – anti-Murdoch sentiment and the public’s demands for greater privacy are obvious.

The News of the World scandal made people misinformed, unaware, and betrayed, which I believe triggered most of the outrage and demands for greater privacy. In the end, I argue that it is not necessarily about the actions that companies take or the changes that companies implement, it is about how they prepare, protect, and communicate to customers. Greater transparency with customers makes them supported, protected, and secure.

Thus, customer contact organizations should react to customers’ privacy concerns by taking the following measures:

1. Secure information from internal threats: Companies must put security restrictions in place that limit possible misuse of information accessible to agents. To create an environment in which reps handle customer information appropriately, companies should implement a holistic approach to addressing agent handling of security information by incorporating practices into hiring, training, and monitoring practices as well as outline procedures for handling security breaches.
2. Protect information from external threats: To reduce fraud and identity theft, companies should develop effective authentication systems. Companies use authentication systems that require customers to provide them with specific information, such as their name, social security number, address, date of birth, billing zip code, and/or password. In a recent CCC Discussions post, a member stated that they have a special “data privacy” team to approve their authentication system.
3. Communicate privacy policies to customers: Companies have to record calls for various reasons – industry/legal requirements, coaching, handling customer complaints, etc… – so it is necessary for companies to communicate their policies to customers to avoid backlash.

What do you think? Do you think customers want greater privacy now more than ever? What privacy policies do you have in place to protect customer information?

And while senior leaders view the QA scorecard as a guide to providing good quality service, reps see the scorecard as some sort of code that has to be cracked in order to achieve high performance marks.      

One organization’s reps actually referred to their QA process as “The da Vinci Code”.  Once a rep cracked the da Vinci code good QA scores were easy to earn.  The problem with this is that reps were optimizing to the scorecard instead of the customer and they needed to redirect that energy to where it belonged: the customer experience.

But how can you make this happen?  It’s simple:

Eliminate the scorecard.

And that’s exactly what this service executive’s company has done: he eliminated the traditional checklist scorecard and replaced it with a customer survey that’s conducted 24-48 hours after the initial service interaction.

But that’s not the only example we’ve heard of companies battling da Vinci Code breakers.

My favorite example comes from National Australia Bank who has their own flavor of eliminating the checklist mentality, specifically by replacing the traditional scorecard with broad guidance for reps to consider during customer interactions.

NAB’s idea boils customer interactions down to the core elements, with competencies like Issue Diagnosis, Issue Resolution and Rapport, and then gives descriptions of why each of those is important, rather than telling reps what to say to demonstrate each of those.  This makes reps focus on demonstrating broad skill sets rather than discrete checklist actions.

And what that means for customers is that reps focus on diagnosing their issue and then resolving it, instead of making sure that every QA checkbox gets ticked along the way.  And, isn’t that really what matters to customers after all?  Having their issue diagnosed and resolved correctly?

Of course it is. 

What has your organization done to modernize the traditional QA checklist?  Post your company’s QA improvements (or are thinking of making) below in the comments.

Want to learn more about how to modernize your QA function?  Click the links below to learn the most progressive QA ideas, and register for our upcoming 2-hour webinar on boosting the performance of QA.

Related CCC Resources:

• Modernizing Quality Assurance
• Customer-Derived QA
• Adaptable Quality Framework

By Kirsten Robinson

Hindsight may be 20/20—but remembering a conversation verbatim is not. How many times have you heard he-said, she-said arguments between people who deny saying something that their opponent claims they did? We’re often told that the customer is always right. But in cases that they aren’t—especially if a disgruntled consumer is threatening legal action over misguided advice—it’s vital to have proof to back it up. Recording consumer calls can provide that word-for-word conversation history that memory can’t. They also present a valuable evaluative opportunity, as managers can review calls and score reps’ performances for internal purposes, and help them improve for future customer interactions.

But, what happens in the rare instance when a customer doesn’t want their call to be recorded? Do you make an exception? How should your company handle these calls?

An executive in our Customer Experience Forum recently asked a similar question, and we got a variety of responses from fellow members. Here are a few takeaways from the discussion:

• Transfer to a non-recorded line. Depending on your organizational set up, connect customers to a supervisor or lead. But make sure there is someone on the other end of that transfer—nothing is more frustrating than being connected to a dead end.
• Call back from a non-recorded line. While this option takes more effort than transferring calls, consider how important it is to your company to accommodate customers. And, if they don’t feel like hanging up and waiting for a call back, it might encourage customers to agree to stay on the recorded call.
• Don’t allow deletion. While it may be tempting to use a service that allows reps to mark a call for deletion so that it’s never saved, members unanimously agree that this option isn’t the way to go. Since reps can delete any call, it’s a risk that they might delete bad calls that they don’t want to be evaluated.

Of course, depending on the industry (e.g., Financial Services) some companies refuse to make an exception to the rule. Putting a message at the front of all calls to inform customers that they may or may not be recorded gives them the choice to opt out of the call. But, recording calls isn’t just beneficial to service centers—it’s also good for consumers in eliminating any dispute over what was communicated by each party.

Keep in mind that there are legal issues to recording calls—laws that vary by state and country. Be sure to check for legalities that apply to you geographically, and ensure that you’re in compliance.

CCC members, see the full thread or join the discussion on handling calls from customers who don’t want to be recorded.

For those executives trying to close out 2010 business, CCC presents a quick recap of its best research of 2010, with the hopes that it helps refocus and fulfill organizational priorities in the coming year.

1. Drivers of a Low-Effort Customer Experience—Many companies wanted to know what causes high and low effort customer experiences so we researched this and find that companies have more leverage over customer experience scores than they ever imagined and the way to take advantage of this is by influencing how the customer interprets the interaction.  The best technique to do so is experience engineering, or actively guiding customers through an interaction designed to anticipate and preemptively react to emotional responses for mutually beneficial outcomes.

2. Modernizing Quality Assurance—CCC finds that efforts to improve the quality of the customer experience are fruitless if companies do not overhaul their quality assurance processes and bring the customer closer to the process.  Leading companies are successfully rebuilding QA by: asking the customer to measure quality, using evaluations to identify staff performance trends rather than isolated missteps, and embedding QA teams within organizations to build better relationships.

3. Best-in-Class Coaching Training Materials—CCC turned our Redefining the High Performing Supervisor key findings—which finds the highest performing supervisors develop staff primarily through integrated coaching, or short bursts of in-the-moment coaching—into a training curriculum to teach individual coaching coaching skills.  The curriculum has slides, exercises, and tools needed to implement this new coaching method.  We also created a series of related e-modules to further embed the concepts.

4. Measuring the Customer Experience—Find all CCC benchmarks, definitions, and research related to measuring CSAT, NPS, FCR, and CES, along with customer experience survey design principles in this resource center.

5. Developing Staff Skills—CCC consolidated all of staff development resources in one place.  Find research, data, and tools related to coaching, training, and frontline metrics/scorecards.

6. Voice of the Customer—Ever a front-of-mind topic for companies, find all of CCC’s research and tools on VOC: how to share VOC with business partners, how to gather VOC from customer interactions, and how to use VOC to anticipate customer disloyalty.

7. 2009 Service and Support Cost, Productivity, and Quality Benchmarking Database—CCC’s latest benchmarking tool allows companies to examine cost per call, AHT, CSAT, and 45 other efficiency and quality metrics by business model, industry, and geography.

8. Inside the Low-Effort Service and Support Organization—Learn how to operationalize effort reduction by reviewing this research on the six principles of low-effort service and support organizations, which is based on a compilation of 4+ years of CCC research.

So that’s a recap of 2010 key research findings and initiatives—certainly enough to keep you busy for a long time.  Learn more about what we’re working on in 2011 here: Creating a Low-Effort Service Environment by Transforming the Frontline Rep Role in the Customer Experience.

I thought it would be cool to bring these dialogues to our blog so you can get a peek behind the research curtain and see what really goes on in our research meetings. 

Let’s take the topic of experience engineering: once we found out two-thirds of customer effort (the leading indicator of customer loyalty in service transactions) is driven by how a customer ‘feels’ about their service experience, we looked for ways to manage the customer’s perception their effort levels.  Enter experience engineering, a way to actively guide the customer through an interaction designed to anticipate emotional responses and preemptively offer solutions that create mutually beneficial outcomes.

Not just being nicer or more polite when you tell the customer ‘no’, but actively choosing words and framing conversations to leave the customer feeling like it was easy, even if it was a complex transaction.

Sound like it could cross some ethical boundaries? Sure it could, so I asked two fellow researchers, Pete and Dalia, to answer the following question:

“Short of actively lying to a customer, can you take experience engineering too far?”

Pete
Yes.  Experience engineering can be taken too far, like when staff members use company information to manipulate the outcome to be beneficial for them and not the customer.  Sure, experience engineering can be put to good use in the service environment, but if deployed with little or no oversight it likely would be perceived as manipulative by customers.

Take for instance anchoring, a practice of strategically placing an option within a range of carefully selected choices.  When anchoring, before you put your preferred option on the table, you start with a worse option knowing the customer will ‘anchor’ off of that first option. 

While this approach to service can end with a positive customer experience, the potential exists for it to be taken to a level of manipulation because the rep can see all the options, but the customer can’t.  That kind of knowledge asymmetry could mean the customer doesn’t get all the information they need to make an informed decision.  For example, reps could make up horrible options in a misguided attempt to anchor customer’s expectations, or worse yet, actually leave out information that is crucial for the customer in an attempt to get the customer to choose a certain option.

And while I’d certainly hope that all staff would operate with greater integrity, it may be tempting, especially if incentives are involved.  Anchoring can be used effectively but make sure that proper oversight, namely, QA, is helping to ensure that the perception management technique isn’t taken to extremes.

Dalia
Yes, in the absence of guardrails.  One of the risks of experience engineering is that it can come off as fake.  Frontline staff certainly can follow the general principles to actively guide the customer to the right outcome, but if the interaction isn’t tailored to the individual customer, it can seem insincere.

The key to ensuring that frontline staff truly engineer the experience and tailor the interaction is having the right reinforcement mechanism in place.

Implementing metrics that enable frontline staff to practice experience engineering is critical.  We have seen different models as to how to do this, as varied as: keeping AHT on the rep scorecard but using it as a maximum “guardrail“; and removing AHT from the scorecard but coaching staff to reduce handle time.  Investing hours of training in experience engineering can be for naught if companies hinder staff from executing the strategy.

Ensuring that experience engineering is built into a quality program is also important.  CCC believes surveying customers is the best way to assess how well frontline staff tailored the interaction.  But companies should also coach staff and look for signs of disconnect with the customer, i.e., does the staff’s tone and pace match that of the customer?  Coaching is a core component to getting experience engineering to stick, too.

So while training on experience engineering is certainly key to operationalizing the strategy, I would argue that the support structure is just as critical.

Lara
No, if you stay true to the definition of experience engineering.  Experience engineering is defined by “mutually beneficial” resolution outcomes – things that are both the best for the customer and the company.  And while I agree with my colleagues points around the need for guardrails and QA approaches, I also think that if communicated appropriately, most reps know what is in the best interests of the customer and do their best to deliver on their promise to provide high-quality customer experiences.

We aren’t talking about deceiving customers to box them into an option that only helps the company, but at the same time giving customer all the options can also lead to poor customer experiences.  Pete’s knowledge asymmetry point stands: the company often knows more than the customer about the different options available.  When given too many options customers can get confused, or pick the wrong one with their limited knowledge of the company/product (check out the Paradox of Choice if you don’t believe me).  Reps, with all their knowledge, need to actually guide the customer to the right choice for that customer.

So, while it seems like it could be manipulation, it’s actually for a good end.  It leaves the customer with the best possible option available (plus a sense of contentment with that option), while also serving the company interests.  I know it can’t always be such a neat win-win solution here, but I think more often than not we’ll find that this technique is a winner for our customers.

So there you have it (and apologies for such a long-winded post).  Three different CCC researcher opinions on the same topic – around areas we discuss in research meetings (and over a few drinks after work).  What is your point/counterpoint for this topic?  What do you think?

As the CCC team spoke with countless companies across our months of developing our new research on QA, there were some common themes that emerged in conversations—including the poor perception of the QA team within the service organization.  One member even told us that his QA team would probably feel better about meetings with other peers in the contact center if there were metal detectors at the door to the conference room…people were that upset with QA!

Now, let me set the record straight.  This has nothing to do with the individuals on the QA team.  Rather, this is a reputation problem for what this group stands for, day in and day out.  And that is…be the bad guy.

No one likes to be the bad guy – the person who has the job of enforcing the rules and levying penalties when individuals break those rules. 

Many organizations try to improve the QA reputation by increasing their visibility across the organization, but most approaches fall short of creating a unique role for QA that doesn’t exclusively focus on the quality scorecard.  At the end of the day, we believe that by restricting QA activities to call scoring and scorecard-based coaching, organizations are ignoring an incredible source of insight around performance trends and development techniques.

What’s the answer to building a positive QA reputation, you ask?

QA can play several different roles within coaching activities, so different variations exist on how to embed the function appropriately. These variations essentially align into two categories that depend upon the constituency that QA interacts with most directly—supervisors or reps. 

1. For QA–Supervisor relationships, it’s mostly about creating efficiencies.  QA coaching in tandem with supervisors can often lead to redundant messaging…or worse, conflicting messaging supervisors then have to reconcile with reps. 

Leading companies minimize role overlap to create complementary, rather than competing, roles for QA and supervisor to play.  In one of our new best practice cases, this takes the shape of an advisory role for QA staff to serve as a coaching feedback mechanism for supervisors.

2. For QA–rep tensions, creating frequent, informal interactions can do wonders.  Blue Cross of Northeastern Pennsylvania, for example, breaks down its QA—rep barriers by creating a “coach line” that QA operates to provide an in-the-moment coaching option available to reps as they handle calls.

By dramatically increasing the frequency of communication between the groups, reps receive more coaching and begin to view QA feedback as more credible since the team is a day-to-day resource and presence.

What’s the reputation for your QA function?  More importantly, what are you doing to fix it?

Just a few months later, CCC has finalized its research on QA – Modernizing Quality Assurance.  Given the huge amount of interest in the topic, we’re experimenting with a “Web first” release of our findings.  Don’t worry – we’ll have meetings on this topics in early 2011, but we wanted to get this material to you as quickly as possible so that you can start using it immediately.

What I like most about our findings is that it explores solutions to long-standing QA struggles not by pushing more and more resources to tackle the problem head-on, but by taking a step back and considering the larger causes of ineffective QA programs to identify new solutions that often side-step original problem altogether.

It’s a bit like having blinders on while searching for the exit to a hedge maze.  Keep the blinders on – and blindly push forward until the hedge stops you from going forward.  Take the blinders off – and sometimes the exit is right there on your left. For example:

Think your QA scorecard isn’t customer-focused enough?  Don’t internally keep on refining your scorecard based on what you think matters most to the customer.  Do what a Australian-based telecommunications company does and just ask the customer instead.

Don’t believe that you have a large enough sample size of QA score to form meaningful opinions about reps?  Don’t keep trying to increase the number of scores per rep per month.  Do what Pitney Bowes does and track rep trends over a 2-3 month period instead of evaluating them every month.

Worried that your reps are optimizing to the scorecard?  Don’t constantly tinker with the line items on the scorecard to make it harder for reps to game the system, move to a competency-based model like National Australia Bank that provides a flexible quality framework that no rep can game.

Trying to improve the relationship between QA and frontline reps/supervisors? Don’t just schedule more QA-rep coaching sessions on the scorecard, do what Blue Cross of Northeastern Pennsylvania and a telecommunications company both do and move QA coaching as far away from the scorecard as possible to establish QA as development coaches not enforcers of the assessment.

What we have found is that these solutions, plus a host of CCC tools, helps service organizations re-structure their QA teams to:

• Shift the source of QA inputs to incorporate the customer’s point of view
• Improve the actionability of QA outputs by surfacing true coaching abilities
• Gain QA credibility by embedding the function in coaching activities

This new QA function is one that turns out accurate and actionable information that is well-respected by frontline reps and their supervisors.  Now, isn’t that a change in outcome that we can all begin to achieve – by looking at the challenges we face in a different way.

What about your thoughts?  We know that over 88% of service organizations believe their current QA processes are ineffective, despite many recent tweaks and changes.  What do you see here that you can use to make substantial changes to your QA function?

CCC members: Catch the entire peer discussion on mystery shopping in the Customer Experience Forum.

But if the goal of mystery shopping is to measure the quality of the interaction – don’t all customers have the potential to provide the same insight as mystery shoppers? So what additional value does an official mystery shopper program bring?

Instead of a mystery shopping program, you could surface feedback that reflects the actual customer perspective by simply calling customers and interviewing them about their experiences.  Companies that do this well report very actionable information related to both the frontline staff and overall organization. 

CCC has seen two compelling practices here.

1. National Australia Group follows up on post-call customer surveys with low scores to learn about the customer experience and surface improvement opportunities.  What’s really interesting about NAG’s approach is that the outbound calls serve as an opportunity to truly analyze the root causes of poor customer experiences, specifically targeting areas of improvement (e.g., rep skills, process and policy).  These calls are much more than simple surveys – they actually identify coaching opportunities and processes fixes.

With this strategy, NAG actually recovers 62% of dissatisfied customers, while improving first contact resolution scores by 31% and CSAT scores by 11%.

2. Telecommunications firm OmniTel does something similar, going so far as to supplant its internal quality monitoring efforts with a customer-derived QA process—literally using customer interviews to learn about the customer experience and then using the information derived to coach and develop frontline staff. 

As a result of its efforts, OmniTel sees a 15% increase in customer satisfaction scores and a 60% decrease in calls rated “poor.”  You can read more about OmniTel’s approach in this previous post.

So, is mystery shopping as we know it unnecessary?  Could you save costs by using your own employees to gather similar data via outbound customer surveys…or does anyone think that mystery shoppers offer something else that the QA plus outbound survey approach doesn’t address?

CCC members: See the full story of National Australia Group’s approach to identifying improvement areas and recovering customers with their proactive service approach.

Today I’m focusing a little downstream from this objective–>subjective shift to talk about one of the potential implications of a subjective QA approach.

Certainly the move from a checklist to a subjective scorecard will come with many change management implications.  But, one of the largest of hurdles we have identified is how to handle variable compensation and incentives. 

Currently, QA scores are a large part of variable payouts many frontline reps receive—and, therefore, reps (rightly?) ask for a specific definition when it comes to QA requirements.  After all, with the checklist it’s much easier to know precisely what to do to get a high score.  Not to mention, clear criteria provides an advantage when appealing a score. With subjectivity, however, reps are suddenly placing their financial gain (incentives) at the mercy of the QA “opinion.” 

And, although guardrails—such as calibration transparency, well-defined subjective scoring criteria, and team-based goals—could be put in place to help allay rep fears about QA bias, the executives we’ve spoken with seem to be very hesitant to base incentives on subjective measures as well.  It’s certainly critical to overcome these qualms on both ends of the organization – otherwise we’ll end up with a QA process likely to be bogged down with constant appeals and disputes.

Here are a few thoughts on addressing this conflict that have come up during member conversations:

1. Incorporate customer surveys into incentives by creating an index score that uses subjective AND objective QA criteria and also incorporates customer survey scores.  By combining three types of scores, the subjective QA piece will carry less weight, but the presence of survey data helps emphasize the customer experience over the objective “compliance” components.  
2. Use objective criteria to reach an incentive threshold—thereby ensuring equitable access to incentives, and then determine the payout amount based on subjective scoring.
3. What if we didn’t use QA for incentives at all—instead focusing the outputs of QA exclusively on coaching and staff development?  Would it still drive behavior?  And if QA scores didn’t exist, what would be the alternative way to base variable comp on “quality”?
4. Or…do we not give reps enough credit?  Would the guardrails I mention above (calibration, rubrics, team goals, etc.) be enough to justify a subjective score to the extent that we can comfortably use it for variable comp?

So here’s my question to you: in making the shift to more subjective QA—or eliminating QA scores altogether—how might you handle the question of variable comp?  Thinking outside the box is encouraged!