To remedy ailing environments, experts recommend a strong cultural foundation and a positive managerial approach.Monitoring, and its indispensable mate, coaching, are being shortchanged and neglected within many call centers, according to recent industry research. The 2007 Call Monitoring Practices Survey, sponsored by Verint Systems Inc. and Aon Consulting, reveals that 75 percent of the 438 U.S. companies that responded to the survey cite a paucity of time and resources as their greatest monitoring challenge (see Figure 1). As a result, many professionals reported experiencing either the nonexistence of quality monitoring and coaching, or the presence of enervating practices. The encouraging news is that call center leaders and experts are passionate and resolute about improving monitoring and coaching methods within struggling centers and, herein, they share useful philosophies and strategies.
Connecting Cultural Clarity to Quality
In some call centers, a “big brother” mindset prevails in which frontline staff view monitoring as eavesdropping rather than a positive performance improvement practice.
These centers suffer from a lack of trust, says Kristyn Emenecker, solutions marketing manager, Witness Actionable Solutions, Verint Systems. “Unfortunately, when that has been part of the environment for a while, it’s very difficult to turn it around. You can’t just implement a quality program by creating a QA form and having weekly one-on-ones. It doesn’t work like that. It’s not a magic pill.”
Emenecker emphasizes the importance of first establishing a culture for quality service within the organization. “You can’t drive quality from the QA form,” she says. “You have to drive quality from your culture — the QA form and coaching are an extension of that and a way to personalize development for each employee.”
Positivity Breeds Positivity
Constructive feedback fosters agent development, but many centers still appear perplexed about coaching and its potential impact. The survey reflects that 58 percent of respondents view the ability to coach effectively as a leading challenge. Many experts argue that this perceived challenge can be overcome by implementing simple, yet meaningful coaching methods.
Mary Cruse believes that positive reinforcement is integral to successful coaching. Cruse is director of Client Services-West for Genzyme Genetics, a division of Genzyme Corp., and president of the Los Angeles chapter of Help Desk Institute. When coaching agents, she suggests focusing on what they’ve done well, as well as opportunities for improvement. “It’s not about what they did wrong. It’s about what they can do better,” she says.
Cruse recommends that supervisors share any compliments an agent receives with the agent, as well as with upper management. This creates “layers of visibility,” she says, as well as layers of positivity.
Coaching Through Questioning
A positive approach to coaching also requires mentors to use proper verbiage when communicating with agents. For instance, the words “you should have” are not advised when coaching agents, says Clifford Hurst, president of Career Impact and author of Your Pivotal Role: Frontline Leadership in the Call Center (published by ICMI Press).
Hurst recommends that call center supervisors adopt a Socratic question-and-answer approach when coaching. Instead of telling agents how to change their behavior, try to draw out of them their own analysis and ideas about how to improve, he says.
Hurst has identified three questions that supervisors can use when coaching to help agents find their own solutions. He calls them the “Three Magic Questions”:
- How do you feel that call went?
- What did you do particularly well on that call?
- What can you do differently next time?
“There is no defensiveness built up by this kind of coaching,” Hurst says. “And even in the 20 percent of the time that the agent misidentifies the areas most in need of improvement, by the time you’ve gone through these three questions, the agent is much more open to feedback than he would have been before.”
The coaching system espoused at 1-800-flowers.com is a melding of positive reinforcement and purposeful questioning.
“We believe in demonstrating a positive approach during our coaching sessions,” explains Peter Schiller, director of quality assurance and performance management for 1-800-flowers.com. Managers’ coaching techniques support the company tenet that “attitude is everything.”
“Through our ‘self-realization’ techniques, agents are not told what to do, but rather asked,” Schiller says. “For agents who are resistant to the process, we identify what, specifically, they are resisting by asking ‘how’ and ‘why.’ Oftentimes, it’s not the monitoring and coaching that meets resistance, but rather the lack of confidence to achieve the desired result. By providing agents with the tools they need to be successful, instilling pride in their job, and showing them their ability to make a difference — the negative attitudes fall away.”
Self-Reflection = Systematic Change
For those call centers that are striving to improve their service quality, Hurst offers this advice: “Look in the mirror first. We often fault agents for issues that have been created by management, whether that’s confusing pricing or return policies, or databases that aren’t easy to navigate onscreen. Look for ways to improve the system first.”
That’s advice that New Hampshire-based CaLLogix has put into practice. CaLLogix, formerly Abacus Communications, is an outsourcing firm with sites in Manchester and Bedford. In 2002, after reflecting on its culture, the company brought in call center industry veteran Sherry Leonard to reform it. Leonard, in conjunction with the quality assurance team, began by entirely revamping the monitoring program.
Prior to her arrival, monitoring consisted largely of “quality being delivered to representatives on a form,” she says. “In the past, if you failed two evaluations, you were fired.” Besides increasing agent attrition, the practice produced an atmosphere of fear — many agents would quit their jobs before they received their second or third evaluations.
“We had a fear of supervisors and management, and that, to me, is just heartbreaking — that people are working in fear,” says Leonard.
Under her guidance, an impersonal and punitive approach was replaced with an affirmative culture that now includes action development plans, internal calibrations, self-monitoring and evaluation, peer-mentoring programs, specialty and refresher agent training, motivational programs, Zenger-Miller training for supervisors, reward programs, and monitoring conducted by both the quality assurance team and supervisors.
The Aon/Verint study deems third-party monitoring as the most effective technique; however, monitoring conducted by both a quality assurance team and call center supervisors is considered superior to monitoring from a single source (see Figure 2 on page 2). The report states that “many organizations find it useful to use a combination of monitoring sources, in order to gain a ‘snapshot’ of calls from different perspectives.”
Leonard’s philosophy mirrors this belief. “When you’re out on the floor every day, as supervisors are, you understand why things are handled the way they are sometimes. QA is not visible at all times on the floor, and they’re not with your frontline out there on the floor — they don’t always realize something has changed within a program or [why] we do something different during a specific time of day. [Using a combined approach] gives you a nice balance of feedback from a QA team member, who will probably look at things as very black-and-white, as well as a supervisor, who is going to look at the gray areas. The representatives feel that [evaluations] are much more fair coming from both groups.”
In the present-day CaLLogix, the company continually looks for ways to improve its own system, instead of faulting agents. “We’ve changed that whole [former monitoring outlook]. It’s not to catch them doing something wrong. It’s to catch them doing something well and to identify where we need to make improvements,” says Leonard, who is now CEO.
Increased communication between agents and supervisors is a welcome and palpable change at CaLLogix. Carrie Perry, a supervisor at CaLLogix, began her call center career as an agent at Abacus Communications in September 1999, and thus witnessed firsthand the metamorphosis of the work environment, from a culture of fear to one of greater quality, care and support.
How has the experience influenced her view of what characterizes a superlative call center supervisor and coach? “I make myself available at all times — any time an agent needs to speak to me or has a question. Administrative work can always wait. It’s very important to put your agents first, above everything,” says Perry. “You have to make the time because the agents are the front line of the business, and if they’re not happy and they’re not doing their jobs well, certainly none of us would have a job. It’s important that we cater to our agents as much as possible.”
Janie Iadipaolo is Associate Editor of ICMI’s Customer Management Insight. <!– var prefix = ‘ma’ + ‘il’ + ‘to’; var path = ‘hr’ + ‘ef’ + ‘=’; var addy70058 = ‘janiei’ + ‘@’; addy70058 = addy70058 + ‘icmi’ + ‘.’ + ‘com’; var addy_text70058 = ‘janiei’ + ‘@’ + ‘icmi’ + ‘.’ + ‘com’; document.write( ‘‘ ); document.write( addy_text70058 ); document.write( ” ); //–>\n janiei@icmi.com <!– document.write( ‘‘ ); //–> .
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