Workforce Management Featured Article
Calibration of Quality Monitoring is Essential for Proper Workforce Management
Once upon a time, “quality monitoring” in the contact center meant a manager or supervisor wandering the contact center floor, listening to the agent of calls. Sometimes, they could jack their headsets into various live calls, listening to both sides of the conversation. Officially, they would simply listen in to several calls once every quarter, six months or year, depending on how often a company reviewed agents. If your periodic monitoring session happened to be a bad day for you, your career was in jeopardy.
Fast-forward to today, and while some companies may be stuck in the past doing monitoring like it’s 1979, most large contact centers use some sort of quality monitoring solution alongside their workforce management. Managers can use recorded calls from different days, and of different call types, in order to gain a fairer picture of employee performance. Agents don’t know which calls are going to be graded, so they have incentive to excel all the time. Different channels such as e-mail and Web chat can also be evaluated alongside phone calls to provide a clearer picture of the agents’ performance.
While this represents a great leap forward for contact center quality monitoring, it still has inherent faults. In a large contact center, different managers will likely use the accompanying scorecards during evaluations in a different way. Agents will be reminded of high school, where some teachers graded very generously and others were impossible to please. If you were unlucky enough to get one of the latter, it always seemed to drag your grade down.
To avoid these scenarios, forward-thinking companies engage in calibration sessions to ensure that all managers or supervisors are using the same criteria to evaluate performance. Justin Robbins, writing for ICMI, notes that while the process isn’t easy, it’s absolutely necessary to manage a workforce well.
“Calibration provides the opportunity to test the process and confirm that consistent standards are applied to each monitored contact,” writes Robbins. “When high levels of calibration are achieved, it will not matter who did the monitoring and scoring; the outcome will be the same.”
So how do you get everyone on the same page?
For starters, contact centers must make time for regular calibration sessions. It can’t be done via instant messaging, or put off indefinitely. Robbins recommending choosing some recorded contacts (phone, Web chat or other) and having everyone listen or read, then having everyone use the company’s monitoring form to score the contact.
“After the contact, ask one person to verbally recap what he or she just observed,” writes Robbins. “Recapping the contact reinforces listening skills and attention to detail; take turns doing this so that everyone learns how. During the recap, the monitor will identify the areas in which he or she awarded points.”
Managers and supervisors can learn from one another and ensure they understand the scoring process in the same way. By doing this frequently enough, companies can ensure everyone is on the same page in evaluating the contact center workforce, and it will boost perceptions of fairness among agents. Without this process, call center management will constantly be the target of accusations of favoritism among employees, which isn’t good for anyone: agent, manager, company or customer.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi