To provide world-class customer service, providing your agents with a correctly-scored quality management (QM) form is a great starting point. In my experience, this is key for all agents, not just the new contact center additions. The score from the QM form provides crucial data to the leadership team to help coordinate and develop the business needs of the company.
There are several ways to score a form for evaluation: weighted, points and percentage, however not all are ideal.
Weighted evaluations are scored as a pass/fail, and in my many years of industry involvement, this type of form does not assist too much with development but gives them an idea of where they are in the mix of other agents. Percentage and points scoring is much more efficient for developing agents. With either of these forms of scoring you can work with the agent to raise their scores with certain behaviors.
Using percentage, the most effective, I could create a coaching plan to take the lowest scoring agents in the call center to the top 20% of agents in the whole region. With this powerful scoring feature, we could develop and design coaching around the percentage they obtained and how it could increase.
The form itself is also key in helping them get good scores. I have always built my forms around the company values and mission. You have to have good sections, categories and questions to help round out the form. Most of the time I set my forms up as follows:
- Greeting – one of the most important sections in a form. Did the agent introduce themselves and brand the company on the intro? This starts the call off right and with the right tone.
- Acknowledge – this allows the customer to know that the agent understood what was being said. Works well at starting off the world-class customer experience.
- Fact Finding – Did the agent ask the right questions to get more info on what the situation really entailed?
- Urgency – Did the agent show an urgency to help the customer and take ownership of the issue?
- Resolution – Did the agent resolve the issue? Did they go above and beyond for this customer? Key to a successful interaction is to make it right on the first call but that is not always the case as we all know but if the agents lets the customer know that they will handle it, well, that goes along way.
- Recap – Essential to let the customer know what we did on the call. This section coincides with the acknowledge section but now turns it on the customer to acknowledge.
- Closing – Not as an important section as the others but none the less it instills the agent and the company name into the customer so that they do business with you again.
Using this method, my agents were able to jump up to top tiers within 30 days. It also created a friendly, competitive environment. The agents now have a stake in their success, can see their progress, and compete with their peers for incentives. And as we know, better performing agents result in a better customer experience.
I hope this will help you to develop your contact center quality management program, happy coaching!
