We all know the impact of excellent customer service to the business. In light of the digital era, most customers rely on contact centers for customer service; therefore, the strategies used should result in happy customers. A key strategy to yield measurable outcomes is through calibration sessions.
Calibration is a standardized scoring process and customer interaction evaluation that provides a quantitative measurement. It ensures that clients, quality monitoring team, supervisors, and trainers can evaluate agent performance and improve customer service. A calibration session takes time, and all parties must participate for it to be effective.
Importance of calibration
It standardizes scoring across multiple teams
Calibration ensures consistent scoring, which is the basis for measuring the performance of agents. In addition, it eliminates the perception of favoritism among supervisors.
Some agents feel that their supervisor is lenient compared to the quality monitoring team. However, after all responsible parties – quality monitoring, supervisors, and client – complete the calibration session, the results are the same. Therefore, it does not matter who did or did not do the call monitoring and scoring.
Consistent findings help drive improvement across the entire team. By including the training team, learning’s can be immediately implemented within the training curriculum.
It determines the quality of agents performance
Agent’s consistency in service delivery to the customers
How effective the agent is adhering to contact center standards and procedures.
Confirming whether the agents’ behaviors you are measuring lead to quality service delivery.
Before a calibration session, you will have determined the scoring benchmarks. Once you calibrate these scores and carry out the exercise, you will know how each agent is performing. In particular, it will reveal the following:
Understanding where your agents are failing will guide the improvement needs. Through this process, the agents will also get to know what matters when it comes to offering quality customer service.
It reveals coaching improvement needs
A calibration session takes time and resources to be successful. Therefore, the desired results of improvement should be achieved. It reveals the exact challenge the agents are facing, either compliancy behaviors like not reading the recording statement or communication soft skills like speaking too fast for the customer to understand.
Since the agents are part of the calibration session, they will understand firsthand how their behaviors and soft skills are playing out. During these sessions, it is the right time to address all these issues, and ensure that each agent understands the right way of offering quality customer service call.The coaches (managers and supervisors) get to know where to focus their energy and time for customers to receive quality services. Remember to be specific, give both positive and negative feedback and on time.
It refines the quality assurance standards
In most cases, we use Quality Standards Definition Document (QSDD) as a guide to all components of the evaluations. It is a great tool to use during your sessions. However, these standards have to be in line with your company quality procedures.
The more calibration sessions you hold, the more you understand the guidelines that do not adhere to your procedures. You can refine them to your particular needs. Ensure that all stakeholders understand the recommended changes to avoid confusion in the implementation process.
In conclusion, calibration sessions are beneficial to all stakeholders from the client, management, trainers, and quality monitoring team to the agents. These four benefits stand out: standardizing scoring across multiple teams, determining the quality of agents’ performance, revealing coaching improvement needs and refining the quality assurance standards.
Consistently performing calibration sessions will ensure overall improvement in customer service delivery, which will lead to satisfied customers. I will look at how to carry out a successful calibration session in the next post.
