Your quality program for customer service is the main way your company directly interacts with customers, and that makes it a key component in your strategies to retain customers and to convert first time purchasers into repeat business. This puts a lot of stress on the program, especially if your organization has any questions about the role of quality monitoring. Ensuring that your employees understand your quality monitoring objectives and the overall impact that they have on the company means getting better responses to feedback and better returns on your quality improvement gestures.
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Individualizing Forms and Procedures
The first quality objective should be to move the customer service personnel away from a “one size fits all” method of responding to customer concerns. That means understanding the variety of concerns customers have, as well as using quality monitoring to address any issues with understanding different customer needs and concerns.
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Keeping Forms Up to Date
Your forms and procedures also stop working at the point where they no longer reflect either your customers’ experience or your offerings. Unfortunately, it can take some time for outdated forms and procedures to work themselves out naturally. This is where quality monitoring has an opportunity to take responsibility for not only the revisions, but the proliferation of those documents after each change is made.
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Avoid Technology as a Cure-All
It is tempting to think of technology as the eventual answer to any business challenge, but the fact is that more often than not, the real change needs to be made at the level of human implementation. That means your quality objectives should weigh both what technology is used and how it is used if you are to make the most of the role of quality monitoring in your organization.
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Track and Share Your Results
One of the major goals of your quality team should be to get the entire department excited about quality improvement. That means sharing the results of your monitoring and making sure that everyone understands the ways that these results are used to make the entire organization better.
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Avoid Being Seen as the ‘Call Police’
There’s no doubt that your quality monitoring objectives include some direct and quantitative goals for your company, and that is great. Being a supportive resource for growth provides an alternative that makes it easier to build rapport and gain cooperation from all the employees in a department.
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Hold Periodic Calibration Sessions
Just as your forms and procedures need to be updated to ensure that they are changed and detailed enough to support your customer support needs, your overall approach needs to be re-calibrated from time to time across the whole department.
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Use Representative Sampling
Many call centers rely on small samples of their overall call volume to make decisions. One of your most important customer experience to move toward representative sampling. That way, you have the confidence of knowing that your results fit the big picture.
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Use What Works
In the end, quality monitoring objectives are about understanding what your company needs to be successful. As you calibrate yours, keep in mind that some objectives might be lower priority for your business model than others. Throw out any that don’t work, and keep on running updates and re-calibrating your procedures until the right balance emerges.
This blog was first published on LinkedIn.
