High Performance Teams

Ensuring that your agents are producing successful calls depends on much more than a thorough initial training. Quality management should be ongoing, involving regular training and constantly updated goals. Managers often implement a system of quality assurance using call monitoring to improve performance on a continuous basis. Here are a few frequently asked questions about call monitoring and quality management to get you started on the path to continuous call improvement. How Can I Engage Agents During Call Reviews? Regular team reviews are an essential part of quality management. Sharing good and bad calls to discuss what went wrong and what went right gives the group a glimpse into techniques that work for individuals and areas to improve on. It is also important to provide one-on-one monitoring with an agent and a manger after a call. This is an excellent way to give personalized attention and reinforce what managers look for when reviewing calls. Whether you are performing a group or individual evaluation, a few steps will further engage agents in the call reviews: Ask the agents to think of calls that would be helpful to review. Avoid pointing out every issue yourself during a call review. Let the agents find the mistakes and positive aspects of each call. This keeps the agents actively listening and thinking about quality. It also avoids the feeling of a management lecture. Add customer feedback into the discussion. How Do I Interest Agents in the Monitoring Process? Let the agents help decide quality measures you use during call monitoring. Involving agents in quality assurance helps them understand the process behind call monitoring and become invested in it. The focus should be on exceeding customer expectations and monitoring from a customer perspective. Asking agents to take a customer’s point of view creates better quality measures. It also reinforces the concept of customer respect and empathy. How Should I Schedule Call Monitoring? Make sure that you have a predictable schedule for coaching: Rotate listening and coaching through the teams on a weekly basis. Make sure each agent has recent feedback and is anticipating and working toward the next established review. Plan your staffing so that at least one agent at all times can be off of the phone and experiencing quality monitoring. How Can I Keep Agents From Returning to Bad Habits? Before a coaching session ends, make sure every agent agrees with the goals set during the session. Get verbal confirmation that each individual is 100 percent behind every goal. Monitoring and training should include clear goals and extend beyond listening to calls for lasting effects: Ask top performers what is working for them. Team up good performers and less successful agents. Do not end the session if anyone is wavering or seems unsure of goals. How Can I Reinforce Good Habits? Make sure to mention the positive to each agent during call monitoring. Immediate concerns tend to focus on negative aspects of an agent’s performance, but starting with a positive comment reinforces quality work, creates an incentive to continue good habits and opens an agent to your less positive feedback. Call monitoring is a powerful tool for improvement. Involving agents in the review process and in creating quality measurements gets them invested in monitoring and provides them with methods to improve performance. Continuous quality improvement starts with call monitoring, helpful reviews and reinforcement of excellent work.