I was recently asked how to measure Customer Care Quality for reps - here are my key steps to setting up a simple quality monitoring process.As your Customer Care team grows in size and volume, you'll introduce more measures of quality, but this can get you on the road for a basic process.
Define the transaction.
What are the typical interactions that your customer care function has? Solving a technical problem? Changing a detail on a customer record? Taking an order and shipping an item? Booking a ticket or a reservation? Keep it simple, and draw a process flow or flowchart of how a typical transaction happens.
Break down the steps.
In that transaction, there will be key stages that you can identify. Using 'Solving a technical problem' as an example - you might have these (simplified) steps in the journey:
- Answer the phone, greet the customer
- Take the details of the problem
- Raise the ticket
- Solve the problem
- Inform the customer
- Close the ticket with the correct details
Identify the moments of quality.
What are the 'marks' that you want your care team to hit in this process? It might look like this, with your own 'moments of quality' in place of my examples:
- Answer the phone: Was the correct greeting used? Did the rep clear security and entitlement? Was the voice and tone of the right standard?
- Take the details: Did the rep use active listening to uncover the problem? Did they establish the customer problem correctly?
- Raise the ticket: Does the ticket have the correct details? Is the explanation of the problem clear for other tiers?
- Solve the problem: Did the rep find the right solution? Did the rep solve the problem with a specific timeframe?
- Inform the customer: Did the rep contact the customer efficiently? Did they share the solution clearly and follow up correctly?
- Close the ticket: Was the ticket/case closed with the right details and categories for reporting? Were downstream systems updated?
Build a scorecard for the transaction.
Take these moments of quality and define a scoring mechanism for them - simplest is YES/NO or 1 to 5 for each question. Imagine listening to hundreds of calls or reading hundreds of tickets and deriving a quality score. Some of your errors (e.g. failing to check security) might fatal errors which fail the whole transaction, some might coachable opportunities to help your rep do a better job.It really helps if this is a percentage at the end - so that reps know where they are and what they can do to improve.
Find a baseline
Measure some or all of your transactions for a period of time to get a baseline. Only by listening to calls and reading tickets will you have an understanding of where you currently are in your quality scores.
Build scorecards
You'll need two sets of scorecards - one for the whole operation showing how many transactions you are monitoring and the average scores. You'll want a second scorecard per rep, which you can share directly and use for coaching and performance management.
Train everyone
Quality is like safety, everyone's responsibility - you'll want to invest in taking everyone through the process and getting support to allocate time to listen to calls and review tickets to score quality.As you add more 'eyes' to the process, you may also want to work on calibration, making sure that everyone knows what good quality and bad quality looks like.
Set sample levels
Define how many transactions you will review. For example - x transactions per rep per week will be quality monitored, scored and published back.
Set targets
Once you have a baseline for how your quality is performing, you'll want to set some targets - maybe base this around your best rep.
Then it's time to coach, coach, coach and performance manage the team to targets!
