Customer Reach

Volume 2.1 - Jan 2005 - Page 1 [Next]

(C) 2005 The Taylor Reach Group

Reproduced with kind permission

Quality Assurance..an Approach

Quality Assurance (QA) is a method for assuring management, owners, customers or anyone that the organization is producing products or services at a predetermined level of quality.

Typically QA is the gathering, analysis and reporting function of an overall approach to quality in an organization. Quality assurance is not primarily a performance management program, but rather a benchmarking and assessment process. Quality improvement efforts can be part of a QA program it is not necessarily a component.

Quality Assurance in many call centers today often misses this essential definition.

It is important for any organization to understand that there are many views of quality for an organization, customers, staff, management, regulators etc. Often each of theses constituencies have their own view of quality. In the absence of clear and defined standards of quality each constituency develops its own and presumes that everyone else understands and agrees with their view or quality.

Therefore the establishment, publication and promotion of what constitutes in an organization is critically important. What is quality to one must be the same quality for all. In other words quality requires a consistency of vision.

One approach is to adopt standards set by outside agencies using one of the many canned standards, Six Sigma & ISO 9000 and their subsets being most common. While very easy to find, they have huge overhead to develop, deploy, implement and maintain. They are complex and for most organizations cumbersome. There is now a growing body of evidence that these programs have become their own bureaucracy and add little in value to many organizations except possibly as gimmicks for advertising and sales. Even there, their value is suspect.

Another approach is to return to the definition of Quality Assurance at the opening. To achieve this end the program should be simple, effective, and efficient and provide a clear understanding to whomever is reviewing it of what the organization is doing and how well that is being achieved.

A Call Center QA program should include the following components:

• Customer Listening & Satisfaction
• Customer Relations
• Failure Analysis and Process Improvement
• Monitoring
• Mystery Calling

When taken together the above components form a complete picture of the key elements for the reviewer. To be effective these components need to be reported on in a frank and open manner without the assignment of blame.

Getting Started

Of the five components the one most often installed in call centers today is monitoring. Followed by some form of customer satisfaction survey or scoring.

A recent ICMI and AC Nielsen study of 735 call centers showed that

• 93 percent reported monitoring agent calls.
• There is a wide variance in the number of calls monitored per month per agent. The most popular frequencies are 4 to 5, and 10 or more.
• Apart from agent calls, other types of contacts are also monitored. Four out of 10 call centers monitor email responses, one in six monitor fax correspondence, and one in 14 monitor Web text-chat sessions
• More than one-third of call centers devote one to five hours per week to monitoring, and a quarter devoted six to 10 hours weekly. However, it is not surprising that the larger call centers (200 or more agents) devote significantly more time per week to monitoring and coaching than the smallest call centers (fewer than 50 agents).

These are good places to start to build Quality Assurance Programs. What is it that management needs to be assured about? The work and the systems that produce the work result. Therefore start QA design or review by understanding what is the work result, who judges it and how is it produced? What information is needed by all reviewers in order to judge the quality of the operation?

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