The management team of my organization (which I am a part of) is currently stuck in a mindset of what I call “forced compliance” in regards to our quality goals. I am of the opinion that focusing on whether individuals comply with your poorly implemented quality goals does nothing to help actual quality within the call center. While our quality scores are meeting our goals and contractual obligations, I don’t feel that the quality of service we currently provide is acceptable.

I have had numerous discussions with my team (mostly my superiors) to propose changes to our quality metrics, focusing on quality, accuracy and ease of compliance. I’m of the mentality that if we can achieve the same quality goals while making the process easier to comply with, we are more likely to see improved quality and improved compliance. Sadly, most of my ideas have been met with responses such as “if we change a policy that people aren’t complying with, we are letting them win.”

So I have two questions today:

1. Am I right in my feeling that the focus of an organization’s quality goals should be actual quality instead of focusing on whether agents comply with arbitrary goals?
2. If the direction I am trying to go is right, does anyone have any resources, case studies or similar that I could use as a resource for future discussions on this topic?

So, I would think that it would be very hard to measure "actual quality" and provide reporting on it that is numbers based.
My thoughts are when determining quality you have to take both the "actual" with the "factual". In otherwords, monitoring and subjective analysis along with numbers and stats to support the findings are both equally important. To a client and for benchmarking purposes, you need the numbers and goals - to really embrace quality and compliance you need to make sure you go above and beyond the number.