Are you maximizing your return on the investment your center is making in call monitoring?  The purpose of monitoring is simply to provide management with a tool that drives customer satisfaction and increases customer retention.  In other words, it is not the act of monitoring that improves the customer experience, it is the actions taken by your management team, based on the monitoring results. Expect, and demand, that your monitoring program delivers in several ways:  

Communicating superior service standards.  Monitoring standards communicate to agents how calls should be handled.  This is a critical opportunity for senior management to explicitly communicate how customers are to be serviced, and how your service exceeds that of the competition, in detailed and behavioral terms.  Moreover, monitoring is an excellent change agent.  If, for example, you now expect your Reps to more actively cross- or up-sell, define your expectations, communicate them, and evaluate calls against them.  If the program has buy-in, Reps’ behavior will change. 

Driving quality.  Call centers are astute in capturing ATT, AHT, ASA, Adherence, and a glut of other productivity metrics.  Because productivity is relatively easy to measure and is objective, productivity becomes the key driver of agents’ behavior.  A quality metric is needed to motivate agents to provide both efficient and effective service.  Monitoring is the best measure of quality and should receive a weight on par with the sum of the productivity metrics. 

Coaching.  Monitoring data is useful when it identifies both strengths and developmental opportunities, and when it is focused on specific, changeable Rep behaviors.  Individual call data should be aggregated so that both Rep and Supervisor can understand the Rep’s skill profile across calls and determine how consistently he/she is performing. 

Rewarding performance.  If, and only if, monitoring is conducted objectively, reliably and representatively, the results will provide a quality metric that can be incorporated into the performance evaluation process.  A process should also be in place to immediately recognize a monitored call on which the agent demonstrated outstanding service.  Such recognition is not only motivating, but also helps position monitoring as a tool for development, rather than as a threat. 

Predicting customer satisfaction.  Over time, customer treatment levels can be tracked. Patterns of service effectiveness can be identified across call types, across teams, and across centers, on both global and detailed behavioral levels.  Valid monitoring results are a “leading indicator” of customer satisfaction.  Rather than waiting for actual changes in customer survey results, an organization can quickly act upon changes in monitoring scores. 

Identifying opportunities to improve business process. While listening to calls, listen also to the customer.  Track frequently asked questions, issues that create customer confusion or anger, and cues for offering additional services.  Pick up on how some agents are able to explain policy or procedures so that they are understood, and even sound customer-focused.  The information that you pick up will have significant use to your marketing, MIS, sales, and technical units. 

By increasing your ROI of monitoring, two key opportunities emerge.  The first relates to the cost of monitoring.  Effective monitoring requires a commitment of resources.  Most companies continue to commit internal resources—managers or quality assurance staff—to gather monitoring data.  Given expanding spans of control and increased management responsibility, more and more companies are opting to focus their internal resources on actioning the results of monitoring through coaching and improvement initiatives.  Those companies then outsource responsibility for most ongoing monitoring to a third party of professionals. An effective third party can conduct these monitors remotely and put into management’s hands reliable, representative, valid and objective skill profiles for each agent as well as support the array of applications of monitoring results described above.

The second opportunity relates to the return on monitoring.  Costs can be easily justified if monitoring results provide clear utility.  Think within your call center and beyond.  Consider how different functional areas in your organization, such as marketing, systems, human resources, training and the business leaders, profit from the wealth of information that can be gathered through monitoring.  Your company will profit by reaching across any functional silos and consider outstanding customer treatment as the organizational goal.

Miriam Tracy Nelson, PhD, is Vice President of Assessment Solutions Incorporated (ASI), a New York-based firm which partners with organizations to select, train and develop outstanding employees. ASI’s professional assessors remotely monitor a client’s call center representatives, objectively evaluating customer treatment behavior.  Dr. Nelson serves as practice leader for the design of ASI’s third party monitoring programs.  She received her doctorate in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from Stevens Institute of Technology.