December 29, 2015
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One of the biggest buzz-phrases set to take the call center industry by storm in the New Year is ‘Quality Management.’ While many within the industry already consider themselves adept at making sure quality remains high, there are further steps everyone can take to make sure that’s the case across the board. One of those steps is effective calibration.
In a recent blog post Gerald Sinclair — WFO Practice Manager at Uptivity, an inContact company – looked at the value of calibration and the impact it can have on a “quality” effort.
“Calibrations ensure fairness for your internal staff, from a strategy perspective, and help deliver a consistent customer experience,” Sinclair wrote. “The goal of calibrations is to ensure that everyone who is responsible for call scoring is doing it consistently and fairly.”
His suggestions and ideas on the issue are worth a second look:
Choose Your Calibration Type: Sinclair notes that both “traditional” and “Digital / Hybrid” calibration choices are available. It’s incumbent upon the leader to choose the best for their respective company.
Include Your Management: “Management is driven by KPIs and financials, so it is important that other stakeholders understand their perspective and how call handling affects the bottom line,” he notes.
Include Your Agents: “Agent inclusion is a vital strategy for establishing agent buy-in and promoting self-improvement,” Sinclair says. “Encourage your agents to voice their feedback, concerns, opinions, and front-line insights.”
Leverage your Quality Standards Definitions Document: “This document outlines, defines and provides examples for the questions on your evaluation form,” Sinclair says. As such, it’s important to know what it is, how it works and how to best utilize it.
Be Consistent With Your Calibration Frequency: “For maximum effectiveness, calibrations should be held consistently with an established frequency,” Sinclair suggests. “More frequent calibrations are needed if there are changes to the program, new staff, or deviation percentages.”
Sinclair has other timely suggestions, available ICI on his blog post. But his bottom line is, getting everyone on the same page when it comes to careful calibrations can only work to the benefit the whole company.