Breaking new ground in managing performance and quality

Customer feedback and calibration are changing the way performance is managed in today’s contact centres, enhancing or replacing the traditional call quality monitoring scores as the standard method of driving customer experience improvements.

Good practice developed by Professional Planning Forum members go beyond traditional measures and demonstrate how the bar in performance can be raised. In a policy paper published this month, two members and a guest contributor speak about their ground-breaking achievements. 

Colin Whelan of the Professional Planning Forum explains: “Businesses are moving away from empirical datasets and focusing instead of sensory – quality-based – datasets. They aren’t doing it on a whim; they aren’t undertaking more rigorous, customer-oriented quality assessment because it’s the “flavour of the month but rather this is 21st Century operational measurement. It’s a new way of doing things that, in my opinion, will just grow and grow.”

Orange UK, for instance, developed Brilliance: a ground-breaking survey tool that enables the company’s contact centres to collect feedback from customers – regardless of which channel they choose to communicate through – by asking them how service could be improved.

The collection of up to 83,000 surveys and verbatims every month, together with individually tailored coaching sessions and more targeted bonuses, has pushed agent performance up by 12% to date. Critically, it has also increased the business’ net promoter scores (NPS) by 27 points.

Calibration: that is, evaluating and, where necessary, adjusting performance benchmarks in a bid to continuously improve the customer experience, is another technique demonstrated by F&C investments and Prolog.  Prolog actively worked with clients to ascertain where the performance bar could and should be raised, and by coaching its staff through the changes required, has achieved cumulative quality gains of 6.1% and 10.9% in two different instances.

Companies such as Orange UK, F&C Investments and Prolog are fairly unusual in taking the steps they have. They’re pioneering change in the way performance is managed in today’s contact centres, pulling their businesses away from easy-to-measure metrics like AHT and abandonment rates and developing more exacting quality targets that are built around customers and their needs. They’re breaking new ground and, in so doing, are creating a model for other organisations to follow.