Listening to calls

- [Instructor] Dell produces computers. Ikea produces furniture. And BMW produces vehicles. As a leader of a customer service team, you produce customer experiences through interactions. When I lead a large retail organization with three internal sites and three vendors, I held weekly call calibrations. During my call calibration, I asked one of my vendors, the million dollar question. And that was, "When you listen to this representative's calls, what do you hear?" After my initial question, there was silence and the connection magically dropped. My first thought was, are they even listening to the calls? Customer interactions are what you produce in having leaders observe these transactions. It's instrumental to creating a positive customer experience. In this lesson, I want to share the three types of methods that a call center leader in your team should use to observe your customer interactions. First, let's talk about call calibration and what I like to call, listening parties. Great customer service organizations gather their leaders together to listen to calls. With technology and prior planning, your entire organization can share the experience of reviewing calls based on product, service, agent tenure, or customer type. Generally, the calls are sent out prior to the calibration and scored by each of the attendees. Scores, are then compared to each other, to determine if the leaders of the customer service team are calibrated. This process can lead to robust discussion and ultimately process improvement in your customer interaction. This activity can also be held with email, chats and texts as well if your recording systems have data capture. That leads us to remote observations. Good contact centers have a team of quality analysts that dutifully observe customer interactions remotely. Great contact centers have their managers and supervisors perform a remote observations, as well. Side by sides or what I like to call, ride alongs, can impact the customer interaction because of the presence of a leader in an environment. Remote observations, however, may give you a more realistic view of how your representatives handle tough interactions, such as customer complaints, escalations, upsells and refunds. These observations can be formal in nature using a monitoring form or they can just be simple notes, commenting on great specific behaviors or situations you'd like to see handled differently. The importance here, is to ensure the representative being observed, receives the feedback in a timely manner. And finally, is it a motion picture? Or is it a snapshot? Good call center operations are constantly changing their perspective on observing customer interactions. I have worked in organizations that have a strict policy of 10 observations per month, per rep, or two observations a week. It varies. Some organizations perform more observations on representatives based on their tenure with the company. With the increased sophistication of call recording systems, leaders are now depending on technology to data mine customer interactions, to pinpoint friction in the customer experience. Whatever management disciplines you use, please ensure that you are accurately sampling performance trends to impact your customer. Don't just capture a snapshot of performance, view the entire motion picture by looking at observations during non-prime time hours, such as nights and weekends. Please ensure that your quality assurance team are not the only people listening to the calls, scoring emails, chats, and texts interactions. As a leader of a customer service organization, you and your team should perform these tasks on a regular basis as well.