Using Call Quality Monitoring to Improve Employee Engagement

Quality monitoring is not usually thought of as a tool for encouraging employee engagement. In fact, in a survey conducted by Benchmark Portal, a global call center benchmarking organization at Purdue University, found that ½ of companies in a large multi-industry survey were dissatisfied with their quality monitoring program. The top 3 reasons for dissatisfaction were:

1. Takes too much time

2. Too focused on compliance and accuracy

3. Agents get very little valuable feedback and coaching from the results

4 Components to Top Performing Quality Monitoring Programs

So what are the keys to creating a top performing quality monitoring program that encourages employee development and engagement. Four components to consider are provided here:

Part 1 – QM Mission

Start with a Mission or Purpose statement for Quality Monitoring Program.  You likely have a Mission statement for your company, your organization, and perhaps even your own group. Get your agents and supervisors involved in creating the QM Mission. Here’s an example of one:

“Monitoring allows us to identify training needs and provide feedback for coaching which assists with employee development, increases job satisfaction, and reduces attrition.”

Part 2 – Business Objective

After the Mission is created, you are ready to build your Business Objectives. Employee Engagement can be one of your 3 to 4 business objectives. We can sometimes overlook employee engagement as a key outcome of QM and focus more on reducing cost, ensuring compliance, or improving customer experience. Setting Employee Engagement as an objective will help ensure this key outcome is given its fair share of attention in your QM program.

Part 3 – QM Processes

Ask yourself and your team, what QM processes are we going to commit to that will help us achieve our business objective of “Improve Employee Engagement.” Some of the process options are ones that you are likely very familiar with:

• Listen to, score and provide bi-weekly feedback on randomly selected recorded calls. This allows the assessment of both the will to do the role and skill for the role
• Conduct side-by-side coaching. This is a good way to assess an agents skill,  as most agents will be performing as good as they possibly can in a side-be-side monitor
• Have agents score their own calls and have them create improvement objectives that are assessed by themselves each month during one-to-one meetings
• Survey customers on agent performance and compare/calibrate to monitoring scores

Part 4 – Define and Train

After you have decided which QM processes you are going to use to help improve employee engagement, you will want to be sure everyone in the center has absolute clarity on how the program will be carried out. There are two key steps to take that will help ensure success:

1. Define the desired performance, how and when it will be measured, reported, and communicated in the form of feedback and coaching
2. Train supervisors, QM monitors, and agents on the program and their individual roles

If you have not previously thought of your QM program a means for Improving Employee Engagement, revisit that idea and perhaps use these steps to help get started. Please contact us through our contact us form if you have any comments or questions on Quality Monitoring.