How to Use Call Center Agent Performance Scorecards for Quality Assurance?

February 11, 2021

How to Use Call Center Agent Performance Scorecards for Quality Assurance?

If you manage a call center, you will know that positive customer engagement is the key to success.

You may take a look around the call center and have no apparent issues.

Everyone is working hard and trying their best. But how do you know that they are working at optimum efficiency?

Well, that’s why we have scorecards for call centers.

Scorecards have been in the industry for some time now, and they are certainly nothing new. However, what information do you need to collect on them?

In our last article, we had a look at quality monitoring and some of the factors that you may want to include in your control. We had points like the following:

• Attention.
• Compassion.
• Effectiveness.
• Friendliness.
• Integrity.
• Passion.
• Personalization.
• Professionalism.

While these are great things to monitor, there is still the question of how to control them.

Also, what specific checks are required?

That extra level of detail is the reasoning behind the writing of this article.

For example, how do you score for attention if there are no subcategories to check?

Scorecards For Call Centers – Getting to The Detail

 

 

As I have just mentioned, scoring on broad categories can get messy and uncontrollable. Therefore, a call center is much more productive if there are specific critical points checked.

So, let’s take a look at some of the details that can be collected.

For this example, we are going to look at an education course call.

Professionalism Scoring on Scorecards

First of all, we are going to take a look at the professionalism of an agent. You may think that scoring someone on their ability to be professional is a simple, single question.

However, here is a list of a couple of things that you may want to find out in just the introduction stage of a call:

• Agent Name. – This point may seem obvious; however, sometimes, especially with new starters in a company, it is a simple point to miss.
• Company Name. – Has the agent told the caller the name of the company for which they are working?
• Recorded line. – Did your agent tell the caller that the call was on a recorded line?
• Call reason. – Was a reason for the call given?

In this list of four points required in the introduction segment of a call, you may think that this would be fine to be collected and scored on a spreadsheet.

We will look into this further later on in the article.

However, just in those four points, you can get a good idea of if the agent is acting professionally or not.

Therefore, just having a yes/no answer to the initial Professionalism point in the list at the beginning of the article has changed from a yes/no to a 25% changeability.

Having these added points in the professionalism section will pinpoint which part of the call got missed. Or not.

But, what about the attention of the agent? We will look at that next.

Attention Scoring on Scorecards

The attentiveness of an agent can also seem like an easy thing to score.

However, again, there are many variables in this section. If an agent appears to be attentive most of the time in a 5-minute call, how do you score that?

Do you guess it at 90% because it seemed like they were paying attention most of the time?

For this section of the article, we will look at the contact information that is required to be collected.

• Name of the caller. – Did the agent collect the name of the caller?
• Zip Code. – Was a Zip Code confirmed?
• State. – Was it checked that the Zip Code was in the correct state?
• Street Address. – Did the agent confirm the street address of the caller?
• Email. – Was an email address collected?
• Contact number. – Did the caller give a contact number?

All of the items on that list can be easily missed or misspelled if the agent is not paying the right amount of attention.

The guess of attentiveness now changes to a 16.66% difference. If you separate first and last names, it can decrease to 14.28%.

As you can see, we are starting to pinpoint the issues at hand with the agents. Not only will this give you more visibility into what is going wrong, but it also allows for more specific training if something is recurrent.

We could go into all eight points on the first list in the article, but I think you get the point.

Now we are going to take a look at how you can collect this information.

Collecting Information.

 

 

There are a lot of different ways in which we can collect this detail.

Here is a list of some of the most common ways people monitor calls and information collected:

• Call Barging. – The majority of call centers will select high-priority calls to the barge, and then manually mark them. It is a difficult task to complete on any mass scale.
• Call recording and review. – Some centers will record a certain percentage of random calls and then manually review the calls. Again, this will only provide a small window into the quality of your business.
• Voice analytics. (VA) – This way of checking calls is becoming more widespread. Perhaps with good reason. Voice technology can mean that a lot more calls are monitored and scored automatically. Some of the issues with voice analytics are that it may miss some critical points due to the low quality of a phone call.

Downfalls of Information Collecting Methods.

As you can see in the above list, there is not a single method of collecting information without its downfalls.

Therefore, no matter what selection you make, in-house QA teams will often miss most of the calls. If there is a large number of unanalyzed calls, then that will have knock-on effects on two main areas of business:

• Quality. – If you miss monitoring calls, then you are going to sacrifice quality.
• Morale. – One of the less seen points that you will effect by missing calls is moral. You need to remember that you are not only monitoring calls for bad marks. But you also want to reward your best agents. This reward will give those agents a sense of pride, therefore pushing them to keep up the excellent work. Likewise, it will show to the other agents that if you do well, there are rewards to show for it.

Both of these downfalls can, and will, have significant adverse side effects on your company.

But before we go into what we can do, we will have a look at how this information usually gets recorded.

Recording of the Information.

As you already know, the majority of information gets recorded on scorecards, with good reason too.

They allow for information to be registered and kept for any amount of time that may be required. But what are the most common types of scorecards?

• Paper scorecards. – These may well be a thing of the past for most call centers. However, there are still some that use them. They can get messy very quickly, and lost even quicker.
• Spreadsheets. – Programs such as Excel are brilliant ways to collect information. They are entirely customizable, easy to fill out, and challenging to lose. However, there are downsides to them. We will tell you those later.
• Automated programs from VA. – Voice analytics often come as a complete package. It is analyzing and scoring in one application. This wholeness would seem like the ideal situation if it weren’t for the necessity of high-quality calls every single time. Although, you also have to consider the set-up and changeability of the program should your requirements change?

So, where does that leave us? None of the above are 100% accurate, and some are more customizable than others.

Scorecards For Call Centers. – Issues with What You Think You NEED

All of this information leaves us in a little predicament. So, what do you need?

If you look at it logically, you need the volume of VA, the adaptability of spreadsheets, and human voice recognition.

However, in practice, this is going to be a difficult task to complete. First of all, let’s have a look at some of the issues with the above.

For this, we will ignore the paper scorecards. They are an issue of their own that should be phased out.

Spreadsheet Scorecards. – Spreadsheets are very customizable. However, after you have written your scorecard, there could be a little bit of work involved if you need to change the scoring.

After you have marked the scorecards, it can be quite a difficult task to create overall scoring for a certain amount of time or compare scoring between two times.

That is easy to get wrong, even if you have an experienced person controlling the spreadsheets.

Going back to the issue of changing the scorecards: Some questions may need additional questions asked afterward. Or the items may not need to be answered.

These things alone may become very problematic in the future, even if you think that you have the perfect system.

Voice Analysis. – VA and all of the software that goes with it can eliminate the majority of the issues mentioned for spreadsheets.

However, the problem arises when the quality of the call is low. Speech recognition can only pick up certain accents and speech tones.

Anything other than those parameters can create the need for human analysis anyway.

Therefore, you need to know what you can trust and not. This trust issue may require you to check each call to see if the VA scored it correctly.

Scorecards For Call Centers. – The Solution

 

Here at Call Criteria, we believe we have the answer to your problems.

So, you may ask, what do we do differently? This issue is where we think we prove our worth to the call center community.

Although we will go into more depth about these in another post, I will take some time to explain why we do what we do.

Collecting Information Solution

You as a company are ultimately responsible for managing the information that you require. However, how do you know which of your agents is collecting the information that you need?

That is where we come into the equation.

As you have seen, the ideal choice for your call center Quality Assurance is a perfect mixture of human analysis and computer software.

This mixture will provide you with a massive amount of monitored calls, with the accuracy of human hearing.

We use the ideal mix of voice analysis and human analysis to get near 100% accuracy with 100% call checking. This ratio is one that we have perfected over many years of experience.

That gives us the ability to be able to provide you with QA, no matter the quality of your call.

With this ability, we can tell you, with pinpoint accuracy, which of your agents are collecting the information, and which are missing the points.

Recording Information Solution

After you have collected the information, and we have analyzed it, how do we record it?

We custom-make software to provide you with clear and accurate information in an easy-to-read dashboard.

The recording of this information is on the scorecards that we provide after you have given us the information that is required. However, we will talk a bit more about that in the next section.

As I have already said, the information can be collected and recorded no matter what the quality of the call is. The data is entered manually by trained experts.

Therefore, it gives amazingly high accuracy.

Scorecards Solution

You have already found out that scorecards can be a little tricky to get the best out of your call center.

It is especially tricky if you have more than one campaign that you are running. Or perhaps you have secondary questions that you only need to answer if a primary inquiry gets responded to in a certain way.

That difficulty is something that we have found in the past, and that is why we have created dynamic, customizable scorecards that can provide secondary questions if required.

For Example:

In this first image, there was no contact phone number provided. Therefore, there were no further questions to be asked:

 

 

However, in this second image, as you can see, a contact number was given. Thus, another question was asked to provide an alternate contact number:

 

 

These images are of a straightforward yet practical example of how dynamic scorecards can assist you and your call center.

We can utilize this method within any question, and with as many questions as necessary.

Earlier in the article, I said that we would look into the spreadsheet option a little more, and this is where a spreadsheet would fail.

We will cover all of these subjects in more detail in future articles, so make sure that you keep an eye out for those.

Scorecards For Call Centers – How To Get It Right – Conclusion

There are an infinite amount of variables in call center scorecards, and that can make it very difficult for in-house QA teams to get right.

However, in our many years of experience, we feel like we have perfected the process of scoring and showcasing calls and the information that they hold.

Managing a call center is your business, and you know how to do it. Quality assurance is ours, and we know how to do that!

If you want more information about how we can help you, then please contact us here.