Advice from a Call Center Geek!
Advice from a Call Center Geek is a weekly podcast with a focus on all things call center and contact center. Tom Laird, CEO of 600+ seat award-winning BPO, Expivia Interaction Marketing and Ai auto QA startup OttoQa, ICMI Top 25 Contact Center thought leader discusses topics such as call center operations, hiring, culture, technology, and training while having fun doing it!
Advice from a Call Center Geek!
Mastering QA: Crafting the Perfect Contact Center Quality Assurance Forms
What if you could transform your call center’s efficiency and agent performance overnight? This episode guarantees you’ll walk away with actionable insights on crafting the ultimate QA forms for both voice and chat channels.
We’ll guide you on defining the crucial goals for your QA forms, such as enhancing agent performance, ensuring compliance, and extracting valuable customer interaction insights. With the collective wisdom from examining hundreds of QA forms, we’ll provide practical tips to structure your forms for maximum impact.
Whether you’re running a large or small contact center, these insights will significantly enhance your training and performance evaluation processes. Don't miss these transformative strategies to elevate your call center operations and deliver exceptional customer experiences!
Tom Laird’s 100% USA-based, AI-powered contact center. As the only outsourcing partner on the NICE CXone Customer Executive Council, Expivia is redefining what it means to be a CX tech partner. Learn more at expiviausa.com.
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This is advice from a call center geek a weekly podcast with a focus on all things call center. We'll cover it all, from call center operations, hiring, culture, technology and education. We're here to give you actionable items to improve the quality of yours and your customer's experience. This is an evolving industry with creative minds and ambitious people like this guy. Not only is his passion call center operations, but he's our host. He's the CEO of Expedia Interaction Marketing Group and the call center geek himself, tom Laird.
Speaker 2:Welcome back everybody to another episode of Advice from a Call Center Geek, the Call Center, contact Center podcast, where we try to give you some actionable insights into your overall operation, try to give you some actionable takeaways to make sure that your customer experience just just improves. Um, this is a podcast episode that I've been wanting to do for a little bit now. Since we've been starting up auto, it's been, uh, I think, frustrating for all of us. That frustrating is not the right, but just I think all of us are going through AI overload, right? I mean, I post a ton of stuff on AI. Everything you see on LinkedIn and the CX space is all about AI. So every couple episodes I'm trying to kind of get back to my roots and talk about things that are. You know, maybe they're AI related, but they're not solely just talking about you know the different aspects of AI and large language models and chatbots and all that stuff. So, as most of you guys know, we have a startup called AutoQA which, funny, is an AI infused with large language models kind of startup that we've been able to fully automate contact center scoring. I don't say fully take away QA, because there's a huge process with QA, but the actual scoring of calls. You know we've been able to fully automate and so I don't really want to talk about that today, as I've spoken about that a ton, but I want to talk to you guys about building out the best QA form. So, even if you're not ready to automate your scoring, but you want to kind of maybe revamp the QA form that you have or take another look at, is what we're measuring? Is it making sense? Is what we're measuring? Is it making sense? And I have my team and I we've just seen so many different. Well, I've seen so many QA forms, you know, over the years from different clients for our BPO here at Xpevia. But you know, over the last you know, three months, we've seen a ton of different forms from a ton of different companies, some really good, some, eh, some that don't have any, that we've had to start from scratch. So I wanted to talk you through kind of the process that I think is we've been utilizing to develop kind of the best form for most organizations.
Speaker 2:Now, qa forms are very kind of proprietary to each individual customer, customer segment, what channel you're in. There's a lot of different things when it comes to voice email, chats, help desk tickets, right, qa and all that compared to maybe just the voice call. So I think, really, this is for focusing on voice, focusing more on chat, right. These are the kind of the two probably main core channels that we've seen. I mean, I think that's pretty obvious, but what does it take? What do you need to do? What are the sections that you have? What should be the actual questions that you should ask? And I think that there's a lot that goes into this. And again, from looking at hundreds and hundreds of QA forms through the years, and literally probably another hundred in the last month or two, this is kind of what the team and I when, if we have to develop a new QA form for for a customer, this is kind of what we would recommend. So if you're kind of looking again to to revamp your QA form, I think this will be a cool episode for you.
Speaker 2:Again, I'm live on X Twitter. I'm live on LinkedIn If you guys have any questions as we're going through. This is kind of breakfast with Tom, as I'm recording this at like 845 or 855 here in the morning on the East Coast Just had some time, so I thought this would be good to kind of talk through, all right, so let's kind of get into this. So the first thing is what is the goal of what you want the end outcome to be? And this doesn't have to be a singular goal and, to be honest, it probably shouldn't be but what do you want to focus on? Do you want to focus on your agent performance? Do you want to focus on compliance issues? Do you want to get insights from your calls? These are all things that have kind of opened up our mind a lot to what you can get from a QA form that maybe we don't think about. And I think compliance and agent performance kind of go hand in hand.
Speaker 2:But the one thing that I've really found to be powerful with you know, using auto and still you could use this with your, your, you know, kind of human scoring team is why are we not asking insights, even if it's with a human on the form to start to collect data? And I get, some of us have these high-end analytics tools that supposedly are doing that for us. But still, wouldn't it be cool if, even if you're doing let's say you do, you have a QA agent that's doing, say I don't know, let's just say, 50 forms a week, right, and so again, that's 200. And let's say you have a staff of three, right, that's 600 pieces of data segments that you could be getting insights and asking questions about what's happening on calls as well. So you could almost use your humans right as an analytic tool and once you get to a certain amount, it becomes statistically valid, right, depending on the time period and how many of these you're going to do.
Speaker 2:So I want to talk more about that later on, but I think that that's something that's really opened my mind and changed about what a QA form can be and what it should be. And even if it's just a small, you know, kind of throwaway section that you have at the end, I think can add a ton of value and we never really think about it. But as we go to actually looking at agent behaviors here's kind of the core sections I'm a huge believer that less is more. Most when I see huge QA forms, a lot of the questions are kind of redundant right. They're asking the same thing in different angles and it can be kind of confusing, I think, for AI when we're doing it. It can be confusing with a human to kind of really get to the core, and a lot of times this happens because a lot of people have an insight into the QA form, whether that's different people in your organization or more. What normally happens is, as somebody takes over QA or takes as a call center manager, they add their two cents to the form and it's kind of like an IVR, right, you get this kind of this monstrosity form in. So I think it is good every once in a while, every couple of years, to kind of like almost rip it down to its core and start to build the backup. And when you do that, I think that this is kind of how it should look, right, we're always going to have and again, a lot of this isn't rocket science, so, but I think that there are some insights maybe that are like oh, that makes sense, right, hopefully that gets you to kind of think that way.
Speaker 2:So number one is kind of the opening and the verification. All right. So normally that's two to three questions, and I think your opening should be basically was the? You know, was the agent ready for the call? Right, the customer's not saying hello, hi, hello, right, we're not doing that. Was their tone where you need it to be. It's not like thank you for calling XYZ, how can I help you? My name's Tom, where you need it to be. It's not like, thank you for calling XYZ, how can I help you, my name's Tom, right?
Speaker 2:Obviously, we want their tone to be just I'm not saying we got to be, you know, gung ho every single call, but it's got to be like this customer does sound important to us. I think that those are really important, right. So your tone right at the beginning, making sure that they're ready for the call, and then any type of verification that you need for that customer, right? Whether that is you have to verify their name, a member ID, a date of birth, those kind of things. If you have to read back, if you want the information read back to the customer, all of that stuff will kind of play into two or three questions. I think is really all you need there to really kind of get through verifying the customer and then making sure that we're starting the call off on a proper tone. I think that's a really important thing to score.
Speaker 2:And then the next thing that we'd normally I think we'd look at is kind of having an etiquette, a phone etiquette kind of section, and with these I kind of have five main questions that we like to ask that I think cover the vast majority of you know what, what, what a customer kind of would want and kind of just the behavior of the agent. So number one is you know, did they show any type of empathy, right? Um, is it just a blanket? I'm really sorry to hear that right? Or do they actually take the time to like, listen to the customer and and legitimately show empathy again? I know this is not an ai episode, but I think that's one of the main misconceptions or and one of the things we've had to work on. The most human beings are really good when they show genuine empathy. They're good at connecting with another human.
Speaker 2:And secondly, the scoring from a qa standpoint it stands right out right because the qa person can really tell that empathy. I struggle right on a lot of your qa forms. We're scoring what the agent said, not how they said it, and I think that's a huge drawback because it's just been kind of lazy for everybody and it's easy. So again, we will score and we see this scored with when we're calibrating calls and we're listening to how humans have scored this. If an agent does say and I know you guys have heard me say this, but I'm really sorry to hear that. Right Gives that fake empathy. They're just checking the box and normally under a lot of QA forms that that's fine. I think you should go deeper than that. You know again that's you guys have heard me talk about it on our auto platform. That's one of the my favorite props, right, because we're not looking for keywords like analytics. We are looking for anywhere in the transcript where the customer had a pain point. They had some type of stress level that went up. They had an issue with a product and did the agent actually say something that either raised the sentiment of the interaction, interaction made the customer laugh, made the outcome of that small 10 second interaction after the agent talked, did it make the call a little bit better? And humans can pick that up, but I think it's really difficult to do over time. But that's something that AI if you prompt for it, it can do a really good job with that too. So empathy and I think, true empathy are really important.
Speaker 2:Call control is another question that I would always ask. That, I think, is very important. You know the best contact center agents are taking you down a journey right, where you know the customer always has the opportunity to kind of go right or left right, but that agent knows where that customer needs to be at the end and can control that, and I think that that's a really important piece. So, are they showing perfect, showing really good call control, without kind of being demanding of, like you know, and being assertive, but you know, the really good customer service agents can do that.
Speaker 2:The third is just kind of the blanket, you know. Did they use proper verbiage, tone, professionalism, and this is different for everybody, because I think this is a culture question, right? So if you're at a bank, you have to be prim and proper, right? Yes, sir, no, sir, um, you know those kind of words. But if you're working for, maybe, a skateboard shop, it's what's up? Man like oh dude, listen, right, did, did the, the agent match the culture of not only the agent but your brand as well? I think that that's really important.
Speaker 2:The fourth question is did they actively listen? I think that this is really important for contact center agents and it can be really hard, especially when you're taking call after call, after call after call, and maybe it's the same exact issue that you've heard like 13 times in a row, but that customer doesn't know that. So that's a really important question, I think to ask. Are they actively listening? Are they kind of not talking over the customer because they're kind of getting bored? Are they just jumping to conclusions? Did the customer say something earlier and the agent just totally forgot about it? Right, and that's so annoying to a customer. So I think that that's a really important question.
Speaker 2:And then the last thing with etiquette is is right, did they follow the proper hold procedures? Is there? Did they? Did they follow your kind of dead air policies for the most part on hold procedures, that it's between one minute and two minutes, right, with halfway through coming back to the, to the customer and kind of giving them a hey, I'm sorry, I'm just going to be a couple more minutes. Is that okay? That kind of thing.
Speaker 2:So it's it's, you know, asking for proper hold, if they can put the customer on hold, which I think is still a cool, the right thing to do, making sure that we're not, you know, having five to 10 minutes, and if we do that we've talked to the customer a couple of times that's going to ruin the call anyway, but I mean, again, trying to hold it to that minute to two minutes and fit 30 seconds through a minute through making sure that we're getting back to the customer and then also just that there's not a lot of dead air. Maybe Then also just that there's not a lot of dead air. Maybe that's its own question too. A lot of times we see them just kind of jammed together, right. But you know, if the agent is working on a screen and there's like that 30 seconds of all you hear is maybe typing or right, and again that can be difficult. Really good customer service agents are good at it. The really bad ones make it seem fake, like how's your day today, sir? Like how's your day today, sir? Like right, but still, I think that's still better than than having a having total dead air, all right.
Speaker 2:So we kind of have an opening, we kind of have that etiquette which is the core of kind of I think everybody's QA form, and then kind of the third section is like, what is proprietary to you, right, is this are these sales calls or these retention calls? Are these tech support calls where we got to find maybe a root cause or or some type of troubleshooting? Or, you know, maybe it's an insurance call, where we have to follow certain SOPs and make sure that we're giving proper information out right. So again for for sales calls and this is this will be a little bit more general because there's so much you you could do here, but I think for the the core questions, right, looking for I I'm a huge on the sales aspect there's two things for me that I think are vitally important. Number one is that we ask proper kind of open-ended probing questions, right to kind of get to the heart of, maybe, what this customer wants, but we're not asking yes or no's. I think that's important.
Speaker 2:And then, you know, some people love this, some people hate this, but I think for most cross-sell upsell customers calling in to you know, sign up for a subscription, having that assumptive language, I think it's proven. I mean, I've seen it in every single program we've ever done. The agents who are using assumptive language in their sales process right. They have a much higher conversion percentage. So you know, it's like a customer saying yeah, you know. So how much is this again? Well, ma'am, this is it's $14.95 a month. If you'd like to sign up for a family plan, it's only $56 for the year. So you know, let's get you signed up here. Do you have any kids? Or would you like the family plan or? Um, you know what? I did hear that you said that earlier that you do live alone. So let's sign you up for this 1495 plan. I have your name as and you kind of go into it, right. So, and again, people can, we can argue about that. I think that that's kind of a good thing, you know, from a sales aspect.
Speaker 2:And the third kind of sales is kind of, you know, did they rebuttal right using benefits, right no-transcript? So if there's like a 30-day free trial, right, you don't want to rebuttal off of that right. Rebuttaling off of low commitment right normally leads to higher drop-offs. You know, as we go, you know, a couple months in, so the customer is going to come back and be like dude, like that's great, you got these sales, but they were on our books for two months, and so I think you know rebuttaling with the benefits, making sure that we're talking positive about the product, and then if there's any retention right for a cancel call right. I think you know that kind of plays into that as well. Did they actually try to retain the customer? Did they try to sell it off benefits, blah, blah, blah. So all those things from a sales aspect that are important to you, I think can go in there.
Speaker 2:If this is more of a tech support, were you able to show understanding of the issue? Were you able to verbalize the problem? Were you able to give a quick summary back to the customer so that they can say Because a lot of times and I've learned this in tech support the customer doesn't really understand what's happening and doesn't have maybe the lingo to read to, to understand it. So it's up to the customer service agent then to kind of speak through what those those issues could be and then get a kind of a verbalization I think that's worse um to the customer that yes, this is kind of this is what's going on, and then you know, did they give relevant troubleshoot, like all those kind of things for troubleshooting? And then again, for maybe, if you're an insurance company and you have certain you know SOPs right, are you giving the proper information Right? I think that that's a really important, obviously really important questions for for anything, but you're looking more at those types of things Did you transfer when you were supposed to? Did you give the proper information for this situation. You know, those are kind of the proprietary things to your business that I think need to be part of kind of that third section.
Speaker 2:And then the fourth is the closing right, and there can be a couple things in the closing Number one. A lot of times we see customers that are they want to make sure that the agent did not transfer inappropriately to another department, so we may have that in the closing. I think offering additional assistance is a cool, just a cool, nice thing to do at the end. Is there anything else that I can help you with instead of just ending the call? I think that you know again, for those of you who don't like longer handle times, you might not like that, but I think you know overall that that's that's the best way to kind of end the call and then you're having a proper closing. You know, whatever that is for you guys, if it's a branded closing or if it's just hey, thank you, I'd like to speak to you again. Whatever that is, I think I think that's important. I think that's important. Your openings and your closings are really important from a branding standpoint, to make sure that it's almost like you're going to get the same kind of experience every time and I think those are pretty important things to make sure that you're scripted to a certain extent with your agents.
Speaker 2:And then here's the last thing. So normally that's kind of where we would end, right, I think that having an analytics section, a small section of maybe three or four questions right, did the customer cancel, you know? Was it too expensive? You know, if you, if you have a retention line, if there is, you know, maybe a marketing wants to get in, like, did they say anything about the product design? Did they say anything about a, you know, an advertisement we had on Facebook? Like whatever, like asking all these things that we normally ask agents through a disposition or we just go talk to them about in a in a focus group. Start to ask those questions right. Analytics is really good at it. Auto QA is amazing at it. You're human being. People can do that as well when they hear things right To just yes or no, some certain things that you can start to really correlate questions.
Speaker 2:I get the question a lot on, you know, waiting questions and waiting sections, and I kind of go back and forth on it. I think overall you are fine if you are on a five point scale. I don't think you have to make it complicated, right. Everybody wants to make it more complicated than I think it is. You know, one out of a zero or five it's a yes or no, it's a binary question and you can really benchmark, I think, a lot better that way when you start to weigh sections and you weigh questions as more important and again there's some really good use cases for that, especially, I think, in financial services, from disclosures and those kinds of things. I think that that's important. But I think you can get confused when you see different scores based on different sections of weighting, those kinds of things. I think that that's important, but I think you can, you can get confused, you know, when you see different scores based on different sections of waiting. So again I'm, I'm just a big zero out of five, you know whole way through kind of thing. I think that you know that that gives you kind of the easiest way.
Speaker 2:Now I would, instead of waiting, weighing calls and weighing sections, I would prefer you to do auto fails. So again, if a specific disclosure wasn't read, and that again that would be kind of in your third sales kind of area and they get a zero for the call, or that section then gets a full zero, which then makes them the highest they can get is a 50, which still is an auto fail, whatever that is. I would prefer you prefer to do that than to just kind of go through and weigh every single section. But auto fails, I think, are important, and the other thing that auto fails do is they pop up your QA and your supervisor right away. To that. There was something that happened on this call that wasn't good. Right, it's not just that they got a 78 on it, but it was a 30. Right, and I think, again, more importantly than that, it just kind of raises the eyebrows really fast so that we can go correct issues a little bit quicker. So, yeah, that's kind of my take, guys.
Speaker 2:Again, I don't know if that's real rocket science. I know I've done this before. There's a couple other podcasts that I have out there that were done a couple years ago on kind of creating forms. And you know, again, I would love to have everybody use an auto QA or use our auto QA, but you don't have to, right, there's there's no reason that you can't set up a form that I just talked about on Excel, on a Google sheet or even a Google form and ask questions as you kind of go through that form. It doesn't have to be crazy Again, there's better ways, right, Especially in 2024.
Speaker 2:But if you're a smaller contact center you're 10 seats, you're 20 seats maybe you don't have anything set up. You could do this today, right, and kind of set up what you think is important and then start tweaking from there, and it also gives you then a way to train and educate agents right, because now you're having them do specific things. When you don't have that, I think it can be very hard and agents can go off the rails a little bit. Maybe that's good for certain instances. But I think, overall, from a call control standpoint, from a call flow standpoint you know, again, call flow is kind of another question that you could ask that kind of goes with call control. But those are kind of the, I guess, the core things that we have seen to have a really solid QA form right for your agents that is not overbearing, that's not going to frustrate them, that's not going to have your QA team take forever to kind of score. It gets to the point of compliance, it gets to the point of agent performance and then, I think, start to think through about kind of how you can get insights from your QA team as well. I think that that's a really important piece that we don't really think about.
Speaker 2:So, again, if there's no questions, I know this was early on LinkedIn. It's kind of breakfast with Tom here at whatever 9.15. Now this is a 25-minute episode. So if there's no other questions, guys, I hope that this gives you some value. If there's any of you that have any questions on QA, we'd love to talk to you about a totally free, no cost whatsoever setup for our AutoQA platform. We set up your forms, we set up your full QA stack. Give you a full proof of concept for absolutely no cost. Check us out at autoqacom if that's something you're interested in. Also, as you guys know, we have Expedia. We're a five 600 seat outsourcer here in the States too, that we'd love to talk to you, talk to some of you guys about as well. But if there's no other questions, thanks, guys. I hope this adds some value and I'll talk to you next week.
