Impactful Quality Assurance Programs

What is the purpose of your quality assurance program? Is it set up to punch a ticket so you can show your leaders and customers how good your agents are? I would argue that a good quality assurance program is designed to help drive the performance of your teams to give better more consistent service.

In most call centers, supervisors or team leads spend a considerable amount of time monitoring calls or chats from their agents. The general rule is approximately 5 per agent, per month. On average, most quality scores are in the high 90% so when you think about the value this provides to the agents and the business, the impact is minimal. Let me suggest another way to structure your QA program to drive improvement. I call this Performance Based Quality (PBQ) and the concept is pretty simple.

When you are trying to drive performance improvement, focus on the bottom quartile of agents and try to shift them up to be at the average line. This improves the overall performance of the team faster and let’s your supervisors and trainers focus on the people that need the help. Your agents that are in the top half of the distribution curve, don’t have as far to go (assuming your process has a capability limit) and there will always be top performers and people who are just doing the job as you defined it. You don’t need to move them to move the needle, you just need to move those bottom performers either up or out. This means to change your call monitoring process to do more monitoring and coaching on the lower performers and less on the top 50%.

You don’t need more staff and you can be sure your leaders are putting the effort where it will be most beneficial to your organization. In fact, in my experience, we actually reduced the number of people monitoring over time, giving you cost savings and better improvement.

We go over more detail on how to do this and provide some statistical models to demonstrate this in the paid content option of our Resource Hub. As always, we are happy to discuss a more customized engagement to walk you through this model and consult with you on how you can change that outdated program to one that is dynamic and focused on improvement.