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Why your overall call quality score is useless.
Quality monitoring is essential – being able to gather information about agent performance is absolutely key for management, benchmarking and knowing which individuals need customer service coaching or development.
It’s also common for contact centres to develop an ‘overall quality score’ comprised of all individual agent scores in order to get a top-down view of how the organisation is performing as a whole. But does this score truly reflect the quality of the service the contact centre is delivering?
No. and here’s why:
Let’s imagine a contact centre has set the target call quality score for a call at 85%. If the business as an average scores 85% they are technically meeting their service quality requirements – but this is misleading.
For example, one of the quality scoring criteria could be worth 10% of the overall score. So if agents aren’t meeting this critical element of a call, and getting everything else right, they are still scoring 90%. This looks great on paper, but in reality, reducing quality to a simple score like this fails to highlight a fundamental issue with the customer experience.
Another one of the most common pitfalls regarding this method is by adding ‘weight’ to certain criteria of the quality score – for example, attributing 10% to meeting one set of criteria whilst setting 20% against another gives the impression that one is twice as important, and encourages agents to focus more on the ‘heavier’ criteria.
An overall score might seem to be useful, but it can often provide a false sense of success – what it fails to reveal are the particular trends across the contact centre. The discovery of these trends is key to creating a truly customer centric service and stamping out any critical issues in agent performance.
Do you rely too much on business-wide metrics? Are you failing to recognise important trends that reveal insight? Although your overall quality score could be consistently above average, it won’t identify and measure the key nuances and more important elements to what’s really going on in the contact centre.
What’s needed is a truly holistic approach that takes the focus away from the overall score and monitors the hidden trends a quick glance won’t discover. Until contact centres recognise this, they run the risk of being blissfully unaware about their true level of service quality.
By Tom Palmer
Tom is EvaluAgent’s Head of Digital and takes the lead on developing and implementing our digital and content management strategies which results in creating a compelling, digital-first customer marketing experience.
