Call Observation / Quality Assurance is absolutely critical to the success of any service organization - so I applaud you for considering this. In my opinion, quality should be determined based on the effectiveness of supporting your organization's service strategy and effectively creating a positive customer experience and the resulting business results. In my experience, checklist monitoring, which verifies that tasks or minimum requirements are met, tends to drive compliance, but not quality. For more information I would suggest the Academy for Corporate Excellence and consider asking for "Dr Moe" to hear more. -- Tom H

In our organization: we perform mostly outbound sales calls and we record the top performer's calls (as well as sales manager's calls) to use as a training tool for our directs and especially for new(er) people. Obviously, we use this for training purposes - not for "trying to catch you doing something wrong" purposes. In our set-up, the managers sit close to the sales people, so they can hear what they are telling the customers.

You may want to break your research into categories and lists of questions to be answered, areas to define, and decisions to be made. 1. (important) Why do you want to monitor? What results do you hope to achieve? How will you know if the money and time put into it are worthwhile? 2. Who do you want to monitor? 3. How will they feel about it? 4. What do you want them to get out of it? 5. Who is going to do the monitoring? 6. Do they have the time and the expertise necessary to (a) accurately and consistently assess agents' performance and (b) deliver coaching and feedback that will positively affect performance? 7. Are your performance standards clearly defined as demonstrable behavioral objectives? 8. Have reps been hired with the skills to or trained to meet the objectives? 9. What is your monitoring infrastructure? Will you listen to calls live or record them? 10. How will you aggregate and analyze the valuable data you'll be gathering? What will you do with it? 11. How will you ensure that the monitoring assessments are consistent, fair, valid and objective? 12. Who will monitor the program to ensure monitors are competent and effective? The answers to each of these will vary based on your resources (time, people) available, your corporate culture, the level of buy in and support in the program and more. Start filling in the blanks here and that will provide you with the framework to determine what you still need to know. -- Rebecca Gibson, Magellan Health Services

Dear Tammy: If I were to completely cover all that you need to know, it will probably turn out to be a website of its own. So I have some tips for you that should help you set off in the right direction, whilst keeping in mind that these tips are complete subjects in themselves. First off, Call Monitoring is a specific activity, more popularly known as "Observation" (or "Silent Observation" / "Service Observation"), where the Supervisor / Team Lead / Quality Analyst listens to a call "live". This might be done as a feature provided by the ACD, or can be a side-by-side monitor, where you listen to the agent through a parallel headset. Call recording can be done in multiple ways again. Starting the checklist from: - whether you want to do a voice only recording or voice + screen; - whether you want to do total recording of all the calls, or a percentage; - whether you want to record calls / screens for compliance purpose or for quality management; - whether you want to have an integrated quality monitoring tools with the recording system or you want to do the quality scoring offline on paper - whether the integrated quality monitoring package picks up calls randomly as a sample percentage or you want to pick out (for scoring purpose) calls with specific words or emotions (e.g: your competitor's name being mentioned, "cancellation/termination" as a keyword being mentioned, either agent or customer raising their pitch signifying anger, etc.). As you go through the checklist, its apparent that the complexity of the solution (and related cost of implementation) will be higher as you want more sophistication built in your process. Finally, if your objective is to set up monitoring and recording for quality purposes, then there is a lot more to it than just the technology piece. You have to deal with the human side as well, including getting the buy-in from your agent population for any monitoring/quality program that you plan to unleash on them. You need to build a Quality Development Program to clearly articulate the objectives; policies; definitions; procedures of sampling, evaluation, calibration, coaching, feedback sessions, grievance redressal, etc. The top-most complaint of the agents in call centers across the world is that the quality systems are implemented to 'watch us making any mistake' (the 'Big Brother' syndrome). So your Quality Development Program should begin with laying down the core objective being Quality Improvement. More importantly this core objective should be set in consultation with all stakeholders. I suggest that the committee you set up to draw the draft QDP should have representation from the agents, team leaders, quality team, operations, call center management and even senior business leaders to highlight the seriousness of the initiative throughout the entire chain of command. Participation since early concept stage also dispels unwarranted fears and increases participation at all levels - especially the agent level. By now you would have realized that it will be inappropriate to follow a process laid down by someone else, because it may be a poor fit for your environment. Building a QDP from scratch may itself sound daunting, but I can recommend you to go through some reference material that will help you get started. You may refer to www.call-center.net/tutorials.htm for some insights into Quality Monitoring trends like Who, What & How often; Quality Monitoring Life Cycle etc. You may also refer to the websites of popular recording/Quality software solution providers like NICE (www.nice.com), Witness (www.witness.com), etc. All the best for your endeavors with Call Monitoring, and should you then have any specific query I would be happy to help. Thanks! -- Rajas Daithankar, Avaya GlobalConnect Limited