Most contact centers fail to consider the customer’s perspective whenever evaluating call quality. At Rogers Communication Customer Care center, customers’ opinions not only matter when measuring quality, they carry more weight than the monitoring scores administered by the center’s own quality assurance staff.
It’s all part of Rogers’ customer-centric quality monitoring program called “My Customer.” Under this program, 60 percent of an agent’s individual quality score is based on the caller’s customer satisfaction rating (collected via post-call survey), and the remaining 40 percent is based on how well the agent fulfilled certain essential call elements, as determined by a QA analyst using a clear-cut monitoring form.
“The My Customer program is a primary initiative and listening post which enables and extends our coaching capability while driving toward an industry-leading customer experience,” says Roland Pauksens, senior vice president of National Customer Care for Rogers.
The primary aim of the innovative program when it was launched in the summer of 2007 was to motivate agents to move beyond customer satisfaction and more toward customer loyalty, says Rod Cook, director of customer advocacy and quality at the company’s Customer Care center (which is really nine separate centers throughout Canada that form one large, virtual operation).
“We wanted to differentiate ourselves from the competition. We hadn’t seen any real improvement in our ‘top-box’ customer satisfaction scores in a few years, and felt that we could change that if we focused even more on the customer,” says Cook.
Taking the Customer Experience to Heart
Effectively managing a “voice of the customer” quality program is never easy; doing so for 6,000 customer care agents across multiple contact centers can be downright daunting. But Rogers built its success on a very organized, streamlined process featuring a motivated QA staff, an experienced third-party partner, the effective use of technology and, last but certainly not least, highly engaged agents.
Here’s how it all fits together:
Roger’s uses a third-party surveying specialist to conduct IVR-based phone surveys with a random sampling of customers every day. These customers receive an automated call about five minutes after they have completed a phone transaction with a Rogers agent, and are asked if they would like to take part in a survey regarding their experience.
The survey features seven or eight question that focus on such things as the caller’s overall satisfaction, satisfaction with the agent and whether or not the issue was resolved. Customers respond to each question using a four-point scale, and are given the opportunity to provide verbal comments.
For each survey completed, the third party sends three things (simultaneously) to the QA team at Rogers: 1) The numeric survey results; 2) any verbatim comments provided by the customer (in the form of a wav file; and 3) the recording of the original call between the customer and the agent.
A Rogers QA analyst then listens to the call and, using a monitoring scorecard, rates the agent on “compliance” – the compulsory, non-negotiable elements of the call (e.g., greeting, correct information, closing, etc.) that have been pre-determined by the QA Team and other contact center support staff.
The QA analyst then downloads their compliance evaluation, along with the customer survey results/comments and the call recording, to a portal that is accessible by each team manager (TM) in the contact center. The TM then conducts a coaching session with the agent in question, during which they go over the customer rating and feedback as well as the compliance score.
Having the call recording on hand makes it easy to pinpoint areas where the agent needs improvement and areas where they excel. TMs often use recordings of other agents’ exemplary calls to demonstrate ideal practices to agents struggling in particular areas.
While agents understand the importance of all these components of the coaching session, it’s the customer rating and verbatim comments that really capture their interest and drive improvement, says Cook.
“Because we hire people who care about people, our agents take customer feedback to heart. They see it as being valuable as well as fair and objective. Comments are played back for agents during the feedback session, and because it’s actually the voice of the customer, it resonates with the agent much more than if such feedback was coming just from the TM alone.”
Keeping “My Customer” Calibrated
Rogers aims to provide every agent with five call/customer evaluations per month. To ensure this actually happens, the contact center uses a powerful Quota Management system. This system tells everybody involved – the third-party surveyor, the QA staff and the TMs – how many customer surveys have been completed for each agent, and lets them know what further actions, if any, are required.
For instance, if the system indicates that a particular agent already has five customers surveys that month, the third party knows not to schedule any more automated post-call surveys for that agent, the QA analyst can check to make sure they have completed all five compliance evaluations for that agent, and the TM can make sure that they have conducted a coaching session for each monitored call.
Equally important to the success of the My Customer program is ensuring consistency in surveying and monitoring. This is accomplished via frequent calibration sessions, during which the center’s QA analysts and QA team managers (as well as those at outsourcing agencies that handle some of Rogers’ calls) all rate the same sample calls and check to make sure the scores are similar and based on the same criteria.
In addition to the calibration sessions, QA team managers conduct occasional audits to further ensure that all QA analysts’ monitoring work is up to par – a sort of “monitor the monitors” approach to quality assurance excellence.
Agent Input Impacts Success
Rogers’ agents themselves have also played an important role in the implementation and maintenance of the My Customer initiative. Since the program’s inception in 2007, agents have provided invaluable feedback and recommendations that have led to important changes and improvements to the customer survey questions and the center’s monitoring form. “Agent are very much involved in the success of the program, says Cook.
And successful it has been. Rogers has seen a significant improvement in agent performance and quality since launching the My Customer program. Further, the center reports a whopping eight-point improvement in its top-box customer satisfaction rate on the cable side of the business, and a healthy two-point improvement on the wireless side. Due to such success, in 2008 Rogers implemented the My Customer program in its National Technical Service Delivery (NTSD) centers, which handle tech support issues and employs roughly 2,000 agents.
“The My Customer program has been instrumental in bringing additional focus to the customer experience and driving change,” says Cook. “The approach of integrating the voice of the customer with traditional compliance metrics, on the same call, is an important step in delivering a more customer-centric assessment while being mindful of our business.”
