While it is very important on a global scale, in Finland it is of absolutely critical importance. The market is small, which means there are a finite number of customers. Due to this, you really need to hold on to your customers by keeping them happy. Everything a company does influences the customer experience. Ultimately, every decision we make and every action we take has an impact. Customer service plays a major role, since it can truly make or break a customer experience. The same goes for telemarketing. A poor telemarketing contact can cause you to lose an important customer immediately!
One fairly effective way to improve customer service quality is to include quality as a factor in your incentive system. In this article, I will explain how you can make it easy by using the QualityDesk quality assurance software.
Check your quality assurance process
If you do not yet have a customer service quality assurance process, you should definitely create one. I have written an article on this topic – take a look how can you implement an excellent quality assurance process. To sum it up, a good way to start is by acquiring our software. We will help you create a customer interaction evaluation form that suits your needs and will help guide your customer service. We can complete the first evaluations together in order to validate the practicality of the evaluation form.
Use a clear evaluation form
A good evaluation form connects the company’s strategy and business goals with the daily work done at the customer interface. This allows you to reinforce your personnel’s understanding in how to achieve the larger-scale objectives of your company, while simultaneously providing relevance in the work of a customer service advisor. As a result, each member of the organization will know why things are done in a certain way and what the desired outcome is. The process of creating the evaluation form should include people from as many areas of your organization as possible: marketing, communications, customer service, supervisors, and maybe even directors. Including the directors lets the customer service staff see that the executive level is actually willing to invest in customer service and wants to help develop it.
Use scoring as a part of the evaluation process
Adding scores to the evaluation form is the easiest way to link quality to your incentive system. By scoring the evaluation process you make it measurable, which in turn makes it easy to take into account in the incentive system and also allows gamification, if you so wish.
The easiest way to implement scoring is by using the QualityDesk software. The evaluation form is built from scratch, and the process begins with setting the goals for the entire customer contact by creating various topics. Examples of these could include “Initiating contact”, “Surveying and listening”, “Sales” and “Ending the contact”. Under these topics, you will add statements that lead towards success. For example, under “Sales” you might place statements such as, “The agent offers added value to the customer by offering add-on sales”, “The agent presents bold arguments in a way that fits the customer” and ”The agent asks directly whether the customer is interested in buying”. For each item, the options are Yes/No, with appropriate scores. Points are given for “Yes”, while a “No” does not award points. This also makes it very hard to do unintentionally biased evaluations. The statements either are or are not true.
Equal evaluation for different contacts
If your customer service receives vastly different types of calls, it is not a problem. With QualityDesk you can ensure that one evaluation form is suitable for everything from 30 second switchboard calls to more challenging customer service calls that take 10 minutes or longer. Of course, you can also use it to evaluate outbound calls. This is made possible by the option to skip evaluation items. If some evaluation point is not well suited for every contact, it can be skipped, in which case it is excluded from the score calculations and does not influence the results.
Monitoring methods – how should it be done?
There are three main monitoring methods. Live (next to the agent or remotely), by listening to customer contact records or by ordering a regular evaluation service from a third party.
All these methods are good, and you should use at least the first two ones regularly. This helps you notice the potential differences in how the customer service agent behaves. Does the agent treat customers differently when the supervisor is sitting next to him or her than when working alone? It is important to evaluate all types of customer contacts: e-mails, chats, social media and, most importantly, phone calls. You can also get third party assistance for handling customer interaction evaluations. QualityDesk also offers a service where we will evaluate the agreed number of contacts within the agreed time period, for example 30 customer contacts every quarter. We will provide clear evaluation reports and actionable recommendations that make coaching easier.
In a quality assurance process, it is important to record the customer contacts. E-mails, chat discussions and social media contacts are, of course, recorded – but hopefully this also goes for phone calls? Phone calls need to be recorded so that you can evaluate customer interactions that occur at different times of day – for example, if the customer service is available 24/7, you also need to evaluate night-time calls. On the other hand, your customers’ rights will be better protected if there is a situation where they may have received incorrect information from the customer service.
Automated integration with payroll systems
Once the evaluation form has been scored and monitoring is done regularly, it is a good idea to integrate the quality points from the QualityDesk software into various systems, so that you can monitor the quality assurance process in real time and in comparison with productivity values, but also to ensure that incentives are paid on time and without manual labour.
We are ready to offer you a comprehensive customer service or telemarketing quality assurance process! You will save thousands of work hours every year – and most importantly, you will produce excellent customer experiences! Contact us today by calling me: +358 50 5737601!
