The Planet Blog

A couple of weeks ago, Flora posted a few questions in the comments section of our Call Calibration blog and asked for more information on our call-monitoring process: “I’m interested to know more about calibration and call monitoring. When representatives are appraised by different appraisers, how to ensure fairness? How to eliminate the effect of subjectiveness [sic] in call monitoring?”

As the Contact Center QA manager, fairness is always a main concern for me, so I’d like to take a few minutes to share a little more about how we’ve set up our system.

In the Call Calibration blog, you got a glimpse of what happens during our weekly calibration meetings: The management staff, supervisors, team leads and randomly selected agents monitor and review a sample selection of calls. We discuss the call, and each team member shares their view on how they interpreted the customer-agent interaction. The call is reviewed from a process-and-procedure viewpoint, measuring how it impacts customer satisfaction.

Subjectivity in call monitoring takes two distinct forms: the subjective goals when working with each customer and the subjectivity inherent in peer reviews of performance. The question of the qualitative or subjective aspects in each call is very important: An agent can hit all the points on the evaluation form and the customer’s needs may still not be fully met. Our goal is to satisfy our customers, and if we aren’t hitting that goal with these objective metrics, these sessions are counterproductive. As such, our call calibration grading sheets have evolved over the course of our reviews, acknowledging the importance of — and the subjectivity inherent in — one-on-one interaction.

For instance, empathy is probably the most subjective quality of a call, so we needed to learn the best ways to “grade” when is a call truly sincere and when it sounds forced and unattached. Is there an objective way to ensure this subjective goal is met? We want to move beyond responses such as, “I’m sorry to hear that,” to responses like, “I’m very sorry to hear that you are experiencing X issue. Let me see what I can do to help.” We work with all of our agents to get their input on the most organic, genuine ways to communicate help to our customers, and as we create these hosting call-center best practices, we get additional feedback that helps us build and shape the way we run our organization.

We know that it’s impossible to separate reviewers from their relationships with the agents being graded, so subjectivity will always be an implicit part of the review process. We’ve made the environment very positive, and we follow up with each individual reviewer after our calibration sessions if his or her perception of the call differs from others. Even on the calls scored very poorly, the agents being reviewed should never feel like they are being picked on or talked down to … Every review offers an opportunity to learn how to perform better — it’s not intended to harp on what was done wrong.

When we first introduced the calibration program, there were supervisors who did not want their teams monitored. The fingers always pointed to someone else’s team, and no one really wanted to hear what they did wrong on a given call. By making these calibration sessions much more casual and positive, the tide turned, and agents are now anxious to be selected for review. We made sure to establish the underlying objective of how our interactions affect The Planet’s overall customer experience, and that team-centric goal goes a long way in opening everyone to feedback and criticism.

Calibration is fun now. It’s an engaging process showing us how we did from the customer’s standpoint at the end of the day. If you have any additional questions about the call calibration process, please let us know!

-Arthur

Non-verbal communication is becoming more and more a way of life in the customer service industry. In customer contact centers once dominated by phone calls, companies now communicate with customers via web chat, e-mail and ticketing systems.

Obviously, the technology industry has been at the forefront of this type of direct communication, with customers often placing more trust in these alternate methods than the traditional “give ‘em a call” approach.

Resolving problems with a ticketing system creates an entirely different support management paradigm than answering a phone call. Issues can be tracked and researched via the written record that exists in a ticket, but tickets don’t have the immediate feedback of a phone call. Because the vast majority of our support is handled through tickets, here’s a glimpse at the inner-workings of our support process.

When The Planet receives a customer ticket, the first thing that we do is conduct a “triage” to determine the problem that has been described and which department should take ownership. We have a staff of triage experts who do their best to insure that a ticket is routed to the right department as soon as it is received.

To avoid being “stuck in the slow lane,” give us as much detail as possible when you submit a ticket. While we can work with “my bandwidth is wrong” or “my server isn’t working,” advising us that different software showed a different amount of bandwidth traffic or that you can’t connect to your server will help us route tickets to the right department much more quickly. Give us as much detail as you can about the problem, and chances are we can resolve the problem more quickly.

Sometimes, ticket processing can be slowed when we request additional information from you by updating the ticket. If you have an open ticket, it’s important to keep an eye on it to see if we’ve asked for new information that will help us keep your account secure and resolve the issue. For us, there is nothing worse than missing one last piece of the puzzle, so we are often as anxious to hear back from you as you are to hear back from us.

When you do submit a ticket, there is a level of trust involved that we ARE working on it. It’s true that some take longer than others to process; it’s the nature of the customer service in technology. Resolving an incorrect server charge on your account will probably take less time than figuring out why a server won’t reboot, and it is our responsibility to keep you in the loop, so we have multiple systems in place to do so. Each department escalates tickets to higher priority levels when a ticket has been open too long without an update. We strictly adhere to these limits and take action when ticket times exceed our set warning levels. Our support managers are constantly updated in real time on the pending time to process all tickets we receive, and our support reps work diligently to get responses and resolutions to every ticket as quickly as possible. In the most complex tickets, cross-departmental communication or the need for additional research may keep us from resolving the individual tickets as quickly as we would like, but without these behind-the-scenes steps, we would not be giving you the best answer.

Moral of the Story: To keep your ticket humming along in the fast lane, please include as much detail as possible in your initial ticket and keep an eye out for requests for additional information. Please be patient as we work to resolve more difficult problems, and always feel free to request updates. We pay attention to comments made by our customers regarding the ticketing system, and we are always looking for ways to improve our work-flow and enhance the customer experience.

Keep this post in mind when (or should I say “if”?) you need to submit a new ticket so you can keep your tickets in the fast lane!

-John