Best practices for incorporating customer surveying into your QA process
We’ve recently launched a robust enterprise feedback management (EFM) application, cc: Survey. The potential returns for an EFM surveying application are immense. As it relates to QA, EFM enables you to calibrate your internal quality measurements against customer perspective. If you say you are averaging 90%, but your customers say 70%, you need to know why! You might consider a call resolved because your agent followed procedures and did not issue a credit, but to the customer that issue may be unresolved because they still want the refund. Gaining insight into situations like this helps you to coach and train agents to better handle and resolve the situation; perhaps a clearer explanation why the credit is not approved would avoid future callbacks on the same issue.
One of the most important items in surveying is the rhetoric you use in your questions and response options. This is just as important on your internal evaluations. Avoid asking two questions in one. Was the agent courteous and knowledgeable? (how do you respond if the agent was courteous but not knowledgeable…)
Another best practice is to include some form of incentive plan for agents, teams and departments. You want them to know that they will be rewarded for doing a great job. Make it public, and make sure the reward is aligned with your employee base. You don’t have to break the bank, either. I am always amazed at the power of pizza among call center agents!
Surveying also has many additional benefits that are not as obvious as the use in QA calibration, and I would consider it a best practice in surveying to think outside the box in determining what data you collect from the customer. For example, in a sales environment, ask them if they made a purchase. If they did not, ask them why they did not. Was it price? Item availability? Delivery time? Maybe you can’t affect the price, but you can craft new rebuttals to a price objection better demonstrating the value of your goods or services. You can also capture customer demographics and calibrate direct customer data with other demographic data your marketing research has revealed.
