Whether your organization performs manual or automated quality assurance (QA), call center coaching forms are an integral component of an overall QA program.

Developing Call Center Coaching Forms

There are several components you’ll want to consider when developing call center coaching forms for your organization.  For example, your call center coaching forms and the weighting of different sections should mirror your organization’s customer service goals and priorities.  In addition, ensure that all requirements are met by involving staff from different areas and levels of the organization.  Regardless of these special considerations, there are certain components that all call center coaching forms should include, such as:

• A section analyzing the opening and closing of the call.
• Space to define strengths and weaknesses associated with system knowledge, resolution skills, product knowledge and familiarity with business processes.
• A section reviewing the overall communication skills of the agent.
• An area to identify applicable best practices and up-training opportunities.

Because these requirements overlap from industry to industry, many companies choose to base their call center coaching forms on a pre-existing or sample form (CallCopy provides several sample forms in our Contact Center QA Guide).

Once a form is completed, review the results with the agent, either by scheduling time with the agent for a coaching session, or by using a tool like CallCopy to share the evaluation with the agent.  Follow up with the agent directly, or use our tracking tools to ensure that the agent has reviewed the content.

Why Use Call Center Coaching Forms

Ultimately, the end goal of any QA program should be to facilitate increased customer satisfaction.  In addition, call center coaching forms can help improve agent productivity, ensure better transaction quality and reduce enterprise risk.

Learn more:

• cc: Quality | Quality Management
• cc: Agent | Agent Coaching & Training
• Download our Contact Center QA Guide
• Download our Improving the Customer Experience with Peer-based QM Whitepaper

With this in mind, CallCopy has partnered with Dick Bucci of Pelorus Associates to bring you 10 Secrets to Boosting First Call Resolution, a new eBook loaded with best practices on how to improve satisfaction and cut costs through increased FCR.

“First call resolution is an essential metric for any best-in-class contact center for two simple reasons: it drives customer satisfaction and reduces operating costs.”

This eBook provides an inside look at the many benefits associated with increased FCR, alongside real-world techniques on how to do so, including steps you can take to measure FCR, ways to identify the causes of repeat calls, insight on how FCR relates to customer satisfaction, and, of course, the 10 secrets to boosting FCR.

So, whether your focus is on the bottom line, keeping customers happy, or striking a balance between the two, chances are your organization can benefit from improving FCR.  Download the eBook now to get started.

» Download 10 Secrets to Boosting First Call Resolution

When the brunt of the storms rendered other Columbus, Ohio offices (and offices across the country, for that matter), non-operational, we were able to work from home thanks to our communications infrastructure and our own CallCopy software.  As the Avaya Insights blog points out, snow days don’t mean what they used to….

For many organizations, hazardous weather conditions have historically meant that when school districts close, parents are forced to either try to find a babysitter at the last minute or take the day off to watch their kids. Inclement weather also traditionally means longer, more dangerous commutes for employees, shorter work days, and above all else, lost productivity.

But that was then, and this is now: our software can record our work-at-home IP phones, and our tools can be accessed remotely via VPN. To ensure our continued operations, we utilize the same technologies that our customers rely upon.

One customer leveraging this functionality is Mohawk Flooring. Using CallCopy software alongside their Avaya Unified Communications infrastructure, Mohawk was able to ensure business continuity despite a crippling ice storm impacting their Dallas, Texas facility several months ago. Agents were able to work from home during the ordeal, eliminating risky commutes and decreased productivity.

To remain competitive, businesses need to be well-equipped to handle inclement weather or even more extreme scenarios such as a pandemic, flu outbreak or natural disaster.

Fortunately, CallCopy’s solutions allow businesses to rest easy knowing that their employees can maintain productivity regardless of the situation. Our contact recording and screen capture technology allows organizations to manage the performance of remote workers – so they remain both safe and productive.

Many organizations understand that there is value in implementing a speech analytics solution, but struggle with defining best practices and objectives associated with an effective program.

Speech Analytics Best Practices:

1. Identify key words and phrases that matter.
   Your organization is unique.  Make sure you define the key words and phrases that make the most sense for your organization and align with your business goals.  Remember to include names of competitors, phrases indicative of decreased customer satisfaction (such as “I want to cancel,” “speak to your supervisor” or “frustrated”) and other service-level KPIs.  If needed, fine-tune the software to recognize non-standard words such as jargon, slang and foreign words.  Also, be sure to include other departments in the process, as they will be able to provide additional insight into the words and phrases important to other areas of the organization.
2. Share the knowledge.
   One of the benefits of speech analytics is that it allows you to extend the business intelligence gathered within your contact center throughout the entire organization.  In effect, this means tearing down the virtual wall between the call center and other areas of the organization, and allowing the knowledge gained during customer contacts to be shared cross-departmentally (think sales, marketing, collections, fraud and other departments).  Historically, this information may have been lost or communicated less effectively as agents are pressured to move on to the next call in queue.
3. Coach and train your agents.
   Use the key word/phrase mining and silence detection capabilities in your speech analytics software to improve processes and identify agent coaching or up-training opportunities by understanding trends and underlying issues. For example, extended pauses by the agent could indicate a need for additional product training.
4. Mine all of your calls, not just some of them.
   By mining 100 percent of your calls, you will be able to pinpoint the occurrence of those critical key words and phrases to give you a better (and more accurate) frame of reference while enabling a full view of corporate insight. This is particularly important when monitoring for uncommon, yet critically important phrases that may be missed when only a subset of calls is mined.
5. Listen to your customers.
   Your customers give you information with every call.  An effective speech analytics solution allows your organization to zero in on the critical pieces of information, and extract meaningful data without wasting time or resources on the less significant segments.  Analyzing and understanding this data allows you to makes actionable business decisions based on the wants and needs of your customer base.

Ultimately, speech analytics best practices can help your organization improve customer satisfaction through agent coaching and up-training opportunities, improved process adherence, trend and key word /phrase identification and extendible business information.  Applying speech analytics best practices to your organization will allow you to better understand your customers by providing you with valuable insight, and the tools needed to turn that insight into critical business intelligence.

» Learn more about CallCopy’s speech analytics solution.

Because PCI compliance is such an important issue for contact centers, CallCopy recently sponsored DMG Consulting’s whitepaper, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) Guide for Contact Center Managers. This guide provides critical details about PCI DSS, how it affects call recording applications and what you can do to ensure your contact center operates in compliance with the PCI DSS.

Some of the topics include:

• What is PCI DSS? The PCI DSS is a security standard that includes requirements for security management, policies, procedures, and other critical protective measures and is intended to help organizations proactively protect customer account data.
• The Implications of PCI DSS for Contact Centers – Contact centers are responsible for ensuring that all data transmission systems, network segments and data storage solutions comply with the data security standards.
• Which Standards Apply to Contact Centers? While all 12 requirements may be applicable to some degree, requirements three (protect stored cardholder data), four (encrypt transmission of cardholder data across open, public networks) and 12 (maintain a policy that addresses information security) are especially relevant to contact centers.
• How Should Contact Centers Protect Cardholder Information? There are many steps you can take to protect customer data. For example, you’ll want to ensure that all employees are properly trained about all security policies and procedures. You’re also required to make sure that the data is encrypted using strong encryption protocols.
• PCI and At-Home Agents and Supervisors – At-home agents can present additional risks to PCI compliance, but certain precautions, like ensuring that agent screen and voice conversations are recorded, can help lower the overall risk.

Download the whitepaper now or visit our PCI compliance page for more info.

The article focuses on the many benefits of IVR surveys as well as web-based surveys in collecting customer feedback.  The paradigm shift relates to the ability to focus the data toward multiple goals, providing valuable data to marketing and HR as well as the contact center.  Surveys are evolving from simple data collection to advanced analysis of employee and customer opinions for true enterprise feedback management.

cc: Survey is offered as a hosted application, taking advantage of Software as a Service (SaaS) to make it cost effective as well as easy to use and manage.

The article is available at:

http://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/CRM-News/Daily-News/Changing-the-Paradigm-of-the-Contact-Center-50219.aspx 

In most cases, station side recording is preferred.  One key factor is that with trunk recording you are not able to record PBX calls.  For example, if one employee calls another employee, that call does not cross your inbound / outbound trunks and cannot be recorded via trunk tap.  With station-side recording, all internal calls can be recorded as well as other general inbound/outbound traffic.  

With station-side recording it is also easier to segment the calls, especially if you do not have a computer-telephony integration (CTI) module active on your ACD/PBX (TSPAI, JTAPI, TAPI, etc.).  The advantage in splitting the calls out is that a customer may call one department, and get transferred to another department.  Since two agents are handling the call, and recordings are commonly used for quality monitoring on your agents, having two recordings is preferred so the agents can be evaluated independently, and so you can permission access to the recordings differently.  You may not want a billing department supervisor to hear a tech support call and vice versa.

This kind of segmentation can be accommodated through a trunk-tap, but without CTI data this is done using SMDR information, which is not available until after the call has torn down and may not always be available in enough time for accurate use.  This is especially true if SMDR is being used to trigger a recording start or stop and not just to update recordings with details like ANI, DNIS, agent extension, or queue description.  Also, different switches may have limitation on how trunk channels are tracked and reported, making it difficult to match SMDR and even CTI data to recordings when a call has been transferred several times.

Most CTI-driven active integrations, such as Avaya DMCC (CMAPI), Nortel DMS, and Cisco JTAPI will behave like a station-side recorder.  This is also the same with passive VoIP recording (packet sniffing).  One exception is the ShoreTel TAPI/WAV integration, which behaves like a trunk recorder in the sense that is does not deliver audio for PBX calls; however you do have the ability to effectively separate recordings for each agent leg of the call.

Perhaps the biggest downside to station side recording is the wiring.  Station side recording can be a passive tap /cross connect at the 110-or 66-block in your telecom wiring.  Depending on what stations are to be recorded, you may also be able to do a split on a full amphenol cable between the PBX and the punch down blocks, which can be a cleaner wiring job. 

With analytics, the real value is not just finding a keyword or phrase (word spotting), but in understanding the context in which that key word or phrase is used.  For example, key word spotting may tell you when a competitor’s name is mentioned, but what you really need to know is why that competitor’s name is mentioned.  True speech analytics does this, looking at the surrounding language and determining if there are indicators for churn or praise, for instance.  There is a big difference in a customer saying “I am leaving you to go to competitor X” as opposed to “I am staying with you because you are so much better than competitor X.”  The competitor’s name is mentioned in both circumstances, but the data has little meaning until you can determine why it was mentioned.  If you are not able to answer the latter question, you are missing the value afforded through speech analytics and you’ll end up swimming directionless in a sea of data.

One if the biggest misconceptions I’ve come across is the tendency to confuse speech anlytics with a dictation machine.  Training a technology to understand your voice for dictation is very different from a technology that understands millions of voices, each with different accents, colloquialisms, and vocal undertones.  The variation in the voices and the increased vocabulary raises the complexity exponentially, which means more servers, processors, and time to complete the analysis.  Speech analytics is not yet to the point where you can confidently “read” the full content of a recorded call.  And if you could, would you want to?  Remember, spoken language is different from written language.  You do not have the benefit of punctuation, tonal inflections (such as sarcasm), and general grammar.  Sometimes your ear is the best tool for the job!

For the contact center, the prime benefit from cc: Survey is to calibrate customer satisfaction with internal quality measurements, but you can also use surveys to call resolution – from the customer’s perspective.  The customer may not think some issues are resolved even though you may.  Additionally, you can measure customer satisfaction with your speed to answer, whcih is useful in calibrating your service level goals.

With so many uses for the data you can collect with cc: Survey, the returns on your investment are very high!

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.