In deze presentatie staat een uitleg over betrouwbaarheidsintervallen en betrouwbaarheden die specifiek van toepassing is voor call centers. Het uitgangspunt is steeds dat er wordt gewerkt met een scoremethodiek die een percentage tussen de 0 en 100% oplevert (zoals bij Auditio gebruikelijk is en ook door COPC wordt gehanteerd) en waarvan de uitkomsten redelijk normaal verdeeld zijn. De presentatie laat duidelijk zien dat ook bij betrekkelijk kleine steekproeven van tussen de 160 en 220 waarnemingen, behoorlijk betrouwbare uitspraken gedaan kunnen worden over de over all contactkwaliteit.

In this economy, everyone is looking to save a buck. Companies are slashing budgets and trying to salvage the bottom line.
So where is the savings within the QA program?
The biggest cost in most QA programs are the time, energy and resources it takes to sit down, listen to, and properly analyze a phone call. It requires man hours to do the task.
So start by looking at your sample sizes and crunch the nubers. Depending on the goals of your program, you generally don’t need to analyze hundreds of phone calls to get an accurate reflection of a CSRs service. If you have a well designed, behaviorally anchored QA scale, then a small sample of randomly selected calls will do the trick. I have been in call centers who will measure hundreds of phone calls for a given CSR. It’s overkill.
Consider the pollsters who can accurately guage the opinions of 175 million Americans by talking to 1,000. It’s statistically possible to do so with a small margin of error, if you do it right. QA works in the same way. You can get an accurate reflection of a CSRs service over thousands of calls by listening to just a handful, if you do it right.

Bronvermelding: QA QnA , Tom Vander Well

Kwaliteitsmonitoring door de opdrachtgever zelf helpt om een juister beeld te verkrijgen van de kwaliteit van klantcontact, de oorzaak van ontevredenheid bij klanten en tevens kan de relatie tussen facilitair contactcenter en opdrachtgever verbeteren doordat samen wordt gekeken naar oorzaak en gevolg.

• Lees het complete artikel van Tanja Florijn in PDF formaat.

Bronvermelding: CCM 11-08, pag. 20-22

“Quality Monitoring is for people like trainers, coaches, customer care managers and customer care contact center managers. Companies use writing or excelsheets. Does QM software give a good ROI?”

ROI is about money.

It is unfortunately very difficult to prove that satisfied customers become loyal customers and it is also very difficult to prove (and probably not even true) that loyal customers are more profitable than non-loyal customers (See: W. Reinartz & V. Kumar; ‘the mismangement of Customer Loyalty’ in the HBR of July 2002).

Quality Monitoring tools give any organisation the power to look into the customer contacts and evaluate them for what really matters; the quality of the contact.

Research of my company (Auditio) shows clearly that calls with a high quality are usually shorter than calls with a low quality. The difference is immense; on a standardized scale with a mean AHT of 100, the best calls take 75, and the worst calls take an AHT of 166 (see here for more info in Dutch). Now we are talking money(!).

If the team leaders are capable of using the QM Tools for improving the quality of the contact, than it is very very likely that the AHT will drop, and thus QM will provide for a healthy ROI.

There is one caveat however; listening in to calls, and getting to an objective verdict of quality is not easy. We think it is work for specialist, that can (and perhaps should) be outsourced to a specialist company.

P. Harts (Auditio)

p7:

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The benefits of remote supervision
A comprehensive quality assurance strategy – including both call monitoring and quality recording, is crucial for ensuring that qualtiy is maintained across any pool of agents. Deploying remote supervisors offers special value to brick and mortar call centers. Many traditional call centers that use on-site supervisors to monitor the effectiveness of their customer service agents find that their internal performance ratings are out of sync with customer evaluations. Supervisors sometimes find it hard to be objective when they evaluate a person they know and see every day – perhaps someone they hired or trained. In such cases, they may also feel that a low rating reflects poorly on their coaching skills. Supervisors may also fail to understand the customer’s perspective, and may even see the customer’s issue as a fact of life rather than a problem requiring solution (PH: omdat ze zo dicht bij de agent staan). Companies that outsource their agent monitoring, on the other hand, report that outsourced ratings correlate highly with customer experiences.

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uit het whitepaper van Oracle; The Virtual Call Center; infrastructure considerations for Maximizing Productivity, Increasing Customer Satisfaction, and reducing Costs, maart 2007.

Klaarblijkelijk correleert de score van een externe kwaliteitswaarnemer beter met die van de klant, dan de score van een interne kwaliteitswaarnemer.

Agents beleven dagelijks hilarische momenten aan de telefoon. Die ervaringen kunnen ze omzetten in een vakantie. Agents die hun gekste klantcontact op schrift stellen, maken kans op de hoofdprijs in een verhalenwedstrijd van Interactive Intelligence (Confessions of a Contact Center Agent).

‘We leveren software voor contactcenters, maar het zijn uiteindelijk altijd de mensen die het doen.’ Woordvoerder Ingrid Wong maakt duidelijk dat ook een softwareleverancier de inbreng van de menselijke factor in het contactcenter essentieel acht. ‘Natuurlijk hebben agents de juiste instrumenten nodig, maar software blijft altijd ondersteunend. We vinden het dus tijd om aandacht te besteden aan de mensen die het klantcontact voor hun rekening nemen.’

De wedstrijd heeft een internationaal karakter en dat werpt direct een kleine drempel op: de inzendingen moeten in het Engels geschreven zijn. Om dat ongemak te compenseren en zoveel mogelijk mensen aan te sporen in te zenden heeft Wong een Nederlandse prijs ingesteld. ‘Het mooiste Nederlandse verhaal wint een waardebon van € 350,-. En het contactcenter met de meeste inzendingen trakteer ik op taart.

Of Interactive Intelligence de inzendingen bundelt, blijft voorlopig onduidelijk. Misschien dienen de opgetekende verhalen een marketingdoel. ‘We leveren Quality Monitoring Software en daar kunnen we mogelijk met dergelijke verhalen op inspringen.’

(Bron: callcenternieuws.nl)

Software: Making call centres run smoothly involves an ever-greater dependency on technological trickery behind the scenes

IT IS a familiar litany. Your call is important to us. An operator will be with you as soon as possible. Your call may be recorded for quality-control and training purposes. These phrases are familiar because the use of call centres has become so commonplace: in 2007 companies worldwide spent some $280 billion on outsourced call-centre services, according to NASSCOM, a call-centre trade group in Delhi. Costs are rising (they jumped 30% last year in India), customers are becoming more demanding, and competition is increasing. So the companies that operate call centres are adopting new software to monitor and improve performance.

Illustration by Robin Chavalier

One trick, which can shave seconds off each call, is to take into account “context data”—such as the caller’s location, the local weather, the time of day and records of their recent transactions—when routing a call. Cisco, an American communications-equipment provider, recently upgraded its call-centre software to provide this feature, which is popular with financial institutions. The caller can then be put through to an agent who is experienced at handling a particular sort of transaction. 

Aneesh Nair, head of the Academia, a call-centre training school in Bangalore, says context data may also include information gleaned from news reports. Storms, sporting events and transport strikes, for example, can affect callers’ moods and purchasing dispositions, he says, and can be used to provide tips to agents. “Demographic mapping” features provide additional information about the products callers are most likely to buy based upon their location, time of call, and whether they are calling from a land-line or a mobile phone.

The next step, beyond analysing the context around a call, is to examine the call itself, using “word spotting” software to evaluate the performance of the agent and the reaction of the caller. There is strong demand for quality-control software, says Donna Fluss of DMG Consulting, a specialist consultancy based in West Orange, New Jersey, because call-centre managers are only able to listen to a few calls per agent each month. Word-spotting software allows managers to monitor agents much more closely.

As word-spotting systems spread, call-centre training schools have started coaching students in gaming the system so they look good under the additional scrutiny. JTS Institute, a cramped school in a bustling Bangalore neighbourhood, now shows students how to “prompt” callers with questions and statements that elicit the replies that word-spotting software, and call-centre managers, are looking for, such as “I understand” and “that’s great”. In addition, says Basheer Shaik, the head trainer, a good accent is even more important now that employers can see tallies of how many times a particular agent is asked to “repeat that”. Students are encouraged to practise English even “with their parents who hardly understand English”, he says.

The market for word-spotting systems is “gaining a lot of momentum,” says Barak Eilam, general manager of NICE, a provider of word-spotting software based in Ra’anana, Israel. Its latest systems are designed to foil prompting by taking into account the context of high-scoring phrases. A caller who says “wonderful” shortly after the agent has said it, for example, may have been prompted.

As well as being used to evaluate the performance of agents, Mr Eilam says, word-spotting systems can also provide valuable insights about what callers think about a particular product, and how their vocabulary changes in response to advertising campaigns, recalls and publicity stunts. In one case word-spotting technology quickly alerted a refrigerator-maker to a design flaw after the words “tipped”, “top-heavy” and “fell” were uttered to call-centre agents in different countries just half a dozen times.

Much of India’s call-centre industry, which employs roughly 300,000 agents, is located outside the ring road that encircles Bangalore, in a string of smart new business parks with tidy lawns and private security. Were it not for the stray dogs, a visitor could be forgiven for mistaking the area for Silicon Valley. Costs, of course, are much lower, but business leaders are aware of a growing threat from call centres in other countries such as the Philippines. Vasudevan Bharathwaj of 24/7 Customer, a call centre in Bangalore where 5,000 agents handle calls for 30 companies, explains that firms like his must innovate and develop intellectual property for sale to other firms.

Listening to the customer

Accordingly, programmers at 24/7 Customer have developed “neurolinguistic” software that does not just spot which words callers use—it tries to provide agents with insights into their psychology. Callers’ words and cadences are analysed to create a profile that helps agents adjust their vocabulary and behaviour to improve their rapport. Agents receive on-screen tips on which phrases, sales pitches and conflict-resolution tricks are most likely to resonate. For example, callers who use “kinesthetic” terms such as “digging through the website” will be answered slowly with phrases suggesting body movement: “Please hold while I pull up more information.”

Similarly, Cisco’s voice-analysis system monitors parameters including volume, cadence, tone, pitch and inflection, and then sorts callers into six personality types to help agents fine-tune call handling. “It’s the bleeding edge,” says Laurent Philonenko, vice-president of Cisco’s call-centre business in San Jose, California. Ms Fluss says “tremendous innovation” is under way in this area, and sales of caller-profiling systems will increase by 70% this year compared with 2007.

CUMA Mutual Group, a credit-union insurer in Madison, Wisconsin, installed such a system last year. Rick Roy of CUMA says it provides agents, who receive tips and script changes automatically during calls, with “another set of ears”. The same software can also be used for quality control, says Mr Eilam, by scoring agents depending on the way the caller’s emotional state changes over the course of the call. Supervisors at many companies, he says, retain customers by phoning back those who exhibit “negative excitement” at the end of a call.

Some in the industry worry that voice analysis smacks of Big Brother, and prefer to keep quiet about it. Callers are usually told only that their call may be recorded for quality-control purposes. The JTS Institute does not mention the technology to its students. “Too much information”, says Mr Shaik, “is not good for them.”

http://news.economist.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/hBSnr0THiHE0Mo0Etfn0EB

De IDMK cursus ‘kwaliteitscursus in contact centers’ die Esther Goos en Ernst Kruize op 13 november verzorgen is compleet volgeboekt. Daarom is er in 2007 nog één extra sessie gepland en wel op 10 december aanstaande. Meer info?

SPSS constateert dat er momenteel nog te weinig door organisaties wordt gedaan aan het analyseren van gesproken tekst. Vooral in callcenters zou dit veel voordeel op kunnen leveren. Door spraakanalyse in te zetten kan fraude eenvoudiger worden geconstateerd en het biedt mogelijkheden voor cross- en upselling. Momenteel worden in callcenters als gevolg van werkdruk relatief weinig notities gemaakt van telefoongesprekken met de klant. Hierdoor wordt echter belangrijke informatie gemist die waardevol kan zijn voor de organisatie.

Sinds kort werkt SPSS samen met CallMiner om spraakherkenning en predictive analytics verder uit te breiden. Door CallMiner’s spraakherkenningoplossing – CallMiner Eureka! – af te stemmen op SPSS’ predictive enterprise platform, kunnen de twee bedrijven beter inzicht bieden aan organisaties in de reden waarom de klant belt. Verder is er meer inzicht in hoe telefoongesprekken afgehandeld worden. Daarnaast wordt de analyse verder doorgetrokken om toekomstig gedrag van klanten te bepalen. Hierop kunnen organisaties hun beleid aanpassen, zodat klanten de beste behandeling ontvangen. CallMiner Eureka! is volgens SPSS de enige spraakherkenningoplossing die automatisch ieder opgenomen gesprek, dat door de call center medewerker wordt afgehandeld, analyseert en rapporteert. Ieder woord in ieder telefoongesprek wordt volledig bijgehouden en geanalyseerd. Daarnaast worden de akoestieke data (tempo, stilte en emotie), metadata en klantinformatie bijgehouden om een compleet beeld te creëren van ieder gesprek en de uitkomst hiervan.

Bron: www.ccmonline.nl (nieuws 03-07-2007)

Meer info SPSS | Meer info CallMiner Eureka!