Using a quality discipline to manage call center processes and execution

People working in service environments often feel frustrated with the utilization of a quality structures like those issued by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Many think ISO is outdated, too rigid, or more for a manufacturing environment.

However, the point of implementing a quality structure is not to create a bureaucracy. The goal is to establish a level of formality and consistency that allows for quality execution. How else do you get hundreds of call center agents who are answering hundreds of different questions to be consistent and accurate?

While the rigor required by a quality structure requires a little extra time in planning and execution, what you get in return is incredibly valuable: better performance, tighter management, and a deeper understanding of what’s really happening in your business.

Consistency in the face of constant change
Customer management has some of the highest rates of change of any business. Many things change routinely for call center agents, with new information and expectations flowing from both the internal client-side activity to the operations within the four walls of a call center. This means that a high level of rigor is necessary to ensure that information is up-to-date and properly disseminated.

Despite the need for consistency, document management is one place where many businesses don’t follow ISO standards. Instead, they try to build process and standards that are driven by the need for speed without understanding the consequences and corresponding checks and balances. All too often, document management devolves into a free-for-all as agents are left dealing with multiple versions of documents with varying degrees of accuracy.

A solid document management process is critical to your success, with tight standards at every step, including approval, versioning, dating, extracting, replacement, and training. This process needs to be designed and maintained against a plan and proven methodology.

Structure and process change
The need for quality structure is just as important when you are implementing process changes. Too often, customer management executives and suppliers put a process change in place and just say “go” without any testing, time studies and understanding of the customer or performance (AHT) implications.

They may end up elated or upset with the results, but either way, they don’t really understand cause and effect. This often leaves negative performance unexplained and positive performance less than “what could have been.”

Rather than launching a process change in one fell swoop, you should test the change on a representative sampling of customer interactions. This will allow you to conduct time studies in order to feed data into your management system and thus determine new expectations, goals and benchmarks.

A process change may increase handle time, and therefore increase costs, in which case a business case is needed. Or it may decrease handle time, but you still need to know how much time to take out of process. Either way, it’s important to institute a level of rigor by testing the change and introducing it methodically.

Inspect what you expect
Whenever you put a quality structure in place, you then have to measure and assess execution against that structure. I recommend combining results-based and process-based assessments, where you inspect output as well as the “goodness” of the process.

For instance, you can do periodic surveys of users of a process to see if it is working at designed. When I’ve done this, it’s added a good amount of value, allowing me to diagnose problems and make improvements that I might not have based on results alone.

The rigor and formality of a quality discipline ensures greater consistency in process and execution.

–Bryan DiGiorgio