Welcome to the Call Center Corner Podcast where hosts Doug Deker and Brian Redden invite experts from the call center industry to discuss the application of professional services that create a Center of Excellence, as well as share insights in the call center technology, trends, and operations.
Brian:
Welcome to the Call Center Corner Podcast, brought to you today by Call Center Power. My name is Brian Redden and I’m here with Doug Deker and our special guest Spencer Nielsen from Liberty Call Center Solutions. How are you doing today, Spencer?
Spencer:
Doing well, Brian. Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Brian:
You bet. Doug, how are you today?
Doug:
Doing well. I’m excited to get into some quality assurance with Spencer. Spencer and I have known each other for 20 years, been in the space together, collaborated for a long time and I think it’s fitting that we have Spencer on our very first podcast. So Spencer, we really appreciate you taking some time to talk to us and I think one of the things that we wanted to kind of get started with was – talk to us a little bit about your background and your company and just kind of how you got into doing this.
Spencer:
Sure. I appreciate it. I’ll try to keep this mundane portion of this somewhat succinct and short. Some 20 years ago plus, I got involved with call centers and I think the wonderful thing about call centers is there are so many stories and I won’t bore everybody with my story, but I got involved with call centers. I didn’t go to school for call centers and I don’t think anybody did, but here I am 20 years later, I think the quality focus came from a need as somebody was looking at, “Hey, what is going on here? My agents, they’re judged and they’re specifically asked to do certain things,” and in this case it was sales. But what we were measuring them on other than their KPIs, when we went to the quality form, I didn’t see a lot of stuff on there that said, “Hey, this guy’s a good salesperson.” So I think that was the first introduction I had to quality and saying, “What are we doing here?” Ever since that’s been a focus and if I’d go down to it, the nuts and bolts of quality, performance management. It’s about, how do we make our agents better? Yes, we’re measuring them, but why are we measuring them? We’re measuring them so that we can then coach, train, improve them as well as just get that standard score per se, of who they are and what they are. So that happened 20 years ago. Most recently, I founded Liberty Call Center Solutions in 2016. Since then, we’ve been working with our clients to drive their performance improvement. It all starts with the measurement so that we can coach and take that measurement and make it operational. I think that’s probably the key to what I want to do – make quality assurance, not just a number, but make it operational. That’s what’s key to me.
Doug:
I appreciate that Spencer. And I know since you and I have a shared background in some of these experiences, kind of had the same feeling about QA back in the day, which was, whatever number we give them to get to 80%, you have to have 80% quality and of course, we managed many vendors over that time. Magically, we’d see that quality was at 80% and some vendors had agents that performed better and some had agents that performed worse, but they all seemed to get to 80%. And I think at some point, you and I talked about how we really make that number meaningful, and is anybody really coaching?
Spencer:
Yeah, I think what’s funny about that is that, and is your goal, we would see a complete disconnect like you said, everybody’s 80%, but you see a complete disconnect between the QA number and the actual KPI of, in this case again, telesales or First Call Resolution, whatever your KPI was, the most important thing to your customer experience, to your bottom line, to whatever it is, if you’re not connecting your QA and those things don’t move in tandem, then what’s your QA about? Now, there are a lot of different KPIs that you can measure that are important to your operation, but if you’re not seeing that 80% or whatever your QA score is, running parallel or at least having some correlation to your KPI, then that to me is the first indication that perhaps QA is not measuring the right thing.
Doug:
Right. I think going back to it for us and just my own experiences as somebody that ran large sales organizations, my most is frustrating experience about being somebody who managed a large sales team is my QA for some agents that were not performing and were not converting was at 80 plus percent. My best sales guys somehow were at 50% or 60%. I was trying to figure out – what is QA for? Is QA to kill my sales or is it supposed to help my guys be better salespeople? And that was the first time that I noticed, “Hey, this QA is good on paper but is it helping my guys sell?” And getting into a difference between compliance and actual sales skills or soft skills, if you want to be more generic, but I was very focused at the time on sales skills and how do we build these guys up to be high converters, closers, and still comply with the things that they need to comply with to make it a good sale, not a sale that they pushed onto somebody that didn’t want the product.
Spencer:
Right. And I think you said it right. What I tend to think of sometimes with the idea of there’s a section about compliance and that’s necessary. Everybody knows that, whether you’re doing collection sales, support and you got to do verifications, whatever it might be, there is an absolute need for a compliance section. And what I like to do is separate that, so that those compliance sections are almost auto-fails because to me, they’re a will issue rather than a skill issue. And that’s what I wanted to kind of transition that thought to – things that I want to measure on a QA form that relates to my KPIs and to that job performance, as you said, so you don’t have a 50% QA and a top sales guy, or a 90% QA and a bottom sales guy. The things that relate to how well that agent is doing, they shouldn’t get points just for their will and their ability to read a closing script and make sure that they’re legally covered. Now that’s important if they don’t do it, then we need to ding them. If it’s serious enough, if they’re not complying with legal ramifications, they get warned, they get written up and whatever the process is, if they won’t do that, there are legal risks, they get worked out. But things that are skill related, things that agents can improve, that they’re on a different spectrum based on tenure, based on training, based on natural ability, things that they can get better at, but they have to practice. We’re not inherently good at talking to a customer, we may not inherently be good at asking questions, we might not be inherently good at presenting information to that customer, but we can learn. We can practice. Those things are the skills we want to measure, whereas those compliance issues are will. I can’t get anybody to do those and if you don’t do them, then guess what? I’ve got to fire you because that’s just your attitude. It’s really about – can I measure and how effectively can I measure the things that impact your job from a performance standpoint that are things that I can then operationally teach you and help you do and get better at. I have this conversation with team leaders, supervisors, whatever you may want to call them, very frequently. It’s not that we don’t have to do performance reviews. It’s not that we don’t have to talk about what I’ll call management items or those will items or compliance items – we have to as it’s part of their job. But that is so easy for our supervisors to fall back on and what we want for them to do is measure those areas that they can coach. And when I say operationalize QA, that’s what it’s about. How do we operationalize it so that it is related to those KPIs? And I can see based on the scores, these are where you’re struggling and now I can coach or train you to do better in those areas.
Brian:
Spencer, you talk about operationalizing. I like the way you put that operationalizing QA. So when we go into contact centers for optimization projects and so forth and so many centers that we’ve run in the past, one of the things that’s very striking about quality assurance in a lot of places is it’s not being used to its full potential. I point to two areas. One is the direct coaching and performance improvement practices so they can be put in place around a good quality assurance program. And the other is a good defect reduction, a continuous improvement strategy that an operation can use a quality assurance. I rarely go into centers that are underperforming, where we see quality assurance is used to affect improvement in those two areas. So can you talk a little bit about what operators and call center leaders miss about taking this great tool of quality assurance and using it for so much more to make their centers better?
Spencer:
I don’t know that I would generalize it. Everybody misses it. I think everybody knows it in some ways. I think culturally in many cases, that QA is disconnected from operations. We’ve talked about this a little bit in the past, Doug and I, and we called it the tail wagging the dog to overuse that phrase and similar to what I’ll call the supervisor conundrum, which is they always follow the path of least resistance. It’s easier from a QA standpoint to measure than it is to effect. And so my job is to measure and I just keep measuring and measuring and measuring because the hard work is affecting the change. Like you said, reducing the defects doing those things. So I don’t know if so much that there’s a disconnect and maybe there is depending on where you’re at as to what they’re doing. And some of that may be structural in the way that the operation is set up and the lines of command per se. But I think it’s just cultural in some ways and that, “Hey, we’re QA, we measure, we measure, we measure,” and there’s no shortage. This is kind of what I always stress. When we talk about performance improvement with either operations managers or team leaders or supervisors, there is never a shortage in a call center of work to be done. So the heavy lifting is the performance management, the change management, that’s always heavy lifting. It’s hard for a supervisor to sit and say, “Hey, let’s talk about how you effectively resolve this issue and how you discover what is the root cause.” If we’re talking about the customer support of why that customer’s calling, or let’s talk about, “Why your talk time is way up, but your close rate is way down.” That’s the heavy lifting. I hate to use the word ‘confront’ because I don’t think it’s confrontational, but it’s hard to sit down with someone and say, “Let’s do this.” It’s really easy for me to sit down and say, “Here are the numbers. Your talk time is this, your resolution rate is this and you give a performance review. Well, the QA as a whole goes the same way. It’s easy for me. I have numbers in front of me to say, “I measured you at 82%. I measured the floor at this percent.” The heavy lifting is taking that and making the changes with it. And because there’s kind of loop this back around, so I’m not losing everything is the challenge with that is there’s never a shortage of things to do. So human nature, what am I going to do? I’m going to choose the more comfortable thing that’s easier and that’s more concrete and those are numbers. Whereas choosing to sit down and say, “Hey Doug, you know what, let’s talk about the closing questions you use or let’s talk about the trial closing questions you use.” That’s hard. So I think those are challenges when it comes to QA and breaking that is a difficult thing. It takes strong leadership, the right tools, and the right mentality of what is QA about. It takes a real evaluation of what you’re measuring and how it ties out to those KPIs and every category, if you think about it, that is not compliance, should be something that you could coach and help them improve, give suggestions, and be patient and helpful. I think that’s the great thing about it is as long as somebody’s willing to improve, be patient and helpful, be non-judgemental and humble and help them grow rather than those numbers just harsh, harsh, harsh kind of thing.
Doug:
I appreciate that Spencer. We’ve seen where it becomes much too easy to take that QA card and go back to an agent and it’s already been scored. So let’s listen to the call that we scored, then put it on the rep to say, “What did you think about your call? And here’s how I scored it.” And it kind of puts them on the spot and it could be, well, that wasn’t the best call, I don’t think that was representative or it gets nitpicky. What we’ve talked about is how do we break out of the old school? Let’s sit here and listen to a call and I’m going to make the rep do all the work and myself as a coach or a supervisor or a QA is sort of putting all this back onto you to coach yourself. How do I become a leader and a good coach and feel confident in what I am going to say to that rep when I sit down without falling back on, let’s listen to this call.
Spencer:
That’s a great question. I love that and I do a lot of role plays with supervisors in coaching. I can tell you 99.9% of the time, I sit down and say, “Okay, I’m your agent, coach me.” And the first words out of their mouth are, “Hey, I listened to a call.” And I’ll say, “Stop.” What do you think happens when you tell that agent, you listen to a call, and then a light bulb goes on there and it’s like, “Oh yeah, what did I do wrong?” Of course, I had to say that because it’s so true and I’m telling you it happens, but your greater question of how do we change it, right? Because I will say this all the time. We listen to calls, we score calls, we take calls, we’re all about calls. But when we coach and when we want to affect that change, we want to operationalize our QA. I will tell them, “Don’t coach calls.” There are multiple reasons to do that. First, it’s demoralizing because we’ve chosen a call where there are things that are wrong and nobody likes performance reviews, nobody wants to hear themselves and say, “Hey, what did you do wrong?” Like Doug says, “Hey, tell me what you thought. That’s great.” It’s demoralizing. It drives attrition.
Brian:
Leaders need to know this. It’s okay to coach on good calls. Because to your point, agents think that every time a supervisor comes up to them with a QA, it’s going to be bad. For the call center of supervisors and managers over out there, coach the good calls too.
Doug:
This is a great example from a roleplay perspective. How did you close? How did you build rapport? How did you control the call? If you’ve got great examples of that from some of your better agents or even some of your agents that may not be your better agents, but are good at certain aspects. Those are good things to help with role play, but let’s get back to you as a coach. And when I say coach, it could be training, teaching, coaching. There are a lot of different terms for it. Some may have come with different connotations and that coaching could come from a trainer, it could come from a QA, it could come from a supervisor or a manager, but in all cases, it’s really, how do you get your agent to go from point A to point B without knocking them off balance and making them feel like they did something wrong.
Spencer:
Yeah. And that’s hard when I got transition now and now I say, “When I say don’t coach calls,” that’s where I go coach skills. And there are multiple reasons for that. But again, we go back to that hard part because if you are a supervisor and you need to coach, “Oh my goodness, I haven’t coached, let me go listen to a call.” There’s a lot of prep work that needs to go into coaching skills because I can’t just pick one call, I need to have multiple examples to decide and figure out what does my agent need? What’s the number one thing they need to improve right now? Maybe it’s probing questions, maybe it’s closing questions, maybe it’s their tone. Who knows what it is? But I need more than one call so what we want to do is trend and figure out what do we need on more than one call. That takes time, effort, and preparation. So there’s a lot of that and little segue here into kind of the old versus the new. And this is why I love speech analytics for quality because I can take speech analytics and I know that analytics aren’t perfect. Everybody who has ever dealt with it and looked at a transcript knows it. They know it’s not perfect. Especially in the call center where we’re going to be dealing with different accents, different things, we know it’s not perfect. But over the course of a day, a week, a month, instead of a 1%, 2% sample of a QA scoring, who by the way was yesterday’s agent on the phone that now is scoring their peer. I get two of those calls. That’s not a great trend, that may not be a great measurement, but even at faulty speech analytics, if I get hundreds of calls, they’re not all wrong. They’re not all messed up. So again, this is how I move from coaching a call to coaching a trend and I get measurement in all these areas. And now I can see, “Okay, this agent is struggling in these areas.” It takes a lot of work. It takes a great company, and a great partner to set up those analytics, integrate those with your QA and your coaching. That to me is the future. We still are going to use human interaction. We’re still going to audit. We’re still going to do those things. But if you can trend where an agent’s at and now I don’t have to coach calls and I can take that guesswork away from that coach or supervisor, I give them a quality score on hundreds of calls. These are the categories. Those categories are tied to coaching topics. If you’re failing or struggling in these worries on your speech analytics, these are the areas you need to coach on. Go coach them. Now I’m going to go back to coaching calls. The other thing about coaching calls and why I don’t do it and what I tell my supervisors is you don’t have time. You cannot go down a list on your QA. That’s not coaching, that’s feedback. That’s where I would say, “One item guys. One item at a time.” Human capacity to learn on all these different things. You can get beat down. Even if you’re only going to coach one thing and you review the whole form. Okay, so you beat them down, tell them what they did wrong. And then you try and coach them to get better in one spot. How do you feel? It’s not good. You’re not listening. How do I feel? “Oh, I did awful, but you’re going to do this.” I’ll tell my folks, “Don’t even listen to a call with them. Even if you used that call to determine what they needed to be coached, when you listen to them and when you listen to that call with them, you’re going to find 10 other things that you want to mention to them. Now you’re going to have to fight the urge to say, ‘Don’t do this. Don’t do this when really, a good coach is going to be doing one thing at a time. Let me focus on this. Let’s practice, let’s role play, let’s make it better, let’s improve your performance here then let’s roll to the next item.” That old way of QA and coaching is “I got a QA form. Let’s listen to the call together.” I always want to say that old ways are old ways because they have some usefulness. Sometimes it’s really good for agents to hear what they’re doing wrong, especially if they’re having a will issue as opposed to a skill issue. They need to hear it because it’s not clicking with them and you can show them. Although, I prefer to help it click with a good sample as we talked about. Those things are unnecessary. Use a trended QA from hundreds of calls, 10 calls, whatever you can do, the most calls, figure out, “This is what my agent needs based on my QA,” throw in other things, you look at their KPIs, combine that with their QA which hopefully correlate, say this is what they need, coach them on those items rather on that QA form or that call. That’s how you affect change. That’s how you improve your overall culture in the center. You reduce your attrition because suddenly I’m not getting beat down every day by my QA score. The other thing, I’m going to tangent here. It’s funny, Doug, you mentioned it earlier. 90% QA, bottom performer when it comes to first call resolution or sales or collection, whatever their core KPI is, customer experience KPI, whatever, but they get a 90% QA. The thing about that is agents are humans too, and they learn, and this is why it’s so important to correlate your QA form to your KPI performance. Because agents learn, it’s hard to sell but it’s easy to get a 90% when I figure out what the QA is listening for. And they’re humans too. It’s human nature. I may not be the greatest sales guy, but I’m not getting fired because I get a 90% QA because I learned exactly what I have to do in each of these categories, the thing I have to say to get that score. So you got to correlate those things. They’ve got to find a correlation or you’re going to have that situation. And it’s basic human nature. It’s survival. It’s hard to sell. It’s easy to get that QA score. So kind of a tangent there, but going back to what you had mentioned earlier about that phenomenon of, “I got 90% QA and I’m bottom quadrant performer.”
Doug:
I think what we saw in the old days, and let’s just categorize this a little bit here as dinosaurs a little bit, because some of the technology that’s available today, which is outstanding, wasn’t available when we first started doing this. You couldn’t listen to 100% of the calls and do trending because you didn’t have speech analytics. You had to have as many QAs as you could trying to give you a 1%, maybe 2% sample across the board. And that was as good as we could get at the time. We did see agents who said, “Okay, well maybe I can’t sell, but I know if I just do this, I’ll get a good score.” And that drove me crazy as somebody who was tied to the KPIs of selling. So since you mentioned speech analytics, I wanted to talk a little bit about what speech analytics can do for a call center that we couldn’t do in the old days when all we could do was manually listen and maybe do 1% to 2% and how that has potentially trained the ability to now trend and coach.
Spencer:
I don’t know how much there is to add. I think you nailed it. It’s about trending and coaching. That’s what speech analysts can do. I think that that’s the key, but there are a lot of benefits to that and there’s some push and some give and take on it. We’ve all been there – arguing over QA scores, when it gets down to it or saying, “That was just one call that you listened to, my other calls were good.” I think that’s a big thing that speech analytics brings. That sheer mass number. I love the way the call center industry is one where people have stories. People start on the phones and they rise. It’s a great story for people who want to work hard and apply themselves. You can make a great success of yourself. We know people who started on the phone and now own their call center company. QC is just a step in there. If you’re a good quality analyst or a quality agent that’s a step. If I’m an agent, and I’m getting judged or scored by this guy who’s my peer. They’re not a supervisor. I’m just thinking, they couldn’t hack it on the phones, so now they’re a QA. They just want it off the phone. So now they’re listening to me and scoring me.
Doug:
We’ve seen that in the past and that drives us crazy and I think that’s one of the great things about speech analytics. As you said, not perfect, but what we get over time is instead of 1% or 2% of the calls that get scored, we get 100% of the calls that get scored. We get trends across every single skill set. How’s your rapport? How’s your closing? Everything gets trended and now as a coach or a supervisor who should be a coach, what am I doing with that? Now I’ve got all this stuff at my fingertips that was not easy for me to get before, so what do I do with it? I think where I would love to see call centers evolve and we’re still seeing that slow movement is, away from “a supervisor’s job is to do reports and handle escalations and track attendance” because, all that is easy compared to coaching. As you said earlier, human nature is “I will migrate to what I have an affinity for,” but how do I get these agents or these yesterday agents that are now today’s supervisors, ready to coach and do these call centers today do training around how do I coach the agents that I’m responsible for?
Spencer:
Thank you for the lead-in. I take a unique approach to that. I think everybody will recognize that if you take a low-skilled agent and script them, they’re going to do better. My approach to that is, we’ve taken yesterday’s best agent and made him a supervisor. Some call centers talk about it. They talk about, “Oh, just because you’re a good agent doesn’t mean you’re a good supervisor,” but that’s ultimately what it ends up being, because otherwise, you’re going to get a revolt on the floor when you hire the guy that has the lowest sales as a supervisor because you think he has leadership skills. It’s a challenge, but we take that agent and make him a supervisor. We know that if we script a bad agent, we improve that agent. But why not provide in a sense, a script for that supervisor. You want to talk about coaching? We can take them in a classroom and we can train them to be Tony Robbins and hope that works. This outstanding manager and trainer and coach and speaker, and some are very dynamic and some aren’t, but we know we’ve taken yesterday’s best agent. Now they’re our supervisor. What I want to do is give them everything they need including who they need to coach and what they need to coach. Now, where does that come from? That comes from your QA and that’s where this ties in. It’s important that your QA correlates with your KPIs because they’re the ones that are going to be coaching and hopefully we’re going to give them what they need to coach as well. That’s where your speech analytics come in because it takes the stupid and subjectiveness out of it. Now we could go on and on about how much it takes to program. Speech analytics is really not artificial intelligence, it takes human intelligence and it takes consistent human intelligence to monitor it, program it, update it, and keep it current. All of those things go into who and what needs to coach. We need to spoon feed and script. We need to give those supervisors exactly who it is and what they need to be coached on. Now, the step that I’ll go further on is I want to give them the ‘how to coach.’ I don’t necessarily want to do that in a classroom and try and train them as I mentioned, not that that’s not valuable and can’t be important, but why not? Why not put that right in front of them? You’d never send a trainer to a training room without a facilitator guide. Yet, we send our supervisors who are training and teaching and say, “Hey, go do it.” And what do they end up doing? “Well, I listened to a call, here’s your QA score.” No, no, no. We can give you who needs to be coached, what the skill is that they need to be coached on and we can provide them facilitator guides. Training content that says, “Here’s what you do. This is the best practice in the center, go and coach it this way, have a conversation, roleplay with your agent, make sure that you are doing something other than just delivering punitive feedback. Instead, you’re helping them get better.” So we script our supervisors and give them everything they need. We take the stupid out of it (that’s not to say our supervisors are stupid) but we take that away and we give them who, what, and how on the coaching form. This is what you do. We know that if we scripture that, I’ll go back to script that agent, a low-performing agent, and they’re going to do better. We can do that same thing for our supervisors – give them all the knowledge from our QA, give them who needs to be coached and then go and do this. Once I had a supervisor I was training tell me, “I love this, but I don’t know what to say to my agent.” I had provided them with some coaching forms and some content to coach and we were trying to improve their sales. I said, “If all you do is take that coaching form, which talks about what probing questions are and how to ask them and how to formulate this or that and read it, just read it to your agent. You’ve done more than 90% of the supervisors globally in helping their agent probe.”
Doug:
I think that’s important. When we get new agents on the phones, they’re going to be nervous. When we get new supervisors who are coaching for the first time, they’re going to be nervous. If we can provide them with a script that says, “This is how you coach.” Then, just like agents who have been on the phones for two weeks, a month, or six months, it’s going to become less and less scripted and more and more natural. The more you can do that coaching, the more you veer away from having to be scripted and the more comfortable you get. But if you never get started, you will be the same supervisor with the same skills today that you are six months from now because all you’ve been doing the whole time is taking escalation calls, building spreadsheets, and giving beat downs. I appreciate your philosophy because we’ve lived through QAs where we feel that it isn’t getting us where we want to be. We’ve lived through supervisors who don’t coach. We see it today with some of the organizations that we run into where we’d love to see supervisors coach, but even if they are coaching, they’re not coaching the way that we talked about. To try to get to that next step, we would love to be able to talk to our partners and clients and introduce them to some of the concepts that we talked about today.
Spencer:
It really does come down to nuts and bolts. As you said, if you provide those things to the supervisors and they’re going to get better, they’ve never been introduced before, all that does is come down to accountability. It’s not as complicated as trying to coach them up as to be good leaders, which we all want them to be because it comes down to accountability. Are you using the tools that you’ve been given? Are you using the scripting and training and if they are, they’ll naturally learn from that and hopefully break that cycle of what I call the poor performance cycle. You get hired as an agent, do well, then get hired as a supervisor. You have a team of agents now that aren’t doing well because they aren’t as good on the phone as you. You’re like, “Oh my goodness, what do I do?” So you do the same thing that happened to you, which was listen to calls, ask them how it went, then beat them down, hoping they’re going to improve. They started trading and the cycle just keeps going over and over again.
Doug:
What we want coaching to do is build skills that should drive tenure, which lowers attrition. When we get tenured agents who are well-coached, we know that we’re going to get good performance, whether it’s collections, sales, tech support, or customer service. Spencer, I know you’ve been driving that through your company for a long time and before that, for other companies and we appreciate you getting on today and walking us through what you do, what your philosophy on QA is, and sharing a bit about your company.
Spencer:
I appreciate you guys giving me the time. I love this stuff. I love coaching. I love what it does for people. I went to school to be a coach. It just was not a call center coach. I wanted to be a baseball coach.
Brian:
Well you know, they do say that call centers are a contact sport…
Spencer:
I wanted to coach and I love call center coaching because it’s people skills as if you can communicate, if you can coach, and if you can manage. I tell my supervisors as we close out and my managers, “Guys, if you learn these skills, this is how you go places. If you learn to manage people and coach people and lead, you go places. These are great skills to learn.”
Brian:
It’s great insight. As Doug and I said, we appreciate you joining us today in the Call Center Corner. QA is a big topic. It’s one of the more important components of building a Center of Excellence and you’ve brought a lot of insight to the table.
Visit callcenterpower.com/call-center-corner-a-podcast-series to listen to the full podcast episode!
