Developing a Quality Program for Live Chat
There might be a temptation to run some reports on your live chat implementation and hand those out, showing who has had the most conversions, who types the fastest, who took the most chats, etc. But quantity of interaction is only one of the benefits you can garner from using live chat.
You probably ignore that voice that says “calls may be recorded for quality purposes” – that’s because call centers have been working on quality for years. Live chat should be no different.
Creating a Chat Quality Assurance program isn’t hard or overly time-consuming. I’ve done it several times over the years. Done well, it not only improves the quality of your interactions with your customers, it can give you a chance to salute your high performers and use incentive systems to boost morale. It’s a win, win, win.
The best part about implementing a program is how much easier it is with live chat than in a call center. In a call center you either have to listen realtime and score the call or you have to have recording and playback capability. Then, if you provide feedback, if you don’t have the call recorded, it can easily be a he-said/she-said about what happened on the call. In live chat the entire interaction is all there and you can coach on tone, timing, inquisitiveness, accuracy, professionalism, closing skills – or any other elements critical to organization. You will find that providing feedback to your agents on their chat performance is faster, easier, more accurate, and less prone to misinterpretation.
To get started, follow these easy steps.
- Create a matrix of the 10-20 elements you really want your agents to get right. Include some simple-yet-essential elements such as greeting and closing as well as some subjective elements that will help you mold the voice your want your agents to represent you with.
- Assign a number of points possible for each element. (Hint: if you make the total equal 100, the paradigm will be easier for agents to connect to).
- Decide how many chats you will review per agent and how frequently you will review them. (Hint: 2-3 chats per day is not too much feedback; 2-3 per month isn’t really a program – shoot for something in the middle).
- Create a simple recognition program in which everyone one who achieves gets rewarded. You want all your customers to have a great experience, so don’t dis-incent all the non-top-agent by only rewarding one prize.
- Make the incentives fun, inexpensive, and quickly rewarded. Certificates, coupons, mugs, food, etc.
- Review the program with the agents so they understand how the program works and what matters to you.
- Salute excellence weekly or monthly for all who qualify and also with a quarterly award that gets lunch paid for by the boss. You can also try to get an executive to agree to take your annual star to lunch. One of the best ways I ever got the corner office to understand the value of what agents were doing was when they took one to lunch!
Quality was important years ago when call centers started recording and scoring calls for training – in today’s ecommerce world of many available options, quality can be the single biggest difference and the one you have the most control over.
Make sure your live chat tool keeps chat histories and allows your supervisors to make notes to the agent about them within the chat record – enabling you to focus on the quality critical to your success with your customers and prospects.
Get started now, it will only take a couple of hours to craft and short period of time each day or week.
February 1st, 2009 at 9:18 pm
Very interesting article. I have a question though. On this point – “Decide how many chats you will review per agent and how frequently you will review them. (Hint: 2-3 chats per day is not too much feedback; 2-3 per month isn’t really a program – shoot for something in the middle). ” – how do you determine the number of reviews per agent for the quality program? Do you look at their daily productivity? The volume of work? The frequency of reviews? I have been in the industry for sometime, but most often, these things are already in place when I join the company so I have not have the chance to actually start the program. Hope to hear from you soon!
February 12th, 2009 at 7:42 am
Great questions, Laney.
I would start by setting aside a certain amount of time for each agent and gauging what percent of their work you are able to review. Depending on the type of call center, when supervisors listen to, grade, and provide feedback on recorded calls, they are considered efficient if they can get two to three calls completed (including agent feedback) in one hour. Multiply that by 8 or so agents a front line supervisor must manage, and it means a substantial commitment to monitor the department. Most find this onerous and do it once a month.
While one hour of direct supervision and feedback is better than none, supervising only two to three calls a month seems like a paltry amount of supervision. This is where BoldChat provides direct and tangible benefit. In one hour, a supervisor can review multiple chats, provide direct feedback using the Operator Discussion function, and the agent is alerted that the feedback is ready for them to review. Instead of having to set up a meeting to listen to the recording, discuss the scoring and weighting and tips, and reducing the headcount available to handle incoming requests, with BoldChat the agent can review the feedback during slow times or between chats.
I’d start with one hour for one agent and see how far that gets you. Once you have reviewed agents chats for one hour, you will have a sense of what percentage of their work you are able to review. Do they take 300 chats in a week and you were able to review 15? What call center can boast monitoring 5% of its agents calls? Probably few. Decide what level of investment you can make and then stick to it.
By far the most important aspect is that you review them, review them consistently, and provide feedback. The sooner after the chat you can provide feedback, the better the learning will be. Nothing drives quality in the contact center like reviewing agent’s work.
Good luck and let us know how its working for you.
Steve