A common viewpoint in our industry today is that getting a group of agents to offer a consistently exceptional customer experience is a complex mystery full of unknowns. But the truth is that getting every agent to provide a perfect customer experience in every moment of every conversation they have with every customer is straightforward and easy to achieve.
It is essential to recognize that agent customer service (which determines customer experience quality) is a structured skill and discipline defined by clear and specific rules of performance. There are 15-20 of these rules depending on the types of calls, and if an agent properly navigates them, they will provide a perfect customer experience in every call they handle. These rules are easy for agents to master, and they require no added time or effort, but they must be precisely followed to provide what qualifies as quality customer service. Most importantly, when they are not precisely followed, the result is a direct and rapid decline in customer experience quality.
So, if there is a clear answer to the riddle, why is customer experience excellence often portrayed as difficult and full of unknowns? The culprit is Quality Assurance scoring/measurement parameters.
The types of scoring parameters used by traditional and now AI automated QA programs do not recognize the rules of customer service, making such programs’ pursuit of customer experience excellence an elusive and perplexing endeavor.
Much of the service quality problem in our industry today is the result of QA measurement parameters that do not recognize the rules of customer service but are widely accepted as the only option to manage customer service.
Traditional parameters such as built rapport, warmth level, conveyed empathy, took ownership, resolved issues, closing, etc., are exceedingly too ambiguous and lack the contextual scope required to effectively manage agent behavior. The sole purpose of QA is to hold agents accountable for specific rules of behavior that ensure quality service, and these vague performance parameters cannot do this. Their lack of success has led to a perpetual search for alternate solutions.
Scripts designed to sound personable are inadequate because they sound insincere and manage only brief seconds of a conversation. And AI attempts at QA such as sentiment scoring, measuring every call, and speech analytics are ineffectual because they do not recognize the rules of customer service and are reliant on traditional measurement parameters.
All of this has resulted in a low-expectation narrative that says the best call centers can hope for is supposed improvement with little clarity as to what that means, beyond hoping for slightly increased CSAT scores.
At BCI, our expertise is in understanding the critical rules of customer service and their emotionally powerful impact on customers. We teach agents to master these rules, and with a contemporary measurement system, hold agents accountable for executing them. We know before even getting started with any call center precisely what needs to be done to ensure each of their agents offers a consistently flawless customer experience.
In the present-day call center environment, the good news is there is nothing unknown, hidden, or left uncovered about the customer experience. And by moving past traditional measurement parameters, getting every agent to provide a perfect customer experience in every call is easy and straightforward.