The Customer Experience your Contact Center delivers is not accidental — it is the direct result of the Quality standards you choose and enforce.
This article is part of our CX–Contact Center Bridge Series — exploring where Customer Experience and Contact Center management meet. It is also included in our Contact Center Management Series and our Customer Experience Hub.
The Contact Center’s Role in Customer Experience
The Contact Center is a touchpoint that only some Customers will use, across a subset of all possible Customer journeys.
For some organizations that can be less than 1% of Customers who utilize the Contact Center touchpoint at all.
For example, imagine that on the spur of the moment you decide to stay in a local hotel this weekend.
You ask a friend about their recommendations, you do some research online and finish by booking a reservation on your mobile phone.
No Contact Center involved.
With that said, when a Customer needs the Contact Center, it can be a real moment of truth. An experience that has significant weight in their overall perception of the organization.
So not every Customer interacts with the Contact Center — but every Contact Center interaction carries disproportionate weight.
The Contact Center is the Formal Living Room of the House
Formal living rooms may sound old fashioned – but they’re still around.
When I was growing up we had a formal living room to receive and entertain special guests or to use for special occasions.
It’s a room that’s always perfect. It’s got the best furniture, the best art and it’s always spotless. Because even though it’s not used everyday, it must always be ready.
And I think of the Contact Center within an organization in the same way. It’s the formal living room in the house of your organization.
- Not every Customer will need to use it.
- Nor will every Customer journey involve it.
- And just like a formal living room, the Contact Center may not be used every day — but when it is, people remember how it felt.
What Kind of Experience Does Your Center Deliver?
This is where Quality standards quietly determine the Customer Experience you actually deliver.
Much of the subject matter for our keynote talk – and for this post – is based on nearly 25 years of conducting Mystery Shopper research especially for Contact Centers.
Most Centers have a list of Quality standards they use to train Agents and measure performance — and which they hope will deliver a great Customer interaction, even though high call quality scores don’t always translate into a great Customer Experience.
Simple examples of Quality standards include:
- Clarity in presenting the product or service
- The level of human touch on display
- The use of positive and branded language
- The conciseness of the email
- The sales or upselling skill
The possible list of Quality standards is endless because there is no industry standard set of standards that work for every Center.
If that were the case, all Customers of all organizations would be happy all the time. And obviously that’s not the case.
What we’ve consistently found in our research is a clear relationship between how thoughtfully Quality standards are designed and the Customer Experience that results.
Or put more simply — when there’s more thought, effort and rigour put into selecting Quality standards — the resulting Customer interactions are better.
Agents also benefit when they are treated like thinking adults — not compliance machines expected to tick boxes, such as using the Customer’s name a prescribed number of times.
Let’s look at some example Quality standards now.
For those responsible for Quality programs, this is a useful moment to step back and reflect on how Quality Assurance is actually designed and applied.
So What’s an Example of an Impressive Quality Standard?
One of our most interesting engagements was as the Official Mystery Shopper Evaluator for the Singapore Government.
Which basically meant mystery shopping the quality of different government agencies for phone, face to face and email interactions.
And one of the standards set by the Singapore Government was amazing. They practiced what they called ‘No Wrong Door’.
Let’s say the Customer had a personal taxation question but accidentally contacted the housing authority.
In most countries, the Contact Center Agent would tell the Customer that they reacehd the wrong place and perhaps give the number for the correct place to call – if that much.
But with No Wrong Door in Singapore, the Contact Center Agent will either arrange a connection to the right Agency or arrange for the right Agency to get back to the Customer directly.
This wasn’t accidental — it was the result of a deliberately chosen Quality standard that reflected the experience the organization wanted to deliver.
And in a public sector setting that’s amazing.
Having lived in multiple countries, I sometimes joke that trying to get public service assistance through a Contact Center could be branded as ‘Every Door is the Wrong Door’.
That is unless you’re fortunate enough to live in Singapore.
What Happens When Quality Standards Are Poorly Designed
Isn’t it funny that we can sometimes come up with the not so great examples more easily than the great examples?
Here are three.
The ‘Ready to Serve’ Quality standard
The Client, a major mobile phone manufacturer, wanted our Mystery Shoppers to evaluate if the Contact Center Agent we reached was ‘ready to serve’.
Did you just read that twice? So did we.
The question we had was this. How is it possible for us to tell if someone was ready to serve? In our opinion, that sounded like something a Team Leader should be doing internally.
We went back and forth with the Client to get some clarification. But eventually our Client contact wrote us and said – “Look Dan, just ask the Mystery Shopper to do it”.
Which was shorthand for ‘we’re done talking about this.’
So we sat down and came up with our own logic for this Quality standard and moved on.
But here’s the thing. If senior management selects a Quality standard that even they can’t explain clearly – how can we expect an Agent to bring that to life in their Customer interactions?
If leadership can’t clearly define a standard, Agents have no chance of delivering it meaningfully.
The ‘Tai Chi’ standard
For a University Contact Center, the Agents were instructed to immediately redirect the Caller to the university website if it turned out that the information was available there.
Don’t answer the Caller question. If it was on the website then send the Customer straight to the website.
I decided to call it the ‘Tai Chi’ standard because they really just tai chi’d Customers to the website! And avoid answering the question.
And their rationale for this standard?
They had attended a seminar where the speaker told the audience they should focus on efficiency. And to get people to use the website you have to force them to go to the website.
And you can just imagine the Customer Experience here.
After dialling, listening to the recorded announcements, punching through the IVR options, finally reaching a live Agent and asking their question – the Customer gets tai chi’d to the website.
Efficiency-driven standards that ignore Customer effort almost always damage the experience.
The Every Quality standard Is Yes or No
For a few Centers we’ve worked with, management had decided that all or most of the Quality standards should be measured on a binary scale. Yes / No. 1 / 0. It happened or it did not happen.
Because they felt it was less complicated and easier to implement for them internally. That’s classic inside-out thinking. Do what is easy for the Center – not necessarily for the Customer.
I bet you can imagine what those Agents sounded like when we listened to the calls. Yup that’s right.
They sounded like robots. There was no style, no articulation, no effort.
Binary Quality standards don’t just simplify measurement — they simplify behavior.
Selecting Quality Standards is Both an Art and Science
There’s an art and a science to selecting the right Quality standards for Customer conversations in your Contact Center.
If you’re lucky enough to have a well-defined Customer Experience Strategy in place that can help a great deal. Because a Customer Experience Strategy describes the kind of experience you aim to deliver.
It provides a high level guide to coming up with the right Agent standards.
If you don’t have a Customer Experience Strategy, then a Service Delivery Vision can help.
A Service Delivery Vision is very much like a Customer Experience Strategy, but it tends to be focused only on the Customer Service function.
Whereas the Customer Experience Strategy is meant for the entire organization.
Now – if you don’t have a robust Service Delivery Vision then the next question is this. How did your Contact Center choose its Quality standards? What guided the decisions?
Here are some of the answers I’ve heard:
- I think our Managers came up with these.
- I think our Quality Assurance people came up with these.
- The last Mystery Shopper provider we used came up with these.
- Our Agents know how to talk to Customers – we don’t really use any standards.
- I’m not sure but we don’t want to change them because everyone knows them already.
- I’m new here and I don’t know – I was just asked to find a Mystery Shopper company.
- We’ve used these for years and they’re ‘industry standard’ for our X industry.
Answers like these aren’t indicative of any level of sophistication in Quality standard selection & design.
The Customer Experience your Contact Center delivers is not random. It is shaped — deliberately or accidentally — by the Quality standards you choose, define, and reinforce.
When those standards are thoughtfully designed, Customer interactions improve.
When they are not, the experience suffers — no matter how good your intentions are.
Thank You for Reading
I help and inspire people around the world through professional training in Contact Centers, Customer Service & Customer Experience.
I regularly share stories, strategies, and insights from our work across Contact Centers, Customer Service, and Customer Experience. If this resonates, I’d love to stay connected.
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Daniel Ord
[email protected]
www.omnitouchinternational.com
