Bad Contact Centre process – a story of how good people simply follow a bad process
Sitting around our workshop table, one of the Participants – a former Contact Centre Agent from a BPO – shared this story –
“Dan – it starts like this.
QA walks over to our station and while we’re talking to a Customer they give us the time out sign. That’s their signal telling us to wrap the call up quickly so they can conduct our side by side coaching session.
That time out sign approach is a little off-putting but you have no choice but to get used to it.
After they settle in and connect their headset to our phone, they pull out a scorecard.
And as I log back into the system and receive my next call, they quietly mark their paper while I’m talking.
When the call is done, I log back out and they talk me through each tick-box they made.
Mostly I just hope that my score is a ‘pass’ because if it isn’t, they can just go on and on about my mistakes.
So of course while they’re sitting next to me I do everything in my power to achieve a pass.
I never knew that there were ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways to do side by side monitoring. Your course is the first time I heard this.
I only have my own experience to go by. And it wasn’t a good one.”
There’s a lot that’s wrong in that story about Contact Centre process
At this point in our workshop, when the story was shared, we’re talking about the power of the side by side method for monitoring & coaching.
The relationship building, the power of personal connection – the time to build trust. The opportunity to make the time to spend with the people who work for you.
But in the many years I’ve taught this method – admittedly one of my favorites – I find that very few either practice it (we have no time!) or they practice it in a way that damages the relationship – not strengthens it.
There are a few things wrong in this story – and practices like these are more common than you’d think –
- Using hand signals to summon people is rude – these should be reserved for animals – not human beings
- Using a scorecard at a side by side session makes no sense – talk about frightening
- Everyone’s faking it here – especially the Agent who is put in a no-win situation
- The entire point of helping someone do ‘better’ has been lost
- The focus on what went ‘wrong’
But the QA person in this story isn’t the villain
It’s easy to say – “Oh, the QA person you’re describing is the singular villain in this story.” 
But you’d be wrong in most cases. Because what happens in real life is this.
Good people readily conform to and carry out bad processes.
They do so to ‘fit in’, to ‘get the job done’ to ‘show they’ve got the stuff’ for advancement & promotion.
And to be fair – it may be the only way they know because that’s all they’ve ever experienced or been taught.
I see this case over and over out there in the Contact Centre industry.
Even former Agents – who disliked everything we just talked about – get promoted and readily jump in the saddle and carry on a legacy process that’s broken. One that they themselves didn’t like.
The villain in this story is the bad Contact Centre process. Not the QA person.
The process isn’t so great from a values perspective either
As a side observation to this story there’s an impact on the culture in this Centre as well.
It’s likely that this Centre has the word ‘respect’ in their core values or if not ‘respect’ then something similar and equally lofty sounding.
We ‘respect’ each other, we ‘respect’ our Customers’, etc and blah blah. You can’t escape the posters that hang everywhere.
But culture is nurtured through the actual behaviours of people at work. Especially those in leadership and influence roles.
Summoning people with hand gestures and scoring them when they’re trying to serve a Customer aren’t really brilliant examples of respect.
So if you’re after building a ‘culture’ (and today who isn’t) it’s a worthwhile effort to filter your processes – and they way they’re executed – through the lens of your values.
Is the Contact Centre industry really that mature?
I once received a comment from a reader who said – “Dan, why do you constantly write about the Contact Centre industry? It’s a very mature industry already.”
And that comment made me think. Sure – it’s a mature industry.
But do we always run it in a mature way?
https://www.omnitouchinternational.com/15-quiz-questions-on-contact-center-operations-management/
Thank you for reading!
I help and inspire people through professional training in Contact Centers, Customer Service and Customer Experience.
We have well over a hundred full length articles in our Blog and feel free to visit those and touch base with me if you have any comments or questions.
Daniel Ord
[email protected] / www.omnitouchinternational.com
