Do your super high Quality scores truly reflect stellar performance? Or are they masking deeper issues?
I often tell this story in Quality Assurance classes
A Client had flown me in to help them improve their service to their Customers. And they had an intriguing issue.
Despite their impressive internal quality scores for Customer calls —ranging from 94.178 to 96.22 1— there was a lingering dissatisfaction among the Managers.
They laughed as they showed me the scores, realizing the absurdity of measuring Customer interactions to three decimal places just to differentiate their top performers.
They told me –
“This is kind of silly isn’t it. You see, our Quality scores are so high that we had to take them out to three decimal places in order to separate the ‘high’ performers’ from ‘lower’ performers.”
We labeled the problem as ‘grade inflation,’ similar to what is sometimes seen in academic institutions.
And grade inflation does no favors for your Team.
Because the moment someone hears they scored 95%+ that’s it. You can’t expect them to rethink their communication. Or work harder to ‘sound’ better.
They’re already good! So their development freezes.
And consider Customers. Is a 95%+ call really that good from a Customer perspective?
Would you feel confident presenting one of your 95%+ calls to your CEO as a benchmark of excellence?
If the answer is no – and most people tell me no at this point – we realize our stellar results are masking deeper issues.
Our people aren’t improving. And the service experience for Customers isn’t improving either.
So here’s what we did about the high Quality scores
We initiated a comprehensive Customer Service workshop for Managers, focusing on communication behaviors and their Customer impact.
Post-workshop, we collaboratively defined a Service Delivery Vision that aligned with the company’s goals.
The Team then spent six months refining performance standards, emphasizing key behaviors like empathy and problem-solving.
These two aspects, in particular, helped them better align their quality scores with Customer outcomes:
- They added more nuanced behaviors to the evaluation criteria—traits best measured on a scale, such as empathy, articulation, and problem-solving.
- They increased the weightage on behaviors which they determined mattered more to Customers and decreased the weightage on behaviors that mattered less to Customers.
They handled the change leadership well
When the old 93.887 became the new 72% that meant some change leadership work with the Agents mattered.
Because that’s a big transition on how people feel about the work they do.
Within six months of the change in scoring – and the change leadership to help people understand the whys and hows – Customer Satisfaction results jumped dramatically.
To the point where the CEO heard about it and invited the Center Manager into a board meeting to share the story of what they had done.
High Quality scores don’t mean much if you’re measuring the wrong things
Sure – you can’t manage what you don’t measure. But you can’t improve performance if you’re measuring the wrong things.
Don’t let inflated scores lull you into a false sense of security.
Constantly reevaluate your quality behaviors to ensure they truly reflect the quality of your Customer’s experience.
And maybe sleep better at night.
Thank you for reading!
I help and inspire people around the world through transformative training in Contact Centers, Customer Service and Customer Experience.
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Daniel Ord
[email protected] / www.omnitouchinternational.com
