From Resource, April 2007
Copyright by LOMA

Is Call Monitoring The Key To Better Call Center Performance?  

Call monitoring may be among the most challenging and potentially expensive practices undertaken in a call center, but it’s also one of the most important. As Dr. Miriam Nelson of Aon Consulting recently explained, if it’s done right, it can help improve agent performance, identify training needs, and pinpoint the appropriate quality metric for each call center associate.  

By Stephen Hall  

If your call center agents aren’t performing their jobs to their full potential, then call monitoring can certainly be an effective measure toward determining the areas in which they need to improve. But figuring out what to listen for, what metrics to use to gauge agent performance, or even how many calls to listen to can be a daunting task, to say nothing of the considerable time and expense that can be involved in many cases.

Miriam Nelson, Ph.D., senior vice president of the call center performance practice at Aon Consulting, a leading global human capital and management consulting firm, addressed these issues during a general session at LOMA’s recent Contact Center Workshop in Savannah, Ga. “I’m going to share some best practices related to call monitoring, and also offer some potential solutions that we can modify to fit your particular organization,” she said as she began her presentation, titled “Call Monitoring: Can You Do It More Effectively and Less Expensively?” “You as an industry are actually not alone, in terms of grappling with these issues. In other conferences I’ve attended, there’s been a great deal of talk about monitoring and how it’s really tough to do at many organizations. I’ve spent a lot of time addressing these issues, and I’m pretty passionate about monitoring in call centers and what it can do. I think there’s plenty of opportunity to get it right and have it add significant value to your organization.”  

Ingredients of Effective Call Monitoring

Nelson then presented the checklist that she and her colleagues at Aon use to gauge the effectiveness of a call center’s monitoring methodology. This checklist consists of five key areas that correspond to the five qualities a call monitoring process should have: accuracy, discrimination, reliability, validity and usefulness. “There are some key components of monitoring, and the first component has to do with the need for accuracy, in terms of sampling,” she said. “You need to ask yourself if your sampling is representative of all calls on the agent level. Are you listening to agents at different times of the day, across the months, and are you monitoring different types of calls?” The second piece of the criteria of accuracy pertains to the ability to do a targeted sampling of calls. “If you know there’s a particular call type, a challenge, or a source of repeat calls, are you able to target your sampling?” Nelson asked. “The third piece of accuracy is your ability to listen objectively. Are the people who are doing the listening really able to focus on the interaction between the customer and the associate in an objective, unbiased way, without dismissing certain behaviors by saying, ‘Oh, they just act like that; that’s just the way they are’?”

The second area of effective call monitoring is the ability to discriminate between effective and ineffective behaviors, Nelson said. “Every call has effective behaviors and less-than-effective behaviors,” she explained. “So the first question you need to ask in this area is: Are you listening in a behavioral way, as concretely as possible? Are there behavioral standards that you’re using? The second piece of discrimination is, do you have a scale, or are you using something like a yes-no checklist? And the third piece is, are you recognizing excellence? So do you have a scale or gradation, in terms of highly effective behavior and a need for development or opportunity? And are you recognizing people who really do excel, and weeding out those who don’t?”

For the third area of effective call monitoring—reliability—it’s important to ask if there are well-defined standards in place to measure reliability, Nelson said. “Are these standards being uniformly applied by everyone? Are they well-calibrated? Maybe you have a quality assurance practice. Maybe you employ statistical process control, or Six Sigma techniques, or something that’s home-grown. But having something in place to assure the quality of the process is very important.”

The fourth area of the checklist, validity, pertains to whether there is a link between your assessment of a call center agent’s performance and callers’ satisfaction levels, sales, or other key business indicators. “Is it correlated with customer satisfaction? Is it reflecting the brand? This is an important relationship that people don’t talk about very much, but I’m hearing more and more talk in the call center industry about knowing your brand, knowing it very well, and reflecting it in what people are doing on the phone with customers,” Nelson said. “Also, is your monitoring comprehensive? Maybe it’s just focused on the soft skills, or more likely, it’s just focused on compliance. Or is it really representative of all the things you need to be measuring? And lastly, is it also measuring or identifying business performance opportunities? So aside from just measuring skills, is it measuring first-call resolution, sales, complaints of a certain type, or customer dissatisfaction?”

The fifth and final area of effective call monitoring is about determining its overall usefulness. “Everything we talked about in the previous four areas has to do with data collection,” Nelson said. “With this final area, we’re talking about how that data is being used in the organization. Are you able to give timely feedback? Are you able to give actionable feedback? In other words, are people able to use your monitoring results to improve? Is your call monitoring efficient? Are you able to execute on this, or is it just this big, annoying hassle at the end of the month for everybody? Is it not disruptive of the operation? Is the cost justified? Do you know the return on investment (ROI) on your call monitoring? And finally, is it secure? The more we work with companies, the more important the security of the process becomes.”  

Findings from Aon’s Database on Call Monitoring

Nelson then shared some noteworthy findings on call monitoring that Aon has discovered through working extensively with various companies on improving employee performance in the call center. “We’ve been able to correlate quantity versus quality, scores versus productivity, talk time and handle time, among other things,” she said. “And one pretty interesting finding of ours is that communication skills have the biggest impact on talk time. People who speak well and speak efficiently, who are clear and don’t need to repeat themselves, are the people who, on average, do much better on talk time. Another finding was that it doesn’t take longer to be courteous with customers. It doesn’t take longer to be nice on the phone—to show empathy, to engage in pleasantries or to use the name of the person you’re talking to. It does take longer to offer additional services or to educate the customer, as you would think. But that’s probably worth a lot in repeat calls and other kinds of measures. So it’s a bit of a trade-off.”

But however interesting these findings may be, Nelson said, the truly important question is quite simple: Does monitoring actually work? “We’ve implemented a lot of call monitoring programs over the years,” she said. “During the first year of implementing new monitoring programs, we usually see increases in overall performance, from 5 to 26 percent. So it’s important to focus on your key behaviors. If you don’t, maybe you’ll see little increases, or your performance might even be flat. But if you really work on the right behaviors and work with your people, the results can be dramatic.”

Turning to Aon’s findings regarding tenure, Nelson said that after looking at trends over time, Aon observed that call center employees with more tenure are better able to articulate themselves on the phone. “We actually do get better when we say things repeatedly,” she said. “Also, call management skills and multitasking skills get better, which minimizes dead air.” In addition, Aon has found that individual coaching in the call center improves the performance scores of underperforming employees by 7 percent within the first month. “So if you really do focus on your low performers and work with them to improve, you will see that increase,” Nelson said. “We saw an increase of 9 percent over two months, and that performance continues to rise as long as you keep that new candidate. Also, according to our scale, a two-point improvement in monitoring scores was found to result in a one-point increase in customer satisfaction. So that relationship between employee performance scores and customer satisfaction scores can change, depending on your business. But you really need to look at the correlation between customer satisfaction and monitoring.”  

Aon’s Approach to Call Monitoring

When an organization contracts with Aon to conduct call monitoring for their call center, Aon’s approach to this process is predicated on looking at everything purely from the customer’s perspective, according to Nelson. “As an external listener and a third party, we’re able to really focus on the interaction between the customer and the call center employee,” she said. “That’s all we know about the employee, aside from their name, and so we just work within those parameters and listen like a customer who’s hearing the call.”

Aon’s approach to call monitoring consists of two steps: an adherence to rigorous quality standards, and a focus on how call center performance can positively impact a business’s bottom line. “We want to identify common business challenges that we at Aon can really dig into,” Nelson said. “For example, one call center’s challenge may have to do with first-call resolution. In that case, we would hone in on a certain type of call and identify what the drivers are, such as customer attrition, a cause of dissatisfaction, or something else. This approach enables you to drill down to an organization’s core business need, and it’s a great way to show the ROI of call monitoring.”  

Speech Analytics: The Next Step in Call Monitoring

Nelson concluded her presentation by discussing speech analytics, a relatively new technology that allows voice calls to be promptly converted to text, thereby enabling call center management to spot trends and problem areas in calls on a daily basis and act to address them in a timely manner.

“Speech analytics may never provide a perfect transcription, but with this tool, you can dive right into the gist of the call,” she said. “We can create categories under which calls can be organized. For example, let’s say a call center is receiving a lot of calls having to do with statements, perhaps because there’s something about the statement that’s confusing for customers. Using speech analytics, we can identify some key words, such as ‘statement’ or ‘line 18,’ to build some categories that help us zero in on a particular set of inquiries. Or maybe a particular call center’s challenge has to do with self-service. Perhaps they wonder why customers aren’t using it enough, and they want to find ways to encourage them to use it more. In that case, we randomly select thousands of incoming calls and build precise categories that pertain to self-service. Maybe the keywords are ‘online’ or ‘Internet,’ but whatever they happen to be, we can hone in on them and then get a sense of how many calls a call center is receiving that have to do with this topic. Then we can listen to calls in a very targeted way to determine what callers are really saying, and what their key questions are. At Aon, we’ve been doing monitoring for 12 years, and this tool is a breakthrough to me. Speech analytics, including one tool in particular from a company called Verint, is a very powerful technology that is currently underutilized. We’ve got the expertise now to do a targeted sampling, root-cause analysis of those calls, and then monitor calls in a selective way.”

Aon’s Call Auditing Process: An Overview

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