TQM in the Contact Center Brian Flagg, © 2012 Introduction The management of quality has a long history, culminating in the U.S. and Western Europe in the late 1980s as Total Quality Management, or TQM. Prior to the industrial revolution, skilled craftsman created products, and the craftsman being expert in their respective crafts, were responsible for the quality of their production. Poor quality would cost them craftsman their livelihood. With the industrial revolution, machinery and specialization of tasks were applied to a relatively illiterate workforce to produce large quantities of goods. Those producing the goods no longer had any expertise on the production of the end product, let alone even understand how their particular function contributed to the production of the end product. Thus, those producing the product could no longer assess the quality of production as had been done in the past by skilled craftsman. As a result, one of the workers would be given the title of inspector with the sole task of inspecting the final product. However, inspectors typically lacked training, were coerced into accepting defective product in order to increase output, and the good inspectors were moved into managerial or planning roles. Hence the quality control department emerged, a separate and distinct function from the manufacturing function (and the planning function as well). The Quality Control function slowly evolved to the inspection of subassemblies at various points in the manufacturing process in addition to inspection at the end of the production line. This was a needed improvement as products became increasingly complex and quality inspection at the end of the line could no longer determine the failing component. By the end of WWII, Japan’s manufacturing capability was virtually destroyed. Previously, Japan had a reputation of producing low-quality imitation products and they sought to change this with the help of leading quality thinkers, Deming, Juran and Feigenbaum. Throughout the 1950’s, quality programs and practices developed rapidly and became a national preoccupation. Quality was built into the organization, from the ground up and from the top down. Finally, in the 1970’s, Japan’s exports to the U.S. and western Europe increased significantly and the surprising level of quality in the products caught manufacturers there unprepared. The U.S. and western European companies fought back in the 1980’s starting with programs such as QIBP (Quality in the Business Process), DFM (Design For Manfacturability), and finally ISO 9000 and the Baldrige National Quality Program, and the culmination in TQM. Thus, manufacturing recognized and made the transformation from the Quality Control Department, the entity charged with infusing quality into the product, and then inspecting for it, to that of Total Quality Management, designing the organization and processes for quality, with the support of the entire organization.
So, where is the contact center industry in all of this today? Contact centers have spent and are continuing to spend significant amount on their QA functions in terms of capital, on hardware and software, and resources such as training, calibration, listening and reviewing, and coaching. The vast majority of these assets are deployed in the task of analyzing for and discovering defects at the end of the line, or the end of the interaction process in contact center terms, sometimes days or weeks after the interaction has occurred. Any inspection directed at intermediate points in the interaction process is typically done by a supervisor ‘plugging into’ the call following an adhoc or judgment-led decision to do so. Can TQM be applied to the contact center? Can quality control be applied across all channels, even self-service? The short answer to these questions is an emphatic ‘yes’! This article will touch briefly on the answer to these questions and challenge the contact center leadership to think about shifting investment in end-of-the-line QA processes and programs to investing in the infusion of quality into the organization and into the interactions, regardless of channel.
TQM Anyone? As a contact center leader, you may already have a company-wide TQM program that has been implemented into your center. But, what does this mean? That you have quality measures for your forecasting process, such as forecast accuracy, and quality measures for your knowledge management process, such as the number of KNF (Knowledge Not Found) entries in your tickets, and quality measures for your calls (and bets are you have many of these). You may even have a quality measure for your training, and perhaps even for your coaching. If you are at this point, congratulations you have understood that quality is much more than just post-call inspection. If you are not to this point, you have some work to do. I strongly suggest you begin with ISO 9000 and at least get your processes understood and documented, and the measures, both quality and cycle time, understood as well. I also suggest building a strategy map to understand the four perspectives of your contact center organization, and then I recommend you go through an internal Baldrige assessment. For more on these topics, see my article on Strategy in the Support Center reference at the end of this article. Again, if you are measuring quality throughout your organization as described above, congratulations. However, from the standpoint quality in the interaction, which by the way is your product, you are at the turn of the 20th century in terms of your quality thinking. You are inspecting an interaction after the fact to find defects. Worse however, is the fact that your customer is part of the production process! Whereas a defective chair or toaster can be caught before it leaves the plant and gets into the hands of your customer, not so with your product. Inspection in manufacturing is meant to keep a defective product from getting into the hands of their customer, hence protecting customer satisfaction, loyalty and brand image. Inspection is the barn-door so to speak. In your center, the barn-door is open as soon as the call is connected with your phone switch. Yes, that means the IVR is part of your interaction process that also needs quality monitoring and management. When you have a poor-quality interaction in your center, the customer is affected at the time of the defect, not days later when the defect is
discovered during an auditing process. Wednesday afternoon is not the time to discover you had a poor quality interaction with one of your best customers on Monday morning. This places the center, and the company, into customer-saving mode where costly remediation may be necessary to win back the offended customer. As an aside, for those that wonder the ROI of social media efforts, if your contact center is focused on QA at the end of the interaction, social media can detect the defect much faster than your QA function. If your best customer had a poor enough interaction on Monday morning to consider not calling again, and outlets his or her frustration on a social media site, it will likely be on Monday morning, not later in the week. So, as long as your center is going to focus on after-the-interaction QA, you better have your ear to the social media ground.
Quality in the Interaction How can a quality focus be brought inside the interaction? By designing quality into the interaction, and then enforcing it. What does a quality-designed interaction mean? How is this accomplished? Look at your existing QA process. The QA process is meant to analyze an interaction with respect to a number of dimensions, such as engagement and connection, efficiency in the interaction flow, adherence to security controls, the use of the knowledge system, etc.. In short, your QA process is enforcing an ideal interaction, only after the fact! You then take the components of an ideal interaction and put them into your training program and into your QA coaching program. You put an understanding of the ideal interaction into the grey matter of your agents and supervisors. But you also put a great deal of other material into the grey matter of your agents. And, on any given interaction, some of the grey matter will be used, some not. During the call, when the agent must be proficient on a number of different applications, each with its own cumbersome interface, understand how to remain HIPPA or PCI compliant, and know how to search the right knowledge source for information, what is the likelihood that the interaction delivered will be the one that is designed? Quality needs to be designed into well-designed interactions. However, it is not the QA department that is tasked with this design. I know I have listened to calls that scored high on the quality measurements but the customer was clearly dissatisfied. My recommendation is to find the organization in the company charged with the overall customer experience and take that group as a partner in designing your interactions. Call scripting has been around for a long time in the contact center. It can enforce quality to some extent in the interactions. However scripting falls short on a number of fronts, the principle ones being; feeling like your speaking to a robot or automaton, and handling exceptions. I know when the person on the other end of the phone is reading from a script. I don’t find the call enjoyable or satisfying at all, even though it may pass quality inspection as being technically accurate. Everything is scripted from the flow of the interaction to the words to be spoken. The problem is, I might as well be interacting with the IVR. I have actually had more pleasant experiences with an IVR than with a scripted phone call. There is no engagement with me as a person, no emotion in the words. The other problem is one of having a set script. If I as the caller deviate from the script, the agent either tries to bring me back to the script, or
transfers me to someone else. In the end, scripting is a simple and rudimentary method to infuse quality into an interaction, although clearly not the best approach. Better scripting systems use if-then-else branching and therefore bring some decision-making into the interaction in order to handle exceptions or other changes to the standard direction of the script. For example, if I call with a billing problem and it turns into a payment program, conditional scripting can help transfer the flow from billing to credit. To the extent the scripting is still rigid, offering the words to be spoken, conditional scripting is not much better. Additionally, the scripting does not affect the applications and knowledge sources to be used during an interaction. The script can inform the agent to ‘go to the billing application and type in the customer contact preference’, or ‘query the billing intranet site for unit of use explanation’ but the typical scripting or conditional scripting won’t guide the agent to the right screen and automatically fill in available information. For this, guidance is needed. Guidance is used to function just as the label infers; to guide an agent from the current place in the interaction to the next or best place in the interaction. By obtaining information from backend systems and marrying that information with what is obtained during the interaction, the agent is guided to the next screen, to the next point in the interaction. The agent can also be guided with the right words to be spoken, but by being guided to the right screen and the right knowledge for the customer in the interaction there is less of a need to place words into the agent’s mouth. They can instead concentrate on the soft skills of empathy and engagement, leading to an interaction that follows the design, is technically accurate, and is customer-centric.
What About the Other Channels? The right guidance for your agents can be extended to your other channels, such as chat and eMail. Chat is nothing more than a phone call with written words instead of vocal utterances, and actually guidance is therefore much easier to apply. eMail is similar to chat, but just occurs over a longer period of time. There is no reason why guidance should not be applied to these channels as well. Face-to-face, such as occurs in a field service interaction or at the customer service counter, can also be designed and guided. After all, they are simply an extension of the phone interaction. What about self-service? Can the interactions be designed and guided? Absolutely! Web designers attempt to make this happen, attempt to guide a customer to a successful service interaction, or a sale, or both. The same guidance technology that is guiding your agents can also guide your customer.
Conclusion TQM, or Total Quality Management was developed in the manufacturing industry decades ago and moves companies from inspection at the end of the line to a quality framework that permeates and guides the entire organization. This same quality focus must also permeate the
contact center organization, driving quality forecasting, knowledge management, training, and coaching processes. ISO 9000 and Baldrige quality assessments can help in this area. However, these techniques and methods will not drive quality into interactions, the quality must not only be designed into the interactions, but using guidance, enforced. Scripting and conditional scripting are rudimentary approaches to delivering this quality within the interaction, but do not address the problem of too many tools and too much information and thus necessarily provide the agent with hard-coded scripts to be read during the interaction, leading to a less than satisfying interaction. Guidance overcomes these shortcomings and can not only be applied to incoming phone calls, but can be extended to chats, emails, face-to-face, and even self-service.
Works Cited Flagg, B. J. (2011, April). Retrieved from Cincom's Expert Access: http://expertaccess.cincom.com/2011/04/strategy-in-the-it-support-center/ International Organisation for Standards. (n.d.). Retrieved May 14, 2012, from ISO 9000 Essentials: http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_9000_essentials