If you present or use powerpoint for anything (training, business pitches, customer quality reviews, etc), please read both of these.  They’ll help you out significantly.  Some of these I’ve been guilty of, but I certainly make an effort not to fall into any of these traps too terribly often.

My personal failure is “Failure to rehearse“. I  always feel awkward rehearsing, so tend to wing it a bit too much.  I’ve been working on that thought!

My personal pet peeve is one of the ones that QAQNA’s writer, Tom Vander Well, has as well - “Reciting bullet points“.

Come on, people.. I learned how to read when I was little.  If all you’re going to do is read what is on the slide, just email it to me. Save both of us some time!

Contact centers tend to be at the core of this arguement. Quality vs Quantity. What is truly the most important? Does a person’s Average Speed of Answer (ASA) mean more than their customer feedback score? Is the abandon rate the key or does customer satisfaction play a role? In truth, the answer is not a simple one. One thing does hold true regardless of your company’s size, situation, or industry.

Contact Centers are the primary point of contact for your company and have an immense impact on customer loyalty, satisfaction, and retention.

A contact center for a small company may be the only employee, programmer and owner — it is still the place where customers come. Larger companies, more obviously, have call centers that have an impact on the customer. Ranging anywhere from 5 to 500+, these customer support organizations (including billing, customer service, technical support, returns, etc) are crucial.

There is a simple reason that the QvQ quandry is not easily resolved. Both are important; Neither can be sacrificed. If your customer satisfaction rating, of those customers spoken to, is through the roof but 20% of your customers abandon before speaking to them, you’ve alienated 20% of your customers. More than likely, these 20% would also rate your customer satisfaction extremely low — you just can’t easily survey them as they’ve hung up before speaking to someone. At the same time, if you’re able to reach a 1% abandon rate and your customer satisfaction is on the floor, the center is not doing your organization any favors.

It takes a strong team who understands client support and call center management to put together metrics that are appropriate for your organization. This team can be a consultant company or an in house team — its irrelevant, but it is important to make sure that you have someone measuring the right data.

Some crucial scores to look at:

• Average Speed of Answer
• Abandon Rate
• Service Level
• Overall Customer Satisfaction
• Professionalism
• How well was the issue resolved

One pitfall to avoid while looking at these numbers — it ignores the outliers. An average abandon rate of 5% per day (fairly industry standard) when measured over the course of a month may show that 4 days a week has a rate of 2% and one day a week has 20%. This is an extreme example, but all too often, contact center agencies and management tries to expand over a month — days do matter. ]]> http://www.mesritz.us/blog/2009/02/quality-v-quantity/feed/ 0