I love visiting Contact Centers and working with Leadership and Quality teams. After 30 plus years in the industry, I will say that I’m still happy with my career choice. I certainly have had a lot of interesting experiences working with all those Centers, but nothing can compare to some of those knock-down, drag-out Calibration sessions pitting Supervisor against Supervisor, Supervisor(s) against the Quality Analysts, Supervisors against Manager. You get the picture.
As I’ve sat and observed the interactions, including the eye rolling, the almost name calling and the defense of what some participants described to a Supervisor as “your pet Agent”, I wondered where the Customer Experience was in all of this.
So many Calibration sessions become more about “I’m right and your wrong” finger-pointing when the scores don’t agree, than how this call affected the Customer. I’ve even seen some Managers avoid the whole infighting issue by just scheduling Calibration sessions once a quarter or even less frequently instead of taking steps to improve them.
In order to have productive (and yes professional) Calibration sessions, we need to set some ground rules, for instance:
1. Opinions are just that…opinions. Our monitoring should be based on facts, instead of rating the call high because “Mary means well” or “John’s worked here a long time”.
Consistency in how we rate Agent skills is important.
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2. Listen for “Moments of Truth” for that Customer: Accuracy, timeliness, problem resolution, empathy, listening – Did we take care of the reason for the call and if not, was it the Agent’s issue or a policy/procedure that prevented resolution (which needs revision if possible)?
Why did the Customer contact us and did we resolve? Why Not?
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3. If you don’t agree on the scores, why not?: discuss rationally, not emotionally.
Don’t take discussion personally
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4. Make sure everyone understands what your Customers expect and need to have a positive Experience: Customer Feedback, Surveys, comments Customer makes during the call, CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score, or perhaps related to the Calibration fighting, I found out this also stands for Combatshootingandtactics.com 
). Our monitoring may also include checks for sales skills and revenue generation but if the Customer is satisfied we know we have a greater opportunity to sell more.
The Customer Experience
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5. Repeat number 4…the Customer rules and providing what they need and want decides whether this call was an 80 or 90 or whatever scoring applies.
This is just some food for thought and I know there are more great Calibration ideas. I hope you’ll share some of your Calibration stories here or on Twitter (I’m @mkcallconsult) or LinkedIn
Filed under: Business Process Improvement, Call Center, Call Center Manager, Call Center Supervision, Call Skills, Customer Experience, Customer Retention, Customer Service, Employee Development, Inside Sales, Leadership, Quality Assurance Tagged: | Calibration, Call Center, Call centre, Call Monitoring, contact centre, customer experience, Customer satisfaction, Customer Service, Leadership, Management, QA, Quality assurance, Supervisor
Great article. My favorite meeting in my call center career has been call calibration. I believe, with a solid facilitator, solid ‘scorecard’ and measurable behaviors, as well as some foundational ‘rules of engagement’ for all who attend the meeting to support, then it can be extremely effective in rooting out issues with your customer’s satisfaction scores, as well as people, process and technology issues.
-p
Hi Patricia,
Thank you! Glad you enjoyed. It’s clear from your great comments that you made sure that the customer experience was the focus (and of course the process and tech parts too as you mentioned) rather than staff taking things personal. I’m sure the way you approached as described brought you much success. TI look forward to hearing more of your thoughts on my other posts.