If you want to keep tabs on your telephone representatives’ performance, reports alone simply won’t do. To really see how your reps are communicating with your customers, you need to do call monitoring.
“Reports will just give you numbers,” says Mary Ann Falzone of Falzone & Associates. “You can’t get qualitative support if you don’t monitor.”
But, warns Vicki Lincoln of Princeton Consulting Resources Inc., don’t just keep your eyes — or ears — on the second hand.
“Oftentimes productivity and talk time are king, the whole numbers-statistical side of phone [work]. All that is important, and I don’t mean to minimize the role it plays. [But] what it’s really about is optimizing both the productivity and the quality of that customer contact.”
For determining reasonable talk times, Lincoln says she favors establishing ranges instead of averages. If calls are taking long, find out why and see if there was a benefit to the length of the conversation, she says.
Many companies abuse call monitoring by just listening to make sure the script is being adhered to, rather than how the customer is being treated, says Jon Hamilton of JHA Telemanagement Inc.
“Is it important that all calls are answered in 90 seconds?” says Hamilton. “Maybe, but what’s far more important is how they’re answered.”
Doing all your monitoring remotely is also a mistake, he adds. Face-to-face meetings with the reps actually making the calls helps in getting a better sense of what they’re hearing from customers.
