How Your Quality Analysts Can Help Improve Your Call Centers’ Performance
With Robin Carter-Stuart, Nominated Representative Coach at TSB Bank New Zealand
Show Notes
Robin Carter-Stuart is the Nominated Representative Coach at TSB Bank. He’s worked in the contact centre industry for the past decade, mostly as a Team Leader, a technical trainer and as a sales quality analyst. He’s got a super strong understanding of how your Quality Analysts can contribute to building a world-class coaching culture in your centres, so you lift performance.
Top 3 Tips:
Leverage your contact center Quality Assurance team to identify the behaviours used by high performing agents, which you want to replicate across your center (09:16).
Quality Analysts can pick up on trends in off-track behaviour, potentially more easily than Team Leaders - as they often listen to more calls. Have Team Leaders engage with QA to understand these trends, and use these insights to influence their coaching. As opposed to ‘nitpicking’ one-off occurrences of off-track behaviour (11:40).
Specify to your Quality Assurance team what feedback is to be given to agents - and how it should be given - so that it’s aligned with the coaching Team Leaders give (12:10).
You'll Learn:
The 3 blind spots Robin has noticed Team Leaders often have regarding their coaching, which are stopping their agents from reaching their full potential. As well as what to do about it (03:00).
The simple change Quality Analysts can make, which will create a better relationship between them and your agents, better employee engagement amongst your agents, and lift call center performance (06:42).
Connect with Robin on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robincarterstuart/
Get your free copy of Game On here: https://bravatrak.com/game-on-book (you’ll also get the latest podcast episodes sent straight to your inbox).
Transcript
Blair Stevenson (00:00)
Welcome. This is the Secrets to Contact Center Success podcast, connecting you with the latest and greatest tips from the best in the brightest minds in the industry.
I am Blair Stevenson, founder of BravaTrak, the High-Performance Coaching System for Contact Centres. It helps you to create and sustain a world-class coaching culture, so that you can beat your targets without burning people out. Guaranteed to increase your centres' performance by at least 11% within 6 months, or it's completely free.
Today I'm joined by Robin Carter-Stuart, who's a coach of frontline leaders at the TSB bank. Robin has worked in the contact center industry for a decade or so, mostly as a Team Leader, a technical trainer, and more recently as a sales quality analyst.
He's got a super strong understanding of how to build a world-class coaching culture. So today he's got some great tips on how your quality analysts can contribute to your coaching culture.
So Robin, welcome along. It's wonderful to have you here.
One of the recent conversations you and I have been having has been around behavioral trends, you know, the importance of looking at trends as opposed to just taking individual snapshots of data. So I was just curious, what do you perceive are the benefits of quality analysts providing Team Leaders with those trends of data on behaviors?
Robin Carter-Stuart (01:31)
I think what I see in Team Leaders is often the struggle to know what to focus on. And so I think QA (Quality Assurance) can assist in making sure that those coaching conversations are targeted. And that also saves time.
It helps a Team Leader to just coach to one or two things in a conversation, rather than trying to coach to the entire interaction. So that targeted focusing on what to coach on, and then also working to agree to performance behaviors. So that actually, across a contact center where you might have, you know, four or five or 10 Team Leaders, they're all working to an agreed set of performance behaviors.
Blair Stevenson (02:20)
Yeah. I think that's really critical. I see often individual Team Leaders just going off on their own paths. Not because they're bad Team Leaders, it's just that there's no kind of agreed focus around the behavioral change that the center is trying to achieve.
So thinking about the sort of Quality Assurance support to Team Leaders kind of leads me to that idea of call center Quality Analysts as coaches. So what are the benefits of a coach-of-coach structure for QA to support Team Leaders?
Robin Carter-Stuart (03:00)
So I think it doesn't matter what role we're in, we all need a coach. We all need somebody to help us with our blind spots, to point out our blind spots.
So I think QA providing coach-the-coach support can improve coaching technique. So something I think is important is role play in that. So if I've got a Team Leader - or a manager - who is wanting to have a particular conversation with a consultant, actually I say "role-play it with me first, so that you feel comfortable with the structure of that and what you're focusing on, and the performance behavior you're looking to".
So yeah, coaching technique will improve when your QA team support you in that coaching conversation. I think also it can uncover time management issues. So it can uncover people not feeling like they're comfortable with coaching, or they're not scheduling their coaching.
So, you know, using the time-boxing technique that you talk about. Actually, fundamentally, a coaching session that isn't scheduled is not going to happen. It's unlikely to happen.
And then I think the third thing in that coach-the-coach support that I can give a Team Leader is exposing where parental relationships sort of play. So there will be Team Leaders who actually enjoy being a fix-it person, and they enjoy playing that sort of parental role, which leads to a 'tell conversation' and not a 'coaching conversation'.
And what an outside person can do - or as an outsider I can do - is to point that out and get them to feel more comfortable with adult-to-adult conversations, rather than parental ones.
Blair Stevenson (04:59)
So I think you've raised a handful of really good points there, and a couple worthwhile briefly talking about is that as you say, if a coaching conversation isn't scheduled, it doesn't happen. And to some extent, QA is being able to guide - perhaps to some extent, holding - Team Leaders to account around that is incredibly useful.
I think the other thing that is about this idea of Team Leaders not necessarily being super comfortable with coaching. And one of the things I notice is that Team Leaders often aren't super clear about what they mean by the word 'coaching'. Or at least there's no commonality of meaning.
So the definition I use is kind of two parts. I'd say it's "bringing out the best in people, in order to maximise their performance".
(05:59)
And for me, the place you want to go to understand what works in that is the behavioral science research. You know, there's a lot of research which is coming out of the field of neuroscience, behavioral psychology, and behavioral economics, which is really clear about what works.
And there are a number of key factors which really drive performance. One of those you and I have talked a lot about is the need for relatively high levels of positive reinforcement of the behaviors that you want.
So, you know, from that perspective, what do you think are the benefits of QAs being a vehicle for positive feedback?
Robin Carter-Stuart (06:42)
So I think if we just backtrack slightly from that, actually QA is often viewed with suspicion. They're often viewed as the baseball bat of the business. And so QA need to do some sort of conscious change to recognize when feedback should be corrective, and when it should be positive, and to not try and mix the two.
So I think the advantage with QA being vehicles for positive feedback is (that it creates) a better relationship between QA and Team Leaders, and between QA and consultants. Because ultimately the feedback is going to the consultant. So less suspicion, I think, better engagement, better listening, a better relationship between QA and consultants.
And this leads to them being more open to the corrective feedback when that does flow through. Something where I've encountered that recently, is particularly during our challenges of 2020 and COVID. And people working virtually, and people having to deal with some quite stressed customers who are vulnerable.
(08:00)
And so when you hear a consultant do an empathetic, amazing job at looking out for a customer, going the extra mile for them, doing something that actually says "our business is human, and we understand your trials" and actually provide the feedback on that level, I've found so engaging for frontline staff.
Actually telling someone when they're doing an amazing job, and what it is specifically they've done that is an amazing job, so that they know that it's good to repeat it, that it's okay to repeat it. Because those sorts of behaviors are often not specifically called out in KPIs. So calling out that positive behavior is particularly engaging.
Blair Stevenson (08:58)
Nice. So we've covered some really useful stuff. So I'm just curious about what would be your top three tips to Contact Center Managers who want to leverage the Quality Analysts to assist with developing a coaching culture?
Robin Carter-Stuart (09:16)
Tip 1
Yeah, so I think the first one that comes to mind is utilizing the fact that your QA team are likely to have a wider view of behaviors, because they've got a contact center wide view rather than your team view.
So QA can be listening to an entire contact center and leverage off rich insights of what good looks like. And I think that's particularly important, especially with an increasingly virtual workforce. And behaviors can - and do - change. So I think it pays to be constantly on the lookout for these.
And they can be often subtle changes. And it may not be happening in your team, but it might be happening across your contact center. And it's good for everyone to be aware of that. And some examples of some behaviors that I noticed changed during some of the lockdowns we had, was actually our people - our frontline people - exhibiting stress on calls that wouldn't necessarily be picked up by the Team Teader.
(10:29)
For example, we noticed a slight increase in when people were transferring calls.
So they'd put the customer on hold, they'd transfer the call, and in that transfer because they were locked down at home, they needed to talk to someone, and they needed to reach out to the person that they were transferring the call to. And so that transfer time increased, and all the while you've got a customer on hold.
But actually what our people needed was some stress relief in how they were handling those customer transfers.
Providing extra empathy to vulnerable customers was something we noticed and recognized. And then just sort of taking ownership for assisting customers to get access to other resources or online resources, were behaviors that we sort of noticed shift as we went into a more virtual world. So QA providing those insights and leveraging those.
Tip 2 (11:40)
I think my second one - my second top tip - would have to be about coaching to trends rather than nitpicking.
So QA can pick up on trends of your people potentially more easily than you can. They have that wide view for trends. Leverage that. And I think, you know, as I've said before, we all have performance blips, but where we need coaching is to our blind spots. And QA will - if you engage with them - be able to leverage those blind spots for you.
Tip 3 (12:10)
I think the last one for me is about how you engage with your QA team. Make sure that the feedback that they're giving is what you need for your coaching.
And so an example of that, that we had recently, was we had a request from a couple of our Team Leaders for us not to provide the answers to the fix in our feedback, but actually to pose a coaching question, to pose a 'what', 'how' or 'tell me' question to actually get the consultant thinking.
But also, actually, it helped provide a resource to Team Leaders who perhaps were less experienced at coaching, to have those coaching conversations. But that only came out because actually a Team Leader requested it and it changed our whole QA approach.
So yeah, QA can change too!
Blair Stevenson (13:11)
Fantastic. Well that's all we've got time for today.
Thank you Robin for coming on the show, you have given us some wonderful insights into the contribution that QA can make to improving and creating a strong contact center coaching culture.
Now for listeners, you'll find the link to the show notes of this episode in the description below.
And if you'd like to connect with Robin on LinkedIn, you'll also find a link to his LinkedIn profile in the description too (https://www.linkedin.com/in/robincarterstuart/).
Now, if you've tuned in today, looking for a way to create and sustain a world-class coaching culture, so you can beat your targets without burning people out, have I got an offer for you!
You're welcome to a free copy of my book, Game On: How to Increase Sales, Productivity, and Customer Experience by Turning Your Managers into High-Performance Coaches.
The link to that offer is also in the episode description below (https://bravatrak.com/game-on-book).
Well, that's it from us today, have a productive week.