A customer of Envision came to me seeking some best practice ideas for de-emphasizing the score on evaluation forms. At almost every Roundtable I host, this subject comes up and it appears that many are in agreement that there seems to be way too much emphasis placed on the score.
Let’s first review why there is so much emphasis placed on the score:
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We have paid incentives or performance standards tied to the score. Wouldn’t this make you focus on the score if your job or your pay was tied to it?
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Many agents do not see their completed evaluations prior to meeting with the person delivering the evaluation. This creates a “sticker shock” syndrome where the agent's only focus is the score when a meeting takes place.
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Many QAs, Supervisors or Managers delivering the completed evaluation forms are not properly delivering feedback from a coaching perspective and instead reference the score.
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Last but not least, agent’s view the program as an audit; catch me doing something wrong program and not a coaching and development program.
Ok, now let’s look at some ways to de-emphasize the score:
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Make the scoring mean something and not just be a number. You may have heard me talk about taking the evaluating back to whether or not an agent accomplished each skill. If it is an objective skill, you can score it as a “yes” or a “no”. (Either they demonstrated the skill or they didn’t.) If it is a subjective skill, score it as one of these three tiered scoring:
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Make sure you have simple and clear definitions of what it takes to accomplish each skill.
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Turn your audit form into a coaching and development form. You do this by combining and aligning skills and only measuring what matters. This way, it doesn’t seem like you are knit-picking them for every little thing.
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Make sure you let your agent’s review their completed evaluation forms prior to meeting with them. This gets rid of the sticker shock because they have already had a chance to review the form and listen to the call.
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Engaging your employees in the process by asking them to come to the meeting with the one thing they thought they did really well and the one thing they would like to be coached on.
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When delivering feedback, it is crucial to emphasize that the scores are just indicators of skill strengths and gaps and the conversation must be channeled back to coaching.
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To make the shift from “big brother” to a “coach,” work has to be done to change the culture and mindset of the program. Opening up the quality program to agent involvement, changing the naming convention from things like “quality monitoring” to “quality coaching and development” and “dispute to re-evaluation” will help.
Last, I will play devils advocate. There are contact centers out there that will argue that TOP performers thrive on the score and if you want top performers, then promote the heck out of the score. This is especially true in a sales environment.
So there you have it. What are your thoughts about quality monitoring scores?
12:19 PM
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