Introduction
- Every organization aims at maximizing profit and minimizing costs.
- Quality management practices are some of the important strategies that organizations use to achieve customer satisfaction and loyalty hence high organizational performance.
- Quality monitoring helps improve customer service in an organization hence improve the overall metrics of performance.
- Quality monitoring metrics in an organization could be defined by the management of the organization with the help of employees.
- Before their implementation, the management should ensure that every employee is on for the idea.
Goals of Customer Service
- An organization should aim at providing high quality customer service because:
- The clients are responsible for the payment of employee salaries and firm profitability.
- Customer retention is easier than obtaining of new clients.
- Employees should be treated well so that they can provide good customer care services to the company clients. Most successful firms are those that posses good customer service culture.
- Apple Inc. has been able to succeed in improving its performance due to a string customer service culture that has maintained the quality of product offered by the company (Bloor, 2008).
Good customer service culture can be created by making the work environment favorable for the company employees. This includes utilization of all factors that help improve employee satisfaction and performance such as increased teamwork, remuneration, rewards and performance reviews for employees. It is important for the organization to realize the importance of teamwork to the success of organizations. For instance, basketball teams full of confident role players always overachieve while collections of individuals seem to fail.
Quality Control cycle
Quality control and monitoring takes the form of a cycle that is initiated by an assessment of the situation in the organization. This is followed by a strategic plan, implementation of the plan, monitoring, evaluation and continuous assessment. Continuous assessments leads to actions by an organization.
Quality Monitoring Practices
- There are many practices that can help improve quality.
- An organization should begin by creating a good organizational culture characterized by teamwork and employee commitment.
- Create teamwork in the organization to help in coordination of call centers.
- Ensure that telephone and IT sub-teams know their responsibilities with regard to quality monitoring.
- Teams should have detailed strategic plans for achievement of company objectives.
- Avoid any issues that might arise such as confusion that may arise when the IT and telecom team is not informed of the changes in time.
- Apple Inc. has an organizational culture that recognizes teamwork as an important factor in the success of the firm. Teamwork as applied in the company’s call center has led to good quality monitoring practices hence innovativeness that has led to customer loyalty and good financial performance of the firm (Bloor, 2008).
Specific Goals for call Centers
- Employee training and education on quality improvement goals is an important factor.
- Training of call center agents helps manage calls well hence improving customer satisfaction and loyalty.
- The agents help the firm save on unnecessary expenses as well as increasing new sales for the company.
- Call time to resolution is improved.
- The time that clients are put on hold while waiting for confirmation or answers is reduced when the agents know their objectives well.
- For instance, an organization can have an objective for its call center as increasing up sells by 40% over the next quarter (Charantimath, 2003).
Evaluation Criteria
- All agents should be included in the formulation of their evaluation criteria.
- The definition of all metrics should help the agents narrow down on the specific evaluation metrics affecting them.
- One of the most efficient building block of an effective evaluation process of quality monitoring team is the development of a self evaluation form.
- Involvement of call center agents in creating a self evaluation form will make the agents know what is expected form from them form the company hence making them work hard to achieve the call center objectives.
System Review
- Call center system should be reviewed frequently to ensure that it is achieving its mandate.
- The system review team should include the management and some of the call center agents. The agents will provide to the team what needs to be improved in the system.
- System review sub team should come up with a wish list that contains the requirements to be made to improve the call center.
Employee motivation
- Call center agents should be motivated to achieve their objectives.
- The organization should begin by organizing a big party for all call center agents. In the party, the firm should set weekly or monthly targets for all call center agents accompanied by the prizes.
- The party should be an open forum with call center agents communicating freely with the management. It is at this party that call center agents should evaluate the calls made by their managers (Charantimath, 2003).
- Every party helps should not be completed without a contest between the management (supervisors) and the call center agents. More chances should be given to agents with the winners being given gifts such as a star bucks card.
Benchmarking
- The management should schedule a benchmarking session with a call center team that has been monitoring quality for over one year with significant improvements.
- During the session, their should be an exchange of discoveries and experiences as well as the statistics and tips on improving quality monitoring.
- Also in the session, the management should ensure that gents share their daily job related issues as well as possible solutions. The solutions should help the employees in accomplishing customer service goals of the company (Charantimath, 2003).
References
Bloor, R. (2008) Apple Market Share: The sound of Breaking window. Web.
Charantimath, P. (2003) Total Quality Management, Pearson Education India.