The Global Association for Contact Center Best Practices & Networking

My best contact center customer experience was with a large mortgage bank in North America. This example illustrates the benefits associated with a good quality monitoring program. What is interesting about this particular mortgage bank is that they monitor customer interactions manually.

Manual monitoring has not generally been an easy or even successful endeavor in the contact center. This is because it is often hard to get a good sampling of interactions and difficult to capture the types of interactions needed for supervisors to perform meaningful evaluations. The mortgage bank also had to add supervisors in order to accomplish the live monitoring.

Although this manual process is more expensive and time consuming than using an automated and integrated solution, the company's results were so impressive that it justified the additional resources.

This mortgage bank has not only made manual monitoring work, but they have combined it with a solid coaching program to maximize their results. This is how they do it. The bank's ratio of agents to supervisors is fifteen to one, and each supervisor is required to do one coaching session per agent per day. The supervisor sits next to the agent and performs a live service observe. They then immediately provide feedback to the agent.

In this process, the supervisor gives the agent a few skills, issues, etc. to work on and improve for their next evaluation. Immediate feedback is vital because the customer interaction is still fresh in the agent's mind. And, since there is no lag time between the agent-customer interaction and the supervisor feedback, it produces higher retention rates for information and faster learning.

This is one of the best customer service organizations I have seen in the industry. Three years ago, the mortgage bank put the program in place, and during this short time they produced exemplary results: an increase in mortgages from $200 million to $1 billion and each agent is now cross-selling a minimum of four new "products" per day. This example reinforces the power of developing and training agents. The agents have improved their skills and customers are experiencing better customer service. It proves that if the agent has the training and coaching they need to do their job better, they can help the business increase revenues, lower customer churn and lower costs, all resulting in a very strong return on investment.