Agent Training: Quality Assurance, Training and the Caller Experience

Presented at the Association of Teleservices International 2011 Annual Conference, San Antonio, TX

At Pronto, we pride ourselves on maintaining a great staff, both conscientious and courteous.   We think we are successful because our average agent tenure is two and a half years and our client retention is 98%, annually. 

But beyond our core staff, how do we handle new agents?  And how do we handle agents who aren’t performing to their full potential?  All of us in the call center business would like to believe that we have all “A” players on our team who handle each call flawlessly, each and every time.  The reality is our agent pools are always in flux.  At any given time we are training new hires and there are agents having a bad week.  A critical key to success for us is getting those agents to perform their best, to move up to “A” performance while still nurturing existing “A” players.   In addition, the agent’s work for our clients is becoming more demanding daily; requiring exceptional listening skills and a new level of caller engagement.

In a research project for the last four months, Pronto reevaluated our training and quality assurance programs and processes in order to improve agent performance and the caller experience.  How did we do that?

• We developed a new quality assurance form; moving away from a subjective form (with fewer questions) to a form with a longer list of objective Yes/No questions.  These new questions placed emphasis on desired behaviors. 

• We developed agent training (3 hours) for the new form, the principles of the behaviors and the new QA process.

• We coached call-handling skills twice a week for a shorter period of time (15 minutes), rather than twice each month. 

Using the POP (Positive Opportunity Positive) method in our coaching session, we saw a 12% increase in overall agent QA scores for the agent test group, and each agent improved his or her scores from the beginning of the end of the process. 

Each coaching session now uses this new POP method of coaching we have developed.  Agents listen to calls with their coaches and coaches start each session with a Positive comment about the agent’s call handling skills.  Agents are then encouraged to share Opportunities they observe for call improvement and coaches finish the session with another Positive comment.  Both agents and coaches then sign off on the form, listing the agreed upon opportunities for improvement which agents commit to improve over the next week. 

Because results have been so positive, we are taking this initiative company-wide and employing this new method of QA scoring with all agents.  For more information on this and our other training programs, please contact us at info@prontoconnections.com .