Our company has a separate quality assurance department that monitors all of operations. In particular, they use a separate section of our CRM (Salesforce) to grade cases (sets of emails, phone calls or communications around a single issue). On average, we perform 60+ evaluations per rep per month. We have a lot of set criteria (grammar, tool research, etc.) but want to start "soft training" the team on pro-active issue resolution. What evaluation criteria would you suggest that gets them to think in this light? Our problem is that we have to be fairly specific, so we can limit the amount of "subjectivity" a rep feels QA is using. So we have criteria like, "Did provide suggested solutions even though you were unable to resolve a case?"

There isn't a perfect way to avoid "Subjectivity" when grading a rep. All you can do is grade based on actions.

Did the rep....

*Suggest the appropriate solution

*Provide detailed (enough) notations on all that was done during the call

*Use slang or other non-business grammer (have a list of don'ts ready when training on what's slang)

*Display a functional knowledge of the product/service (Reps who take longer to look things up may require additional training. Especially if what they're looking up is considered common knowledge.)

*Put the customer on hold when it was not necessary (this may seem subjective, but putting the customer on hold at all can show a lack of knowledge in the product. Reps should try to engage the customer for as much of the call as possible, except if additional research is required)

*Thank the customer for calling

*Use the appropriate greeting



Without knowing more about the business, that'd be my suggestion.

First question, what does HR have to say about this? Have you engaged that department? Reason I ask is...often HR has organizational, individual and team developmental tools in use, and can be a primary resource for you. Additionally, if such tools are currently in use in other areas of the organization, it would be good for your staff to use the same, even if some modifications are required to address your department's functional and technical specifics.

There are solid, research-based tools on the market to address your needs, and if it's feasible for you to use them (budgets, management buy-in), I would not try to reinvent the wheel. The bonus being that these are research-based tools, i.e., they actually measure something and they actually mean something. I've seen organizations use statements such as "Helps create synergy." My response...so what? That usually has little or nothing to do with serving a customer, and it has even less to do with how well a job is accomplished.

If you must use "homegrown" criteria, I agree with Xeno, and would encourage you to write the criteria much as suggested, i.e., be sure to avoid compound criteria. For example, grouping the last two examples together ("Uses the appropriate greeting and thanks the customer for calling") would render the criteria worthless when trying to evaluate a rep who does one but not the other.

Good luck!