What is the best way to introduce call monitoring to the team?

Our organization introduced call monitoring about 1 year ago. Employee's were told that the system was being used for quality assurance purposes and that the primary objective was to deliver consistent service to a diverse customer base.

Supervisors compiled a small checklist of information each employee was required to verify with each phone call. Phone ettiquette, professionalism and job knowledge were also key factors that would be evaluated.

After three months of having the system in place, each staff member and his or her supervisor evaluated phone calls based on the check list that was created. As our organization provides various levels of services, the supervisors identified what kinds of calls (services) they were looking for and then allowed the employee's to select any day, date or time. A total of 8 calls per employee were evaluated using the checklist.

At the end of the evaluation, the staff member and employee used the results. The focus of the evaluation was to identify what the employee could do more of, what the employee could do differently, and what the employee could do better. The process opened the door to healthy communication and evaluation as well as many AH HA moments.

A year later, the monitoring system is still used as a training tool for new hires but focuses more on clarifying information that has been given by the customer or the employee. The monitoring system has proven to be an active support mechanism for staff members who have been questioned on whether or not the correct information has been provided or shared. I view the system as a win win situation for both employee and organization.

Your employees are going to have mixed emotions about this. Some seasoned call center employees will be used to it and this is common practice at many call centers. But some of your employee's are going to feel punished or like big brother is watching (or rather listening) over them. Like most people the first question they are going to ask themselves is, whats in it for me? Some would say its about doing a good enough job and staying employed here! But almost always influence and leadership with fear only yields short term results. You are going to have to make it fun and rewarding for them to embrace it. First make up a scorecard so they know exactly what they will be graded on, no surprises. Next there will have to be some type of reward for meeting the accepted criteria, this is totally up to you. Maybe it is lunch on the company, an extra day or half day of pto, leaving or coming in early by 2 hours. Or maybe you want to do a point system where call center agents can save up for more lucrative prizes, giving them something to strive for, similar to having a long term goal so to speak. Next I have found it is most effective to evaluate 1 call per week with each employee. Reason for this, out of sight out of mind. If you only evaluate once a month, the first week or so after the evaluation the call quality will be high, then after 1 or 2 weeks the agent will loose sight of that they are being monitored.

Call monitoring will really improve the quality of your calls and customer service. Also a cool thing if your employees engage in emails to customers is to randomly select an email from that employee and send it out to all their peers, you would really be surprised what is being put in a lot of your company's emails to customers!