Last fall I decided to undertake a "big step" in my personal and professional development. I enrolled in a PhD program in Human and Organization Development. I am really enjoying it, and thought I'd share in this space from time-to-time ideas that have caught my attention.
I have been thinking a lot about performance evaluation in general and quality call monitoring in particular. Why do we monitor calls? How well do we do it? Does doing it serve its intended purposes? Do we, in fact, deliver higher quality services as a result? Or, do we just irritate our reps by doing it?
In studying systems theory, I came across this passage by Gareth Morgan, writing in Images of Organization:
The central idea here is that if a system is to have the freedom to self-organize it must possess a ceretain degree of 'space' or autonomy that allows appropriate innovation to occur. This seems to be stating the obvious. But the reality is that in many organizations the reverse occurs because management has a tendency to overdefine and overcontrol instead of just focusing on the critical variables that need to be specified, leaving others to find their own form.
This passage makes me wonder. Why dont' we allow our reps more autonomy in what to say and how to say it? Why do our monitoring forms drift into lengthier and more detailed versions over time? What if we reduced them to the few critical variables that need to be specified and leave our reps free to have a true conversation with customers without further impedance from management? How sure are we, anyway, that the items we monitor are, in fact, correlated to customer satisfaction or other important measures of call performance?
I believe that, as an industry, we have a lot of work to do here. I invite anyone reading this to engage in dialogue with me with your comments and suggestions as to what we can do to improve quality monitoring practices.
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