Agent Calibration and its Importance

Calibrating agent evaluations based on industry standards is of key importance for contact centers to maintain their effectiveness. Calibrating the quality of agent contact handling not only supports center efficiency and helps grows customer satisfaction, but also contributes ultimately to bettering the organization’s reputation and its bottom line.

A way to uniformly rate agent performance. It improves call monitoring, limits variation in interpreting performance criteria, and achieves consistency among the people responsible for scoring calls. Calibration requires considerable commitment to master and keep the process going. It may take hours of discussion and practice before your team can begin to score a call in a uniform way. Once mastered, the rewards are considerable.
Everyone responsible for monitoring and scoring calls needs a complete understanding of customer service goals and performance standards. These individuals must be trained to participate in the calibration process, apply evaluation standards uniformly, and provide feedback to agents.

Importance of Calibration

Calibration eliminates both perceived biases and actual quality–scoring process corruption. It ensures all those involved in evaluating agent performance have a common understanding of the quality elements being assessed. When calibration is achieved, it will not matter who did the monitoring and scoring, because the outcome will be the same.
By applying the same criteria to evaluations, the coaching process can focus on recognizing achievements and identifying improvement opportunities. Successful calibration fuels the process improvement engine so organizations can continuously improve customer service and reduce operating costs.

Other Techniques for Call Calibration: (Passive and Active Call Calibration)

Conducting Passive Calibration Weekly for Internal Evaluators

A Passive Calibration forum is simply having all evaluators listen to calls for about one hour and discuss how they would have evaluated them. This allows everyone to stay abreast of how everyone is judging a variety of factors. The active calibration is a more formal blind- evaluation, evaluate a call offline, then become together as a group to see where everyone agrees and disagrees. The two measures used are variance and alignment. The variance is set by the person responsible for the calibration process. It answers “how much variance is allowed in category scores and the overall score in order to be “certified.” Alignment is a simple average of averages of alignment per scored question. (i.e., 90% of the evaluators are in-alignment on the first question, 75% on the second question, etc… then averaged.) Graph these over time with the goal to reduce variation and increase.