What a Quality!!!!!!!!!!

Yesterday was just record breaking! I don't mean anything that's Guinness material but I think God tested my patience in terms of coaching people as part of my job description. I have always been cool about giving my best practices on this line of work but yesterday's session gave me a new taste of you-can-never-please-everybody thingy. Let me provide you some details. Here we go...

Let's just call her Leila. She happens to be one of the earlier batches of employees in the account I am supporting. Having been an employee of this company for three years and some months, it's already imprinted in my consciousness (or may be up to my subconscious level!) that, if you're gonna coach somebody who's been taking calls for this department longer than your stay (in short, more tenured than you), they would most likely challenge the depth of your product knowledge and/or judgements. Now Leila happens to get a zero score during one of our calibration sessions with her supervisor. The calibration session is intended to measure the variance of the Quality Team's scoring (the team I belong to) with the supervisors handling such department. This way, we can be sure that our judgements are pretty much uniform in terms of marking off agents on a specific behavior or line item. Then whenever an agent gets a zero score, we need to do coaching for him/her so the reason for getting that low score will be right away adjusted or corrected. Going back to Leila, before I even approached her, she's already aware that she got a zero. Usually, coaching sessions would start by letting the agent listen to the call so they would remember what took place on it then the discussion will follow. I've wanted Leila to listen to her call first but she insisted to know the markdowns first because she can just listen to the call later. Hmmmm...

As part of my routine, I would set the agent's expectation about why he/she is being coached. For Leila, I told her that the decision of giving her a zero on that call is not purely from the Quality Team but as a collaboration with her supervisor. I told her the reasons why she got a zero and how she got the other markdowns then recommended what she could have done to avoid them. Now here comes Leila's defenses....

According to her, we (the Quality Team) should consider what's really happening to her on the floor while she's taking that call. We ought to know what tools/windows she's actually using to cater to that customer. (Honestly, while she's saying that, I was thinking: "You mean I need to know if your eating, sleepy, chatting with someone else, surfing non-work related sites, etc.. while you're taking that call!?!??! Geesshhh...I don't think we have a spy camera on your station for us to capture that!) Being a humane person that I am, instead of laughing my *ss out, I explained to her that the only concrete basis that an evaluator can have is what came out or what was heard on their call. What we are auditing are recorded calls, not live calls, so there's no way for us to know what tools/windows they have actually used. To lighten the mood, I even kidded that we only have our ears to use for our judgements. Then for her to have a better understanding of the call we're talking about, I insisted for her to listen to it before we end the session. She even asked for the paper where I wrote down all her markdowns which I unhesitantly lent to her.

Being a cunning person that she is, it occurred to me lately that the reason why she borrowed my paper while listening to the call is because she will be able to closely watch out for the reasons of her markdowns then think of ways to contest each one of them! I got that idea after talking to a teammate who's gotten used to her angsts during coaching. Damn agent! Since my realization came in late, she did manage to contest all the reasons for her zero. She even made me listen to some parts of the call that will justify her claims. But of course, her defenses were so far fetched! What I mean is, she explained that she didn't mean to do the "mortal sins"; the evaluators just have a different way of interpreting them! The extreme part was when she reiterated that she didn't confirm anything to the caller when she said "uh huh" after the caller's inquiry. For example, the caller asked: "Have you taken your lunch?" Then the agent went: "Uh huh, uh huh!" For her, that's not saying "yes". In my head, I was thinking: "So it's just a senseless noise!??!?!" Wahhahahahahaha!!!!!!!! Damn it. I told her that we have to consider the caller's CONCRETE reaction after she used those fillers. If she had listened closely, the customer literally replied with "Okay!" after she said "uh huh." Even a fifth grader would understand that the filler was taken as a YES by the caller!!!!!!!!! And it so happened that she confirmed a wrong information to the customer which is a big NO, NO in terms of quality, thereby giving her a zero score. But in spite of all my explanations, she's still contesting the score and she went shouting on the floor: "What a Quality, what a Quality!!!!!!!!!!!"

Now that she started acting difficult to me, I involved her supervisor in our discussion. I made her RECALL that the zero didn't come mainly from my team because it was a calibration with her supervisor. After me saying that, all her wits came back to her.... and her face mellowed from an angry b*tch to an angel. I made a quick review to her supervisor so she can recall the recording we have used on the calibration. As sneaky and witty as a fox, the supervisor made her understand that the zero came from Operations and the Quality Team; it was reiterated that what she's claiming are hasty generalizations and created a negative setting of the customer's expectation; even them, the supervisors, will never have a way to know their condition and what tools they've used while handling a call; to be concrete with our judgements, we base our observations using the client's set of guidelines and with the customer's reaction about the information they have provided. As scared as a rat, Leila just bowed her head and agreed. Wehehehehehhe....

Lessons of the day? There's really no gain in questioning authorities without consideration to the set of measures they are using. We can never bullsh*t our way to success; we need to follow certain laws! If a guideline is questionable to you, we have a set of process in correcting them; you'll never get results by merely whining and publicly contesting them! Always remember: "Now, 10 years later, the person who talked and complained is still talking and complaining and still remains in the same position. The person who took the initiative and found solutions has been promoted several times." (by Catherine Pulsifer)

For that, let me end my entry with this: If you have time to whine and complain about something then you have the time to do something about it. ~Anthony J. D'Angelo