Measuring

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MEASURING TELEPHONE EFFECTIVENESS

By Jon Hastings

Phone work is important to every successful organization. Yet one of

the areas that has been underdeveloped in recent years has been the

measurement of telephone effectiveness.

Most modern phone centers, which are technologically sophisticated,

are still very primitive in their communication measurement techniques. Certainly, they have machine-derived data about a rep’s telephone time on and off calls, as well as average call length. But they have very unreliable information about a given rep’s telephone effectiveness, or communicative quality.

The typical approach to assessing call quality is the use of check-

lists by supervisors. These lists are usually concerned with whether a

rep said something. This kind of “presence-or-absence” determination

is one of the most superficial ways of measuring any phenomenon.

Imagine watching your television news and hearing the meteorologist

declare, “Yes, we had weather today!” Of course, we had weather, but

what kind of weather was it, how does it compare to yesterday’s, and

what is the prediction for tomorrow?

To get this kind of quantitative and qualitative report requires precise language and a meaningful use of mathematics. To say, “It rained

today,” doesn’t tell us whether the rain was normal, above average, or

below average. Tell us it rained four inches today, and we have knowledge that is much more meaningful.

This analogy illustrates two of the requirements for measuring phone

work. To make it meaningful we need:

1. Clear categories

2. Quantification of data. There are several other criteria that

phone measures need, in order to be meaningful and to improve

telephone performance and customer outcomes.

3. Telephone communication categories need to be operationally de-

fined. For instance, in defining “articulation,” we don’t say it

is being understandable to listeners. We define it as “the full-

formation of words, so they are immediately comprehensible to a

listener of reasonable sensibilities.” This tells phone reps to

form words fully–in other words, it prescribes a course of behavior

that they can follow.

4. The categories need to be exhaustive. All meaningful events in

conversations must be captured by our measures.

5. Each category must be isomorphic. Categories need to mean one

thing, and only one thing, and not usurp another category’s

territory.

6. They need to be flexible, to allow for unusual telephone events.

7. They need to seem fair to phone workers.

8. The measures need to create inter-judge reliability. They need to

be usable by different managers with different experiential and

educational backgrounds. These managers need to score the same

conversations within a margin of difference of no more than 2

percent.

9. They need to be tested and proven across companies and across

industries.

10. They need to relate to customer values and improve customer sales

and satisfaction with greater reliability than the systems they

replace.

Jon Hastings is a telemarketing consultant based in Napa, California.

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