"Nope."

The contact center agent shook his head as he scanned the quality assurance form. We had just sat down to review a call, and it wasn't going well.

"Nope," he said again.

The call had been fairly good overall, but that's not what he focused on. The agent was fixated on the score. Specifically, the points he didn't receive.

He scanned the report while tuning out my feedback, saying "Nope" anytime he saw a score he disagreed with. It was a frustrating conversation.

In retrospect, it's hard to blame him.

He knew his performance was ultimately judged by the score, and the scores were a bit arbitrary. Why was one behavior worth six points while another one was worth four? I didn't do myself any favors by just setting the score sheet down in front of him at the start of the conversation.

It wasn't until much later that I discovered a way to give clear, unvarnished feedback without agents getting defensive about the score.

The solution? Eliminate the score.

What is contact center quality assurance?

I realize some readers might not be familiar with the quality assurance process in contact centers. Here's a brief overview.

You've probably heard that disclaimer at the start of the call, "This call may be recorded for quality and training purposes." Many contact centers record customer phone calls and this disclaimer is often required for legal reasons. They also capture emails, chat sessions, social media responses, and other customer communication.

In a typical contact center, a checklist is used to evaluate a sample of each agent’s recorded contacts as part of the QA process.

The checklist contains a series of required actions or behaviors used to evaluate each interaction. Many of these checklists also assign points for each behavior, and the points are tallied to give agents a total score.

QA can be an important part of agents' job evaluations.

Why quality assurance scores are a problem

"Well, that's friendly for me."

The agent clearly wasn't friendly on the call. Her monotone voice sounded bored, perhaps even a little put-off by her customer's reasonable request.

But "friendly" was worth 10 points on the quality assurance (QA) form, so the agent was arguing. The discussion had devolved into a debate about points rather than how to project more friendliness on the next call.

This often happens when we attach an arbitrary score to an employee's review. The score becomes the focal point and the intended behaviors get pushed aside. Any loss of points can feel like a slap.

The worst part for a supervisor is the scores are hard to defend.

What exactly is friendliness?
What does 10 points worth of friendliness sound like compared to five?
Can you still be friendly if you sound like a grumpy robot?

Inevitably, score-based QA takes the focus away from constructive feedback and turns review sessions into arguments about points.

What is scoreless QA?

Scoreless QA is a quality assurance process that focuses on behaviors rather than points. For many contact centers, the transition can be as easy as eliminating the scores from your existing process.

For example, let's say an agent is required to verify a customer's identity before discussing private account information. When you review a call, the agent either correctly verified the customer's identity or they didn't.

It's the behaviors that count, but points often get in the way.

Jeremy Hyde, Director of Customer Service at Sun Country Airlines, explained the benefit of removing the points. "The idea behind no score is avoiding the argument of 'that call was a 93, not a 92!' rather than focusing on feedback."

Eliminating the points makes it easier to focus the conversation on helping the agent do a better job the next time.

"We use scoreless QA sheets but still track areas of focus and quality expectations," said Kristine Berken, a customer loyalty team lead at Cellcom. "We find reps react more positively to this method as it creates less anxiety or 'big brother' feelings."

How to create a metric without a score

The biggest objection to scoreless QA comes from supervisors who want a clear metric to evaluate agent performance and to track overall trends. Here's where scoreless QA really shines.

Let's say you monitor five calls for a particular customer service agent. The agent provides the correct answer to all customer questions on just three out of five calls.

You now have a tangible, actionable metric!

Goal performance: provide the correct answer 100% of the time.
Actual performance: provided the correct answer 60% of the time.
Gap: improve accuracy by 40 percentage points.

Removing the score shifts the conversation from earning more points to "How do you ensure you give correct information on your next call?" (By the way, this blog post can give you some ideas as to why reps give out the wrong information.)

The goal of the QA discussion should be helping the agent identify expected behaviors for the next contact and agree to try them.

Jeremy Watkin, Director of Customer Experience and Support at Number Barn, offered this three-step process on his Customer Service Life blog for giving behavior-based feedback:

Start by discussing what worked.
Now discuss areas for improvement.
Wrap-up by discussing goals for future calls.

You can also identify macro-trends across your contact center without QA scores.

Perhaps you identify "prevent future calls" as an area for improvement. A roll-up of your QA results for the month shows that agents are doing this 82 percent of the time.

You can then drill down and try to find the root cause.

What issues tend to drive future calls?
Do agents know how to recognize these issues and prevent them?
Are there particular types of issues agents fail to prevent?

Conclusion

You can immediately improve the quality of feedback you share with your agents by getting rid of arbitrary scores. This reduces noise and focuses the conversation on what matters—improving calls.

Customer service is getting worse.

That's the finding from two recent reports. Companies are struggling to avoid service failures and keep their customers happy. But a third report and two top customer experience experts offer a glimmer of hope.

You can stand out from the competition by being average.

Forget wows. Stop worrying about delight. Don't fret over extraordinary. Just be consistently, perfectly, boringly average.

There are few caveats.

Your average has to be just a little better than the competition.
Your average has to be consistent.

More on those in a moment. But first, let's look at the state of customer service.

A customer completing a survey on an app.

Is customer service getting worse?

Yes. Two prominent consumer studies show that customers perceive that service is getting worse.

The first is the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), which publishes a quarterly national customer satisfaction score for the United States. The composite ACSI score has declined or remained the same for seven quarters.

Image source: The American Customer Satisfaction Index

The second study is the 2020 National Customer Rage Study from Customer Care Measurement and Consulting (CCMC). It found that the number of households experiencing at least one problem over the past 12 months increased by 10 percentage points since the 2017 study.

Image source: Customer Care Measurement and Consulting

There is some hope.

I conducted a survey of 1,084 U.S. consumers in November, 2020 and asked them what type of service they receive most often. Surprisingly, 66.7 percent said they usually receive good service.

Cover of report, “What type of service do customers receive most often?”

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Download a copy of the report, “What type of service do customers receive most often?”

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Should you try to delight every customer?

No. It’s impossible to delight every customer, and trying to do so can be costly. It might seem counterintuitive, but research shows that delighting customers has no significant benefits.

Customer experience expert, Matt Dixon, is the author of the classic business book, The Effortless Experience.

Dixon told me in an interview that he and his colleagues set out to research customer delight and discovered something unexpected. They found that companies were better off avoiding service failures.

"On average, most service interactions don't create loyalty at all. They create disloyalty."

That's because, try as they might, companies often fail to keep their promises.

Products don't work
Services fall short of expectations
Delivery is a logistical nightmare

CCMC's Customer Rage Study shows that companies continue to make life miserable for customers when something goes wrong:

2.9 contacts were needed to resolve a typical complaint.
58 percent of customers never got a resolution.
65 percent felt rage while trying to get a problem solved.

Despite the widespread use of surveys, many companies are doing a poor job identifying the problems that lead to customer rage.

For example, I recently experienced 18 points of frustration when ordering a table and barstools. It's likely the company only identified one.

There's got to be a better way.

How average service can win customers

Average really isn't the right word. Consistency is the key, as Shep Hyken points out in his excellent book, The Cult of the Customer. Hyken has a fantastic definition of customer amazement.

"Amazement is above average, but it's above average all of the time."

Hyken elaborates that companies win customers by being just a little above average, but doing it consistently. It's the consistency that captures customers' attention and eventually earns their trust.

You can hear more from Hyken in this interview.

There are a few things companies can do to be more consistent. The starting point is to create a customer service vision, which is a shared definition of outstanding service that gets everyone on the same page.

I researched customer-focused companies while writing The Service Culture Handbook. A clear vision was a common trait that set elite organizations apart.

The next step is to gather voice of customer feedback. Surveys can play a role, but there are many ways to gather customer feedback without a survey.

It's also important to identify reasons employees struggle to provide consistent customer service. I uncovered ten obstacles in my book, Getting Service Right.

Finally, it's important to understand that every customer is different.

Which brings us back to my study on the type of service customers receive most often. Most people felt they usually receive good service, which is service that meets their expectations.

But there was nuance to the responses. Perceptions changed by age group, gender, and geography. For example:

More women than men reported they receive outstanding service most often.
People in the western United States were more likely to report outstanding service.
Older customers felt they receive more outstanding service.