360° Vendor Management

Calibrating Quality Expectations With Your Outsourcing Vendor

If you manage a call center, you know what calibration is. Otherwise, you may not be leveraging the most important tool you have to manage agent-level quality. In an outsourcing relationship, failure to calibrate quality expectations can result in poor vendor performance.

Calibration is the process by which both the vendor and the client review a sample of real-life transactions, score the transactions independently, and compare the results to each other. The best companies have several types of calibration sessions.

The first is the standard monthly calibration session, where the client’s internal audit team compares results with the vendor’s quality team. The purpose of this meeting is to ensure that the vendor provides feedback to their agents based on the exactly the client’s expectations. Normal attendees include auditors, trainers, quality management, and day-to-day operations managers. The team tracks calibration variance*, on-time completion of monthly sessions, importance issues - and the issue’s corresponding action plans. Results are reported to vendor management and account management teams. The trick behind this meeting is to make sure that the vendor truly understands the client’s expectations - simply marking items correct or incorrect is insufficient. The teams need to spend the time to ensure that everyone has a shared understanding of the rationale behind the scoring in an environment that is NOT confrontational.

From our experience, teams start using calibration sessions with the right intentions, but later hold the sessions less frequently than they should (every month folks, every month!) or parties begin to use an accusatory tone in the meetings, making it a vendor vs. client meeting. Effective managers avoid this and carefully facilitate the meeting to get the desired results. The other issue we frequently see is that the sample sizes shrink as other tasks take priority. It’s important that the right sample size be crafted for every calibration session - and that the samples be pulled at random.

The second type of meeting rarely occurs, but, in our opinion, should occur far, far often. Executives and key stakeholders rarely spend the time to get close to nitty-gritty details of transaction quality. However, it’s precisely due the infrequency of looking at the low-level details and the frequency of informal “stories” (regardless of the stories’ completeness or accuracy) that executives begin to make decisions regarding a program based on inaccurate information. Every quarter, executives should spend 1-2 hours reviewing transaction quality by having calibration teams make a joint presentation of program quality issues, achievements, and plans. You might want to include key customers, key internal stakeholders, and other influencers.

Programs that calibrate frequently, accurately, and with a tone of continuous improvement have a far greater likelihood of success than those that don’t. SLA results will be contested less and the agents handling the transactions will receive the feedback they need to improve individual and team performance. It doesn’t make a difference if your program is a call center, back office transaction, or IT program…CALIBRATE!

* Calibration variance, a metric that identifies the difference between client and vendor quality scoring, is calculated as (VendorQualityResult - ClientQualityResult) / ClientQualityResult.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 22nd, 2007 at 8:46 am and is filed under Discipline, Outsourcing SLAs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.