Advice for evaluation forms

Guidelines for effective evaluations

An evaluation is the end result you receive from a Quality Management recording solution. The “Quality” in Quality Management comes from evaluating the methods and language the agents use while working with customers. Evaluations call out the elements you want the agents to use in a call.

EXAMPLE   The agent answers a call by saying “Good morning, this is Bob at XYZ Company, how can I help you today?” The evaluation form has three introductory questions: Did the agent use a greeting? Did the agent identify him or herself and the company? Did the agent ask an open-ended question? The evaluator answers each of these questions with “yes.”

The evaluation indicates excellent agent behavior and the areas where agents need improvement or training.

When you are implementing evaluations, consider the following best practices:

• Prioritize your initiatives—Start with the highest value or highest priority.
• Establish what success looks like—This is the desired behavior.
• Create a log of measurements and compare scores over time—Pick an evaluation form and stay with it for at least a quarter so that you can measure improvement over time and verify if your training and coaching are improving performance.
• Review agent evaluations and play back calls to determine the root causes of problems—Find out where you are having problems and improve training through root cause analysis.
• Make agent, team, and organizational comparisons—Measure progress at all levels.
• Move on when you have established success—When you no longer have problems in one section of the evaluation (for example, agent greetings), you can remove it from the evaluation. As your contact center’s business goals change, you can add new sections to the form to continually improve the performance of your agents.

Guidelines for evaluation form questions

Consider the following tips when writing evaluation form questions.

Use simple questions. Simple questions allow managers and supervisors to investigate the root cause of an agent’s low score.

• Make each question a single question (don’t use questions within questions).

• Limit the scope of a question to a single measurable event.

  EXAMPLE   “Did the agent go the extra mile?” is a bad question. What does it mean to go the extra mile? Does going the extra mile look the same for every contact? Probably not. Instead, identify specific actions that agents who go the extra mile could do. For example, did the agent offer to follow up with the caller to make sure the issue was resolved? This questions asks about a specific action, and everyone will know what a “yes” or “no” answer means.

• Write the question so that both the evaluator and the agent will clearly understand how the agent performed.

Use questions that require a yes or no answer whenever possible. Yes or no questions provide clear and concise answers. They also require less documentation and collaboration efforts to get consistent evaluation measurements. These types of answers are more objective. By contrast, numerical ranges require you to establish criteria for each number in the range. This makes collaboration efforts between multiple evaluators difficult.

Organize your questions by placing them into distinct sections. Categorizing questions allows you to produce detailed reports about agent and team performance in each category.

• Match questions and sections to the flow of a typical call to make it easier for evaluators to score agent performance.

  EXAMPLE   You create three sections named Greeting, Order Entry, and Closing.

• When using percentage-based scoring, assign higher weights to the most important questions and sections.
• Use no more than ten sections in an evaluation form.
• Use no more than ten questions in a section.

Decide whether there are any key points of failure. Mark questions that address critical behavior (such as courtesy) as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). If such a question is scored negatively, the entire evaluation fails.

If you are using predictive evaluation scores, write questions that relate to the kind of data that Calabrio ONE pulls and analyzes. See Configure predictions for more information.

EXAMPLE   You use QM to measure the amount of silence in each contact. The evaluation form asks, “Did the agent give prompt attention to the customer?”

EXAMPLE    You have an Analytics phrase category called “Greeting” with phrases like “thank you for calling,” “my name is, “ and “how may I help you today.” The evaluation form asks, “Did the agent properly greet the caller?”

Key performance indicator (KPI) questions

To use KPI questions, you first need to identify the business goals for the contact center. When you break down the business goals, you need to identify the challenging areas and how you can measure success in meeting those goals. For example, you can break the business goals into the following:

• First contact resolution (FCR)
• Sales process and skills
• Product knowledge—You can use contact evaluations to identify agents who do not have sufficient product knowledge and then provide training to improve their product knowledge. For example, you might want to consider the following questions when evaluating an agent:
  • Does the agent have deep product knowledge?
  • Is this a critical indicator or a challenge area?
• Agent proficiency with tools—Agents sometimes have to deal with a wide variety of tools when they deal with a customer (for example, order entry tools, agent productivity tools, database tools, or custom software tools designed for the organization). You can use the evaluation to monitor agent proficiency with your contact center’s tools and then provide training to improve their tool proficiency.
• Average call duration—Some calls are longer than others. You can use the evaluation to understand what factors result in longer calls and then provide solutions that result in fewer long calls and improve the average call duration.

When you know what your business goals are, you can incorporate those goals as answers to questions in the evaluation form and assign KPIs to those questions. This allows you to align your agents’ goals with your business goals for the contact center. You can then use the evaluation forms to measure your agents’ performance against your contact center’s business goals.

A KPI can have a positive or negative impact on your contact center’s business goals. The value assigned to the KPI answer reflects that impact.

EXAMPLE   Your contact center’s business goals are to increase revenue, improve customer satisfaction, and reduce overall cost. An agent who turns an unhappy customer into a happy customer has a positive impact on your contact center’s business goals. An agent who loses a potential sale has a negative impact on your contact center’s business goals.

How KPI questions are scored

A question with one or more KPI answers is labeled with “KPI” in the Type field. A KPI overrides the final evaluation score. If you have multiple KPI answers, prioritize the KPI answers when creating the form to determine which KPI answer determines the final score.

When a KPI question appears in a section, QM scores the KPI question like any other question. The total value for that section appears in the section score, including the KPI question. QM retains the scores you assign to all questions and sections. These scores are available for review.

You must continue to score the entire evaluation when a KPI answer triggers a final score.

Percentage-based scoring

When you create an evaluation form, you must choose either percentage-based scoring or Point-based scoring. Percentage-based scoring is based on a range of whole numbers from 0 to 100. As the evaluator scores a section on a percentage-based evaluation form, a rolling total and percent appear on that section.

About percentage-based sections

Each percentage-based section has its own weight that determines how much it influences the total score for the evaluation form. Each section tab displays its section weight. The sum of all of the section weights must be 100. These weights are applied after all sections are scored to arrive at the overall score, as a percentage, for the evaluation. The overall score is calculated as follows:

	Section score as a percentage × section weight = weighted section score

	Sum of all weighted section scores = total score as a percentage

About percentage-based questions

Each percentage-based question has its own weight that determines how much it influences the total score for the section. The weight is converted into points. The maximum score for a section is 100% (or 100 points), no matter how many questions it contains. Calabrio ONE uses this formula used to calculate the weighted score for a single percentage-based question:

(actual score ÷ maximum score) × weight = weighted score

EXAMPLE   In a section with three questions, Question 1 has a weight of 50%. Questions 2 and 3 each have a weight of 25%. This means Question 1 is worth a maximum of 50 points and Questions 2 and 3 are each worth a maximum of 25 points.

The following table shows the potential points that a question with a 0–5 answer scale could earn if it has a weight of 25% or 50%. If an evaluator answers N/A, Calabrio ONE treats the section score as if the question does not exist.

Scale Answer	Points Earned (Question Weight of 25%)	Points Earned (Question Weight of 50%)
N/A	—	—
0	0	0
1	5	10
2	10	20
3	15	30
4	20	40
5	25	50

The following table shows the potential points that a Yes/No question could earn if it has a weight of 25% or 50%.

Answer	Points Earned (Question Weight of 25%)	Points Earned (Question Weight of 50%)
Yes	25	50
No	0	0
N/A	—	—

The following tables show the results for several sections in a sample evaluation form.

 Scored example for a three-question section

Question	Weight	Type	Score	Weighted Score
1	50%	0–5 scale	4	40
2	25%	0–5 scale	3	15
3	25%	Yes or No	Yes	25
Section Score				80%

 Scored example for a four-question section

Question	Weight	Type	Score	Weighted Score
1	60%	0–5 scale	3	36
2	15%	0–5 scale	4	12
3	20%	Yes or No	No	0
4	5%	Yes or No	Yes	5
Section Score				53%

 Scored example with “not applicable” (N/A) as an answer

Question	Weight	Type	Score	Weighted Score
1	60%	0–5 scale	NA	—
2	15%	0–5 scale	4	12
3	20%	Yes or No	No	0
4	5%	Yes or No	Yes	5
Section Score				42.5%

NOTE   An answer of N/A removes that question from the total possible score. So for this example, the score of 43% is based on a score of 17 out of a total of 40 instead of a total of 100.

How percentage-based evaluations are scored

When you save an evaluation form, the form calculates the Possible Points, Points Earned, and Percentage (or score). These formulas are based on the number of sections in an evaluation form.

Possible points

The total possible number of points for a scored evaluation form is the sum of each section’s possible points multiplied by the total number of points:

	Form Possible Points =
	Section 1 weight × Section 1 Possible Points
	+ Section 2 weight × Section 2 Possible Points
	+ Section 3 weight × Section 3 Possible Points
	+ Section 4 weight × Section 4 Possible Points

The following example shows how Calabrio ONE calculates the total possible number of points for a scored evaluation form with four sections:

Section	Weight	Possible Points for the Section	Points the Section Contributes to the Form
1	25%	100	25
2	25%	75	18.75
3	25%	80	20
4	25%	100	25
Total Possible Points			88.75

Points earned

The total number of points earned on a scored evaluation is calculated using the following formula:

	Form Total Points Earned =
	Section 1 weight × Section 1 Total Points Earned
	+ Section 2 weight × Section 2 Total Points Earned
	+ Section 3 weight × Section 3 Total Points Earned
	+ Section 3 weight × Section 3 Total Points Earned

The following example shows how Calabrio ONE calculates the number of points earned on an evaluation form with four sections:

Section	Weight	Points Earned	Points the Section Contributes to the Total Score
1	25%	85	21.25
2	25%	60	15
3	25%	65	16.25
4	25%	90	22.5
Total Points Earned			75

Percentage score

The percentage for a scored evaluation form is calculated using the following formula:

	Form Percentage =
 	Form Points Earned ÷ Form Possible Points

The following example shows how Calabrio ONE calculates the percentage score from the previous two tables:

	75 ÷ 88.75 = 84.51%	

Point-based scoring

When you create an evaluation form, you must choose either point-based scoring or Percentage-based scoring. Point-based scoring is based on a range of whole numbers. The minimum number can be less than zero.

EXAMPLE   The minimum number of points on a form is −50, and the maximum number of points is 150. A score of 0 is considered adequate or average. Positive points are awarded for exceptional service when the agent performs beyond the normal expected outcome. Negative points are subtracted for poor service and indicate the agent needs additional coaching.

The minimum score for a points-based evaluation form is the total of all minimum scores that are assigned to questions.

The maximum score for a points-based evaluation form is the total of all maximum scores that are assigned to questions.