QUESTION:
I’m hoping you can resolve a couple of issues we are having with our dispute process. 1) Our agents and supervisors feel that when there is an error made on call evaluation by the Quality Assurance (QA) Auditor that they should not have to follow our dispute process but just notify the QA Auditor and have the evaluation score corrected. They feel the dispute process should only be when the agent disagrees with the evaluation score. We ask that they follow the dispute process so that all discrepancies on an evaluation can be tracked and used as learning tools. 2) When an evaluation dispute is reviewed and other errors on the call were found by the reviewer, do we evaluate those even if it means the score is going to be lower or do we bring to the agent’s attention but not change the score?
ANSWER:
It’s always a little tricky to enforce a dispute process because there are instances in the quality process that are sometimes unique and do not necessarily fit neatly into the defined dispute procedures. This might be what’s happening at times with your group.
- If the QA Auditor agrees with the error he/she made when it is brought up by agent & supervisor, then there is not really a need to run it through your entire process and essentially waste the time of your QA Auditor. Having said that, it still needs to be tracked. I’m not sure if you want that responsibility to be left to the QA Auditor, since reporting his/her own error might be a conflict of interest and thus might “neglect” to follow through with reporting a change. Perhaps it can simply be added to your dispute process that any change to a quality evaluation score must be approved by the QA manager. Then at the time of “approval,” it is logged into your dispute tracking system.
- When other errors are discovered upon review of a disputed score, I would recommend simply learning from the error in evaluation but not lower the agent’s score with this additional finding. It could be perceived as “punishment” by the agent for bringing up the dispute by digging up additional problems with the call. If there really is a behavior issue in the call, then that behavior will undoubtedly come up again in subsequent calls where there will be an opportunity to coach to it without it getting all tangled up in the dispute process where there is a risk that any coaching given about this new “finding” would be resented and thus have no positive impact on the agent performance.