ACA International members Leslie Bender and Debra Ciskey share their expertise on finding the right call evaluation process for your business.
11/12/2019 11:30
Evaluating your collection calls will provide you with specific and descriptive information about your company’s culture, the state of your training, the competence of your supervisors and trainers, the quality of the accounts placed with you for collection, and your collectors’ skills and compliance with your performance expectations.
However, your call evaluations will only be as good as your evaluation forms and the consistency of your evaluators, report Leslie Bender, IFCCE, CCCO, chief strategy officer for BCA Financial Services Inc., and Debra Ciskey, IFCCE, executive vice president of Collections Coach LLC. Following is an excerpt from their article in the November issue of Collector magazine.
Constructing Effective Evaluation Forms
Before putting pencil to paper, brainstorm the behaviors you want to reinforce
through your call evaluations and feedback. Just as you would in the strategic planning process, begin with your end goal in mind. For example, are you seeking to reinforce a specific approach to customer service? Are you looking for first-call resolution? Verbatim delivery of scripts?
Meeting client-specific requirements?
Design your forms to measure the behaviors you desire.
List the knowledge, skills and actions you want to evaluate. Determine how agents’ knowledge would be demonstrated by their behavior. For example, if you want to evaluate how well agents understand client processes, you might include “Accurately described client’s billing practices” on your forms.
Have you had regulatory inquiries or complaints that touched on certain call tactics? What is your litigation experience related to agents’ behavior on calls? You can influence collector behavior by reinforcing the performance of desired tactics and enforcing policies prohibiting undesirable call tactics on your evaluation forms.
If you have clients who require specific disclosures, courtesies or language that is not applicable or desirable for other clients, you may need evaluation forms that you use solely for those specific clients. This can reduce confusion among evaluators and collectors.
Form Design
Simplicity should be the goal when designing call evaluation forms. Depending on your evaluation processes, call auditors, supervisors, managers and collectors themselves may use the forms. A simple, easy-to-use form will help assure consistent scoring and prevent discrepancies that may threaten the credibility of your call evaluation program.
Consider the call flow in your form design. Collection calls often follow an expected format; tailoring your form to this format prevents confusion. Scorers can miss key pieces of the conversation if they must search around the forms for applicable items, or they may have to listen to calls repeatedly to see if they were scored completely. This wastes time and may impact the accuracy of your call scores, which will in turn affect the credibility of your call evaluation program. If the form is too hard to use or presents the review criteria in a helter-skelter manner, it won’t be used in the way you expect.
Use objective evaluation criteria, especially in compliance call audit forms. “Yes,” “No” and “Not Applicable” will likely fit your compliance requirements.
For example: The collector identified the consumer by first and last name; the collector identified our company by name; the collector identified the creditor by the correct name.
When you want to score the collector on behavior avoidances, state those items clearly to prevent the double-negative trap.
Try: Used polite and professional language; set realistic expectations; fairly described the customer’s alternatives.
Your form will only be as credible as its authors, and you may need to involve representatives from operations, client management, legal/compliance and training.
However, if you are pressed for time, consider letting your client management team get things rolling with common or unique client requirements, let legal/ compliance spot any potential risk areas, engage operations on any talking points or call strategies, and then present to your training team to reinforce.
Ask who will be listening to the calls. Will it be your legal/compliance team? Do you have a customer experience team? Does your talent development or training team run with call listening in your organization?
Read more on communicating expectations for collection calls and providing feedback to your collectors from Bender and Ciskey in the November issue of Collector magazine.
Subscriptions to the Collector magazine digital edition and email notifications for each new issue are available for ACA International members by logging in to ACA International’s website here. Members and nonmembers can also purchase a print subscription. Nonmembers can create a guest profile on ACA’s website to subscribe to available publications.