[Music]  Follow the FDC's ecom education blog. My name is Katherine I'm an office  administrator here at Avensis. Partnering with the right call center is critical because it's likely the only physical real-time contact your customers will have with your brand. Unfortunately you don't have the time or resources to run your online business and build out a high functioning call  center. That is why so many successful online and traditional businesses  partner with boutique domestic BPOs to engage their customers. Follow these eight steps when partnering with the call center to achieve consistent  high-quality user experience that will  differentiate your business. Step one: create a culture of trust. For  your feedback to be successful your  customer service Account Manager and  your internal auditing team must be on  the same page before beginning examine  your company's core values as well as  the bodies of the team you're using to communicate on behalf of your brand to  the whole world. How do they influence your culture and guide behavior? Our team members focused on other successes as well as their own is your Account Manager rewarded for helping your  business grow professionally in a recent  study by Paul Jay Zack a Harvard researcher, he discovered that compared to people at low trust companies, people  at high trust companies report  seventy-four percent less stress and 40% less burnout. High quality support starts with high quality employees. So creating  a culture of trust is key to any  outsource to customer service model. Step two: defined quality. Including your new team and conversation that that defined  quality creates a shared understanding. Use real life call examples to generate discussion. For example, if everyone  agrees that empathy and listening are  important, how to call responses , demonstrate empathy and listening if the customer shares an experience or an  emotion, does the team member responding  to the customer reflect that emotion? Does the team member create a rapport  with the customer? Step 3: create rubrics  and determine benchmarks. Create rubrics and weigh the criteria according to your values. If you have decided in steps one and two that professionalism is important add this to your rubric determine if it is more important than correctness or empathy for example rubrics work best when there are no more  than four to five criteria some of the  best rubrics we see include correctness is the response correct completeness did  the team member answer the customers  questions empathy the team member or  personalized their response it acknowledged the customers feelings and professionalism. Did the team member  demonstrate good email etiquette? Find a  range of customer responses that you can  use as benchmarks, as a group evaluate  the responses based on the rubric you  created this benchmarking exercise  generates a second discussion of quality  and gives team members practice using the rubric. Step four: make your team reflect on  their own customer responses. Research in the fields of business and education has demonstrated the importance of reflection and learning in your article  why you should make time for self  reflection  even if you hate doing it Jennifer Porter asserts that reflection allows us  to pause, sort through all of our  experiences and observations and create. Meaning which then becomes learning. Researchers found that call centres demonstrated that employees who spent 15  minutes the end of each day reflecting  about lessons learned performed 23  percent better after 10 days  than those who did not reflect making  time for reflection in the peer review  process prepares team members to learn. Step 5: make sure your account manager  trains your team on how to provide  feedback. Make sure your account manager  knows what good effective feedback looks  like sharing specific examples. Good  feedback should focus on what their team  member did what the effect was and what  steps they could take next feedback should be specific and in the case of  criticism it should include suggestions  for improvement here's a couple of  examples when you told the customer that they were having an issue they  immediately became defensive. Next time  consider placing the blame on the device  rather than the customer which diffuses the situation when you share your  personal experience with the customer  you reduce the tension. Great work. Step 6: begin your review and share  feedback you or your own Quality  Assurance team should be proactive in  defining quality and giving your contact  center the opportunity to reflect on  their own responses. By doing this we  avoid surprises in the feedback process  team members know how their calls will  be evaluated beforehand. Once your review process is done it's best to make sure  your team is afforded a second  opportunity for reflection that captures  what they learned during the peer review process. How did the call centers  self-assessment compare to your  assessment? Use this reflection to guide  goal setting as well as training for Optimax a prototype optics manufacturer  with revenues of 30 million dollars the  answer is team based performance reviews. They avoid potential pitfalls by giving  the reviewers clear guidelines and by  contrasting the employees self review  with peer reviews so they can compare  self perception with team perception  that also helps the reviewers to stay  objective in the process they act as  coaches relaying information  step 7 provide training based on the results of their review it may seem like  common sense but I can't tell you how  many contact centers drop the ball on  this. Use your feedback to train and retrain your call center team tying  their training to your review process  demonstrates the relevancy of the  quality assurance process collecting  data enables you to offer training opportunities to a whole team if for  example we see patterns that indicate  that more training is needed on the  etiquette alternatively individual team members can pursue training to  strengthen specific areas based on  feedback from their peers. Tracking this  data over time demonstrates growth for  both teams and individuals. In conclusion remember to repeat steps  four through seven as often as possible  you're creating your own well loyal customer service machine you'll find  that by doing this that you're  consulting your rubrics and your  benchmark standards that you already  created less and less off well MPs  ratings might be great rubrics it doesn't really answer the ultimate  question that you as an entrepreneur  need to answer is your customer service  up to your business's standards by partnering with the right customer  contact term by holding them accountable  in the right way you're gonna keep these  bells ringing and your customers happy all the time. Thank you so much for joining Aventis today at FDC University we're really happy to have you and share some of our knowledge with you. [Music]