WFM Unfiltered

Your QM Messes My Staffing | Rob Dwyer

• Rob Dwyer • Season 1 • Episode 16

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In this episode of WFM Unfiltered, Irina is joined by Rob Dwyer, a seasoned expert in Quality Management (QM) and the driving force behind transforming how organisations handle quality in contact centres. Rob’s unique perspective on the often-frustrating relationship between WFM and QM shines a light on the untold connections that affect staffing, agent performance, and overall service levels.

You’ll hear a candid conversation about how traditional Quality Management might actually be working against your business by cherry-picking calls and introducing bias. Rob breaks down why AI is shaking things up and could solve many of these age-old problems by analysing every call without human bias. And don’t miss Irina’s bold take on why traditional QM “absolutely sucks” and how AI might be the key to bridging the gap between QM and WFM.

The episode also dives deep into the vital need for better communication between departments. Rob highlights why QM and WFM need to work together more closely to address operational inefficiencies and improve staffing processes. This conversation isn’t just about call monitoring—it’s about how your entire contact centre can benefit from a more integrated approach to QM and workforce management.

Whether you’re in QM, WFM, or Operations, this episode is packed with real talk on the frustrations, opportunities, and the future of contact centre management. Don’t forget to subscribe to catch more unfiltered discussions that will challenge how you think about workforce management!

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Irina:

Happy Tuesday and welcome to WFM Unfiltered. I'm your host, Irina, and we're going all the way to tornado land. And I have a great guest with me today and a topic that from WFM perspective, we usually avoid as the plague, because we think that There is no really correlation between WFM and QM, but hold your horses because we're going to discuss What happens in the world of QM versus WFM? Are they related, connected? How? And so forth. But before that, I want to introduce you to my guest, Rob. Hi, Rob, and welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Rob:

I'm doing great, Irina. It's great to see you again. It's been too long since we've had a chance to talk like this.

Irina:

That's true. That's true. And actually I have a fun story. My inspiration for creating a podcast is Rob because he invited me early on in my LinkedIn career to his podcast. Don't forget to subscribe to NextInQ and watch Rob. And I absolutely loved it. And he was such an amazing host and he was able to cope with my nervousness and being very, very stressed. And he actually prompted the intro for WFM unfiltered by asking me why a lot of people were thinking that WFM is boring, so that's how it all started, blame it on Rob. And

Rob:

I will take the blame.

Irina:

absolutely, but Rob, can you mention a little bit more about your background and where our visitors can find you?

Rob:

Yeah, absolutely. So, my background is basically the last 15 years I've been involved in contact centers, primarily the BPO space. And over the last four years, I've been working for a technology company that spun out of the BPO that I work for. So Customer Direct is the BPO that I work for. HappyTo, H A P P I T U, is the technology company that I work for. Um, and I love talking about Quality about training and those things. But I think what is really interesting is how we're going to put all of these together. By the way, everybody can find me on LinkedIn as well. I'm on there way too much. So feel free. Give me a follow, send a connection request, all of those things. MASH that subscribe button, I think is what the kids say. Something like that. Ha

Irina:

I trust you on that. I am not really familiar

Rob:

ha

Irina:

that.

Rob:

ha.

Irina:

Go find Rob, go find his show. If you don't follow him already, you absolutely should and watch his podcast as well. But now on to the very important topic, because you might love talking about QM and training. We absolutely hate talking about QM and training. We associate it with shrinkage and please get my agents back on the line. I don't want to see them go anywhere. And That's maybe the starting point. Can you, because we all know it's important because we're talking about concepts like first contact resolutions and so on and so on, but can you make the journey from your perspective? What's happening on the QM side? And have you ever seen struggling with WFMers being a bit more difficult to release agents to QM?

Rob:

Yes, and yes. So let's talk about what's happening in the QM world. QM, I think, or quality management, is undergoing a fundamental change. that we have not seen in the past. So the old school quality management, particularly in contact centers, was I have a team of quality analysts, they listen to phone calls, they score them, they may provide feedback, whether that's directly to the agent or supervisor or team lead of that agent, with some expected coaching happening. The, the fundamental problem of that whole model. I can't listen to enough phone calls to really understand what the true performance gaps are. And, look, analysts are people. They are people with to do lists. They are people with biases. They, if I'm a quality analyst and you have a handful of five minute calls and one 17 minute call, Oh, hell no. I am not listening to that 17 minute call. I got other calls to get to. So I'm skipping it. That call may actually present some of the most critical performance gaps that I as an agent have that need to be addressed. And we just skipped right over it because I don't have time. Just don't have time. And so what's happening is AI is starting to fill the gap. What we can do with AI today allows us to analyze every call, whether it's 17 minutes. It doesn't take any longer than the one that's five minutes and we can provide feedback on that. So I think that's where the fundamental change is happening. We're seeing some fundamental changes in training as well, but yeah, I mean, the reality is we got to get people on the phones too, right?

Irina:

Can I, can I share my honest opinion? I'm trying to be

Rob:

it's your show, you can share

Irina:

show, but I need to be a good host. So I think, and probably a lot of people are going to go after me for saying this, but from my perspective, traditional QM, as you described it, absolutely sucks. It should be forbidden. It should be wiped out, should not be existing. And that's one of the areas where I'm very, very excited about AI, because as you mentioned. For me, it makes much more sense that you're able to analyze all of the calls than cherry pick interactions here and there because what I have seen from my perspective is As you mentioned, uh, QMs don't want to go and listen to the 17, 20 minutes calls and they pick shorter interactions. Everything is good. They are not bored. But actually I have noticed that we've been giving bonuses to people that have shorter AHD because they're very efficient and they're handling a lot of calls, blah, blah, blah. And we were penalizing a lot of these guys that are having much longer AHDs. Two years long after, sorry, we discovered that they are every single time hitting first contact resolution and the other guys were cutting the call short. And how was that not picked up by the QMs? For me, it's a mystery that can be probably easily resolved by the fact that sometimes you're just, um, lucky with the interaction that you pick. But for me, that was always like, Oh, you know, I'm not going to put these guys on the late shift by themselves cause they're so slow. And it's annoys me because we're dropping calls. Wow. The reality is, okay, these guys are actually much more valuable for the customers because they're helping them. And the other ones are screwing me over because it leads to repeat. If calls and customers calling again and being annoyed. So why are you doing this to us, Rob? You personally.

Rob:

Yeah, why am I doing it? There's something else that you didn't hit on, that is. Um, maybe you and I are friends, and then I moved into an analyst role and you are still on the phones, and I might look at things a little bit differently when I, when it's my turn to listen to your calls than I do to, you know, some other rando person that I don't know and don't have a relationship with. So there's, There's automatically this inherent problem of bias that can be introduced. Not always, right? Maybe I don't listen to people that I don't know, um, so there's no personal relationship, but there's also, and look, I'm going to be totally honest with you. There are people that I have listened to year after year in the contact center. I hate listening to them. I hate it. It's something about maybe their voice grates on me or a particular phrase that they use regularly that I'm just like, I, it, it's just not for me, but I also recognize that's my own personal bias. It's not something that hits customers because customers aren't hearing it over and over and over year after year to them. It's just a regular interaction to me. Grading. And I don't want to hear that. So there's, there's bias that we have as humans that we can help remove from the whole process. But to get back to your question, why do we do it? Well, we do it because we didn't have a better way. And ultimately, There needs to be some accountability. There needs to be some performance management. We need to have some idea about how agents are performing. And the only way we've known how to do that is to listen to calls and then coach agents. So that's why we do it. Like, Irina, we're trying to help the agents get better at their jobs so they can be potentially more efficient and help you and WFM manage service levels and make sure all the calls are getting answered in a timely manner.

Irina:

Mm hmm, mm

Rob:

There's, there's that, right? It's a symbiotic relationship, but it feels. I'm sure at times, like, Hey, I need to coach this agent. And you're like, now's not a good time, but I might be thinking as a team leader. Like, it needs to happen now because I can't have them repeat this behavior to the next customer, I need to address it right away, and it may feel more important to me to stop or correct a particular behavior than to meet service level because my responsibility is agent performance as a team leader. Not service level. That's your responsibility. That's right.

Irina:

on, wait. Because you're gonna be answering on behalf of all of the QM teams out there, the biggest irritation that we have is usually QMs coming, or TMs, whoever is doing the quality monitoring in the respective contact center. Taking people away or requesting agents to go for a meeting because they need to have their QM scoring, performance, whatever. There is a single feedback most of the times that is going back to WFM to understand the need in depth. What's happening after your evaluation? Should I be expecting any change? How is that reflected in my staffing numbers? And the thing that it's highly annoying is because We often speak that we need to be more engaging from WFM perspective. We need to explain the connection. Why do we, um, sometimes cancel vacation requests or say no to shift changers or to swapping shifts, what have you, and we need to be very descriptive to get people on board. Well, your QM guys are somewhere from our perspective in the end of the room, and I have no idea what they're doing. I just know that they had their headphones on, they're listening to calls, they're signing some stuff on some papers here and there in Excel tables, and that's the extent of it. And that's where the process breaks because I want to know if you, Rob, personally work with your agent, shall I be expecting that they're faster? Is there explanation why they are slower? Shall I have something to, uh, take into account when I'm creating the schedules? There is like, Zip. Zero. Nothing is happening. So, how can we address that challenge?

Rob:

think that's a great question. And the answer is relatively simple and that's, we just need to all have better communication. I think. A lot of companies, we get into these silos, how we operate, WFM, you're over here, and training, you're over here, and quality, you're over there, and operations, you're back here, and we're not all coming together and talking about The challenges that we're faced with solving and how we're going about solving those and how whatever we do is going to impact these other areas of the business. Because every area of the business is faced with similar conundrums from time to time, where they're asked to do something that goes against what their ultimate goal is. So let's just talk about training. Training, probably, if you ask the average trainer, they probably would say, I would like more time to train.

Irina:

Mm

Rob:

And operations is like, no. And WFM is like, no, no. Like we need those people on the floor right away and then we get them on the floor and qual the quality is like, this is what happens when you rush the training. and operations is like, well now it's my problem. And WFM is like, no, no, no, this is good'cause we're meeting service level. Then operations is like, yeah. Quality sucks. And so I have to pull them off to coach them. Right? So it's all this pull and push and tug. But I think the, the biggest problem is we're not all talking to each other to let people know, like, what is it that I have to work with Irina on? What is the specific problem that I'm addressing? And quite honestly, part of the problem is operations, depending on how you're executing them in quality. Your quality team or your operations team may not have a good answer for you.

Irina:

Mm hmm.

Rob:

Even if you asked them and said, Hey, I just want to understand, like, what are you coaching them on? What, what's the, what's the expected outcome of this? Do they know? That's a, that's a really important question. And some organizations, they're just like, I just need to coach them.

Irina:

table and ticking, like, Have you introduced yourself to the customer? Tick. Like, have you said goodbye, Mr. Customer or Mrs. Customer? Tick. Were you polite? I think so. Like, tick, tick, tick, and you get 100 percent scoring. The thing that maybe most of the organization like 99 point many, many nines after that is doing wrong from my perspective is when we're talking about training or quality monitoring or process. In general, the process remains the same, like, throughout the whole business growth or journey of that company. I don't think I have seen many organizations, maybe not even one, to be honest, that says, Okay, you know what? Our average handling time target, because, you know, it's a very sensitive topic for me, should be whatever, 300 seconds. Why? Can you explain to me why? Because for me, it's important to know the, the number, right? But I would like to understand what goes behind that number. So I can also monitor and okay, that's rather too short. Like maybe I can trigger it to the QM or training or team leads. You know what? This guy's extra short. Is there a problem with them, or maybe they have something much smarter that we can introduce to the rest of the agents, so we can lower the average handling time for everyone. So our targets Remains the same. And for me, I would be expecting from the QM training, whoever it is in charge for that initial process to revisit it and say, okay, for the past five years, we were introducing ourselves in a stupid way, which was costing us 30 seconds where we can reduce it to 10 seconds or whatever, but nobody's doing that. It's like a very stupid, static, uh, kind of a. tick box exercise that we're trying to go through. And then what you're describing is absolutely correct. We're going into the vicious cycle of, we can't have more time, but we need more time. Why do you need more time? Why can't you make an audit of your process and say, how can we doing things better? Because we often change schedules, right? We are making the exercise to say, okay, we need more late shifts. Or maybe if we change the breaks, or maybe if we change the starting times and so on, this would be the result. Never have I ever heard that feedback on the training and on the process from the QM department. So as you can see already, I'm quite ranty today. It's a very sensitive topic.

Rob:

It's okay. I am with you. I even wrote an entire article about this and it is about analyzing, like, what are you trying to get out of QA and what is the impact? There are things on QA sheets that are worthless. They are not important. Someone at some point decided, hey, these are are really important. I can tell you that, uh, we worked with a partner and we changed They're greeting. Now, there's a big difference in the outsourced world versus the insourced world in really sometimes the motivation behind lowering average handle time. In the outsourced world, often it just boils down to cost, right? I want to reduce cost because I want to reduce talk time. But that partner, we changed the way they were executing just their greeting, just how they answered the phone. And that was Among other things, a way to reduce talk time, because instead of saying, thank you for calling this brand, which they already know who they're calling, Irina, they know, they dialed the number, they know who they're calling. You don't have to say it again. They just strip that out so that instead they answer the phone, you know, good morning, this is Rob. How can I help you? And when you take that over the aggregate, it's a lot of savings of time. And I wholeheartedly agree that this checkbox, you should regularly go through that and really ask why. why. do we want this to happen? Is it truly important? How does it impact a customer? How does it impact our business? Is this important to driving revenue, for instance, or is it not? Did someone just throw this fluff in there at some point? And I don't think enough companies do that. They don't review these. Forms, and part of it is, again, they're not collaborating with the business. Quality is in their silo. They think, well, no, we should do this, but there's not enough asking why, why are we doing it this way? Help us understand. Maybe there's a really good reason behind it that we're doing this. We should regularly be taking a look at that and just maybe changing how we execute on certain things. Maybe that will help WFM.

Irina:

Yeah, I think that from WFM perspective, I don't know how is it on your QM side of things. From my WFM perspective, we're in the position of being hammered by every single department there is, like agents, QMs, team leads. Contact Center Managers. Everyone isn't happy with us. You need to communicate more. You're not doing this. You're not doing that. And we're constantly working towards, we need to be more proactive with our approach, with our communication. Well, now as a host of this show, I'm in the perfect position to rant and say that Well, maybe we should also look critically at the other departments and ask them to be more proactive because I don't believe it's the work of WFM to constantly go and beg for information and be like, Hey, can you please educate me? Can you please tell me more? Can you please, is there something new? Of course we can do it, we don't have the time to do it. It's that simple. We don't have the time. And I feel it's always like everything is in WFM. Everything is screwed. They're not giving us people. That's why, again, we don't have time for this. Service level drops is the WFM. They don't allow vacations. Everyone is miserable with us. Well, I'm equally miserable with the QM because I have no clue what you're doing, to be honest.

Rob:

mm

Irina:

clue, absolutely nothing. I don't understand your process, I don't understand what you're expecting of the agents. Big part of agent unhappiness is they're working under a lot of pressure, um, customers are shouting at them, WFM are giving them shitty shifts, then QM are scoring them low, and that's why we're triggering attrition in the contact centers. Well, I know what I can do better, but guys, you need to start communicating more. And to be honest, even in the CX space, I don't hear a lot of talk about QM. Right now it's the hype of AI, and actually I think this is gonna solve a lot of issues. But in general, this is like a subject that's like taboo, like, we know what we're doing, we don't have to tell you about

Rob:

ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Irina:

And it's fucking annoying, to be honest with you.

Rob:

I mean, here's, I think, part of the challenge Irina. I think there are a lot of quality departments that are scared. They are scared right now. And I think there's good reason, but I also think that we need to temper some of that and we need to talk to quality about the evolving role that people will have in the process, right? Just as Uh, any role might be worried about AI or some other technology displacing what they do and they're going, well, what am I think they're, that, that is true in quality. Absolutely. 100%. And by being opaque and not cluing you in to exactly what my process is, That helps me exert some control over the situation, which I don't think is good, right? It's a defensive mindset, right? Let's just, let's be real about it. It's a very defensive mindset. And that happens. It's not a QM specific thing. It just happens. I think as organizations, we need to be In general, more communicative about what does the future look like when we introduce AI into the contact center? How are we going to deploy that? And what does that potentially look like for your role? Whether you're an agent, whether you work in WFM, whether you work in training, whether you work in quality, it doesn't matter what role you work in. Maybe you're just a data analyst, right? AI is going to impact your job somehow. The question is, what's the vision from leadership about how that's going to work? And does that mean that I have a role in the company's future? And I think right now, lots of people are feeling under threat by AI, like AI's coming for my job. And it's because. Leaders aren't doing a great job of communicating what the vision is and how they anticipate AI being part of their daily work. Or, maybe the leadership doesn't really believe that. Maybe they really do want to cut jobs. And that's just creating a lot of stress in that business culture. So, you know, I think that's it. I do think that there's just a, there's just a big opportunity for everyone in a leadership position to help their people understand what's coming and how they fit into it.

Irina:

I think you're spot on with this one. The way that I'm seeing AI, again, across the board, regardless of whether we're talking about WFM, QM, whatever, is that it should enhance your skills. And let's be honest and blunt, there are still a lot of tasks, I'm not saying jobs, I'm saying tasks, that even right now, Before the hype of AI should be not done. They should have been automated. Right? And there are a lot of people who are comfortable where they are and they don't want that elimination of tasks because it means that you need to learn potentially a new task and do something different. And it's a comfort zone. And I Do understand that. However, um, as a person, as a professional, one of the things that I hate the most is when somebody tells me, well, this is our process for the past 20 years, someone invented that kind of a Excel sheet. Guys, I mean, come on, we're talking about your business growth and you want to keep your sheet from 20 years ago and execute your business process in the very same way. It's just, it's just not compatible. It doesn't match. Either you need to embrace change and start working towards that vision that you have mentioned. Either you stay where you are and then probably your competitors will wipe you out, not even AI, to be honest. And I, I think it's a great topic because first we're having the miscommunication, lack of communication between all of the parties in an organization. Now we are having AI and everyone is scared for their job, but then we're having most of the time heads of operations that Their ears perk when they hear AI. Oh, eliminating job producing calls. That's amazing. Get me on board. Let's sack people. So I think it's a great, great topic. Very difficult one. I think we're a long way before those changes are implemented in a good way. So before we wrap up, can you give me some tips? What can we do in the meantime to kind of ease the process, solve the challenges?

Rob:

One of the things that you just touched on is the role of change and how impacts people, impacts how they feel and how they react. I think number one, the very first thing that companies need to think about is how they are going to manage and communicate change. If you're not good at communicating and managing change right now, no tool is going to fix that. Every tool you introduce, no matter what you intend, It's going to receive the same kind of pushback and the same kind of fear because you are not doing a good job of helping people through that. And that's the natural reaction. I'm scared of change. I'm worried about change. And so start there. Start with understanding, okay, We're going to make a change no matter how big or how small it is. Who do I need to talk to about this? Who do I need to get on my side? Who do I need to be a cheerleader for this change? How am I going to communicate it to everyone? How do I tell them what their role is? All of these things, right? That's where I need to start. The next thing that I need to do is Answer the question, what problem am I trying to solve if I'm going to introduce a new process, tool, or procedure? What problem am I trying to solve and what does success look like? I can answer those questions adequately, And I've got a much better chance of actually achieving that success than if I haven't answered those questions. So I don't really care what the tool is. I don't care what the technology is. I don't care what the process is that you're changing. Start with asking important questions about what success looks like, what the problem is you're trying to solve, and start with identifying how you're going to communicate those changes to your employees. Things will be much, much easier on everyone. Just do that.

Irina:

And while you were talking, I was thinking exactly the same. That first of all, I'm so on board with the change management and the fact that people were scared. They don't understand. We're not communicating it. Why are we changing certain things? But also before thinking about implementing a new tool, And I'm completely with you, regardless of the two. We need to understand, why are we doing that? Why do we want to cut parts of the process? Is it because it's not working? Should it be there in the first place? Because even when we're talking about AI, we're saying, A lot of this process can be automated. Maybe we shouldn't have this process in the first place. So before you are starting to think to budget for something that you might not even need, I think organizations should just kind of be more critical and make audits of their operations and processes regularly and say, okay, This is obsolete now. This is dated. We no longer need this and just start fresh. So it's a very, very interesting topic and thank you Rob for being a guest on the show. Absolutely loved having you. And thank you for being on the receiving end of my rant episode.

Rob:

I'll listen to you rant any day, Irina, any day.

Irina:

Thank you so much and you're always welcome on the show and don't forget to follow Rob and his show on LinkedIn and you won't be disappointed.

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Irina Hollatz (Mateeva)

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