What are your tips for creating scorecards so that they are as objective as possible?

Hi Kristen,

Contact center scorecards, have quite a lot of very objective targets on them:
Handling Times, Wrap Up Times, Occupancy %, Compliance %, etc.etc.

The two subjective items on the scorecard are customer satisfaction (which an organization should not try to tweak) and quality.

Reading your last sentence, I hope I understand correctly, and it is the quality evaluation scorecard that your question is targeting specifically.
Quality Scorecards contain both objective and subjective scores. Objective scores would be things like:
- Correct Greeting
- Correct Ending
- Correct Solution to the customers question
etc.
Subjective scores are more difficult, but can not be erased from the scorecard:
- Empathy
- Tone of Voice
- Control over the contact
etc.

You are totally right, that it is never possible to give a 100% objective rating on these scores. However, there are multiple things you can do to assure that the ratings are trustworthy and reliable.

1. Make sure there are regular calibration sessions by all the members of staff who are responsible for rating the subjective scores. By assuring that there is a well calibrated team in place, you reduce the chance of unfair differences between this group of staff members.
2. If possible, try to regularly assign a different quality assessor to an agent. This reduces the chance of unfair treatment of agents.
3. Allow for agents to sit down with assessors if they feel a quality assessment is unfair or unbalanced. Make sure that you limit the amount of times agents can requests these sessions otherwise you will have some agents constantly knocking on the assessors doors.
4. Try to get some outside support on an annual or semi-annual basis to sit down with the quality assessors as an independent advisor. This kind of external feedback keeps the quality assessors on their toes.

I hope this answer was helpful.

Niek Bosch