Award success for Serco's pioneering quality management programme

A far-reaching quality management programme that puts customers at the very heart of service delivery has secured a top industry award and is now expected to set new standards in operational excellence within the Contact Centre industry.  Following a highly successful and innovative pilot programme, the new Serco Quality Framework has just secured a key award for 'Excellence in Transformation' in the industry-wide P&Q Challenge and is now about to be rolled out across six of Serco's UK retail operations. And the executive responsible for developing and implementing the new framework has been shortlisted for a top personal award for her achievements over the past 12 months.

The P&Q Challenge is a major collaborative venture in the customer service sector to identify new benchmarks for performance management and quality monitoring within an industry that is undergoing considerable operational change. The new Quality Framework developed by Serco has been developed in response to the challenge and aims to provide a consistent and supportive approach to quality management across different work streams and different forms of customer contact. 

Serco's new concept has been developed to reflect all key business requirements as well as the principles of continuous service improvement. And, in an industry first, competencies and performance standards are now aligned fully with direct customer feedback and the drive to be a global leader in retail customer experience.

"The new framework is a far cry from conventional performance measures and traditional quality control processes associated with Contact Centres," explains Julia Ashman, Serco's Head of Process Assurance and Quality, who has been responsible for developing the new framework and who has been shortlisted as National Quality Manager of the Year in the 2014 Call Centre Management Association (CCMA) Awards. 

She said: "We've moved away from 'tick box' performance measures and gone right back to the drawing board. This has helped to highlight the most important things for today's customers, how we can make it easier for customers to do business with us and how we can ensure our service performance is measured and improved in accordance with the real priorities of the business. We've consulted extensively with Advisers and Team Leaders every step of the way and have taken every opportunity to apply customer insight in developing a more appropriate quality framework that is easy to use, motivational and progressive. As a result our approach to training and the personal development of Advisers is now focused primarily on conversational and customer management skills rather than adherence to prescriptive and one-dimensional processes."