Tucows Inc. is a publicly traded Internet services and telecommunications company, headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is the second-largest domain registrar worldwide and operates over eNom, and OpenSRS, platforms for domain resellers. Over 40,000 web hosts, Internet service providers and Web companies encompass the OpenSRS/Enom wholesale platform managing domain names, email addresses and digital security products for millions of end users worldwide. From domain registration (Hover/Enom retail) to web hosting (ExactHosting) to Telco (Ting Mobile) to as fibre Internet (Ting Internet), Tucows' Retail Support services help over 700000 combined end user customers demystify her technology services every day.
We asked Tucows' Senior team about their Quality Assurance programs. Here is what they told us.
Since inception, quality management was organic and instinctive for Tucows. The way we worked with each other internally and with end users created a coaching culture. This made it easy to maintain our very high standards when retail support began with one brand.
Years later and after explosive growth, the amount of staff in our locations around the world created challenges to maintaining quality, and our now varied business lines have added even more staff. All this made us think deeply about optimal behaviours that go into creating great customer experiences.
Using Scorebuddy helped us break-down and quantify those approaches that accounted for our Initial awesomeness, so we can continue to teach staff how to do It on purpose instead of by luck
We measure behaviours that most often result in splendid, tailored customer experiences. We check for things like owning situations, using regular language without complex jargon, following-through on promises, active listening, and creative problem solving. In addition, we focus on all those things that go into one-to-one communication and that have gone a long way to providing consistency across the entire Support floor.
We started measuring TNPS (transactional net promoter score) several years ago and added NPS as we worked to identify the "secret" to our approach. We learned customers loved us, but we didn't know what we were doing that was so different.
Scorebuddy's approach is congruent with our own perspective on how to treat customers, so it was a great fit for the next leg of our journey. The interface is fast to learn and easy to use at any level and isn't bloated with a lot of useless "value-adds" no one actually wants or needs. It does exactly what you need it to do. Everyone is always so helpful, no matter how crazy our questions. They are very receptive to our feature request ideas.
Scorebuddy has now become an extension of our organization. It allows us to continue our unique coaching approach while maintaining standardisation that unifies the support aspect of our varied business lines. With agile development driving everything we do, we're not afraid to try anything and have used various third-party services, but none of them did everything. Having everything in one place in Scorebuddy is convenient. The built-in Analytics reporting saved us having to develop our own and we have a solution for the storage of coaching notes. In our coaching culture, the 360-degree visibility aspect allows us to work the way we prefer. Everyone from the newest agent up to the VP is involved in the ongoing dialogue about our approach, so we can continue to adjust it with changing trends. The ability for agents to reach back out to discuss scores and coaching puts development squarely into their own hands, too. It even allows us to gather information from the frontline for onboard training, internal documentation and to gain ideas for more customer-centric brand development.
In the year since we formalised a Coaching Program, we put the Scorebuddy Interface through its paces. And we don't have a monitoring or QA team. Mirroring our multiple business lines, we use a decentralised yet tailored approach where managers and SMEs monitor and coach within their brand while all following a single set of standards for customer experience. We manipulated Interface features to do things like add our QSDD and Coaching Program Guide inside the interface on the Group Goals tab, making them readily available during coaching conversations.
We massaged a non-numerical scorecard into a submission tool for ad hoc coaching notes, so those great conversations that happen on-the-fly around the floor every day are no longer lost pieces of each agent's development story. We created a separate Group so they can be filtered out in reporting from agent score trends.
And the Causes...LOVE the root causes. We examined thousands of interactions to pull out exact reasons why agents might not meet an expectation to help them self¬identify and then broke them down further into skill areas. This helps us have targeted coaching conversations and the agents then know in which areas to apply more of their development energy. Plus, it helps us identify areas of opportunity based on skills, so we can help our staff develop in directions that increase their personal satisfaction to lower churn. As we move into the second year of developing our Coaching Program, we are excited to see what we can do with the newest Scorebuddy features!