Making Notes On Customers Account

Making Notes On Customers Account

What standards do contact centres use when making notes on customers account to record details of why they were calling

Question asked by Jane

Answer for Making Notes On Customers Account

I’m not aware of any specific standards for note taking. The common ones tend to be around spelling grammar and timeliness. A number of contact centres provide agents with a short guide to abbreviations.

The other area ties in with this is call reason codes. Best practice tends to suggest that a maximum of 20 call reason codes are used and that these start with a number so that they can be entered quickly.

There is also an article by Carolyn Blunt on the web site on how to deal with after call work.

With thanks to Jonty

Answer for Making Notes On Customers Account

In my old company we used to tie this in with our call quality standards. Under the ‘Know your stuff’ section of our standards we used to score the agent against ‘were accurate notes placed on the customer’s account’. My quality assurance team would look for the following:

Accurate reflection of the call
Name of the 3rd party caller (if applicable)
If an address change took place the previous address was noted
Specific changes noted (.e.g. Any discounts, agreements, extensions made)
Note if caller failed DPA
Correct call category is selected

We did not mark down for incorrect spelling or grammar. As long as the notes made sense and gave an accurate reflection.

I hope this helps give some clarity.

With thanks to

Answer for Making Notes On Customers Account

I would say that spelling and grammar are only important to the extent that they impact clarity – if notes are totally indecipherable they’re not much good to anyone. A more problematic form of bad note-taking is messages that are long and rambling.

Agents can lose sight of what information is significant to record, so rather than cracking down on grammar, it’s worth training for ‘Who, When, Why, What’.

If they don’t know what to record, agents try to record everything. Reminding them that the important details are Who Called, When they called, Why they called, and What you did for them, can help.

It would be a good idea to produce a style guide based on the best practice of your more experienced agents. This might include examples of Who, When, Why, What writing, as well as some standard abbreviations and shorthand. As a fringe benefit, improving note-taking can reduce wrap-up time too.

Notes should also create as complete an audit trail as possible. Agents who make reference to their colleagues or other departments should record exactly who they have spoken to. This generates accountability and prevents work getting lost in ‘I thought he was going to deal with it’ situations.

It’s also much easier to keep track of an event with a detailed audit trail. If a customer calls for an update, it should be easy to tell from their case notes exactly what progress has been made.

One final thing that sometimes gets overlooked – customers can ask for copies of any information you hold on them, including their notes.* Agents should never write anything about a customer that they wouldn’t want them reading.

*This is true in the UK, and many other other countries besides.

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