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Quality Assurance & Quarterly Bonuses
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Date: 25th Nov 2009
When Quality Assurance was first introduced, LTU gave the initiative its qualified support and hoped it would bring significant improvements to the way staff were managed and rewarded.
At the time LTU predicted a number of potential concerns that could undermine and corrupt the initial, laudable aims of the Quality Assurance and Bonus System, and, unfortunately, our fears have increasingly been realised.
LTU’s concerns regarding the Quality Assurance and Quarterly Bonus system include:
● The original focus upon delivering a quality service to customers - and only attempting to sell to clearly identified customer needs - has been seriously compromised in pursuit of demanding sales targets. Staff are expected to attempt to sell to customers on all calls: if they don’t, they risk having their QA Scores marked down and losing their Bonuses.
● Inconsistent, petty and pedantic marking of calls, leaving staff under pressure and confused about what exactly is expected of them. Furthermore, new and regularly changing scripts are often confusing and are not given sufficient time to ‘bed down’.
● Reductions in the numbers of calls marked - from the original 15 to now just 10 a quarter for full-time staff. This gives staff less chance to recover from perhaps one or two mistakes in an entire quarter.
● A clear trend over recent months toward more calls being marked as ‘Red’. This includes calls that would previously have been challenged successfully at Appeal but are now being rejected. This not only affects Advisers, but also has a knock-on effect on Team Leaders and Quality Advisers.
● Insufficient time - just five days - for Advisers to appeal against unfairly marked calls. This quarter, call marking has been ‘front-loaded’ to October, leaving many Team Leaders (especially those leading larger teams) with insufficient time to provide feedback to their Advisers before the time limit is exhausted.
● Staff who have performed well to earn Quarterly Bonuses being denied payment if their line managers say they have been off work too often. This includes staff who can prove that their sickness is genuine and who don’t even meet the Bank’s official definition of ‘Persistent Short Term Absence’.
● Poor VoiP phone quality that can disrupt the quality of calls, since staff cannot always hear customers clearly - leading to them being marked-down under QA.
● Moves toward it becoming increasingly difficult for staff to receive Gold and Silver QA Scores, despite some receiving cuts in their pay rates shortly after QA was first introduced because of the higher bonuses staff were supposedly then able to earn. Total Pay received by staff seems to be deliberately being driven down.
● Threats to staff that if they fail to achieve Silver or Gold scores, they could be put on Coaching Plans or formal Performance Improvement Plans (which could lead to their dismissal). This is despite the Bank agreeing that achieving a ‘Bronze’ call rating means that staff have performed satisfactorily.
● Unrealistic ‘compliance’ requirements that can lead to Advisers and Team Leaders being refused bonus payments. For example, for Team Leaders the 95% risk measure means just one mistake by a member of their team could lead to them receiving no bonus.
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