What is Great Service?

And many of the Matrixx managers listening in used to take calls. "The people evaluating you have done the same job you're doing," says Tomoji Shino, a Matrixx rep for a toy company. "People who have been on the phones advance because they know what it's like." (In fact, many supervisors do rise from the phones, often quite rapidly. Even President and CEO David Dougherty, who came to the company from Procter & Gamble, has spent time taking calls.)

No one is exempt from Matrixx's drive to raise the quality bar. Not even Donna Cary, a DirecTV rep in Salt Lake City, who is so good at what she does that Matrixx rewarded her with a five-day trip to Hawaii. Her special skill? Selling NFL packages to customers calling on unrelated business. "People would call to order movies," says Mark Jarvis, Cary's supervisor, "and she'd say, 'Do you like sports?'" But Cary speaks without the enthusiasm that Matrixx likes.

"I'm a real mellow person," she says. "They tell me I speak in a monotone. They say I need to be happier. I tell them I am happy. They say, 'Yeah, but you don't sound happy.'"

Jarvis has just spent two hours listening to Cary take about 18 calls. "I graded her on each call. She did very well. I talked to her about her voice inflection."

"He gives me a mirror," Cary reports, "and says, 'Smile when you're on the phone.'"

After Jarvis evaluates Cary, they switch roles, and for several calls, she evaluates her supervisor. "I like her to have a different perspective," says Jarvis.

"He's really good," says Cary. "He says, 'I'd be happy to help you with that.' That's hard to do on every call."

The process of assessing what good service means -- and figuring out how to deliver it -- never stops. The sprawling DirecTV operation takes calls 24 hours a day, 365 days a year; sometimes more than 1,000 reps in three states are on the phones at the same time. The service's programming packages are intricate and change daily. DirecTV offers 175 options, including 60 cable channels, 55 pay-per-view channels, and dozens of regional sports channels. To keep everyone on the same page, reps meet in teams for half an hour before every shift to talk about changes, problems, and quality issues -- much like the beat cops on "Hill Street Blues." Reps even receive an irreverent daily newsletter ("Direct to You") devoted to being a DirecTV agent and getting better at it.

Four times a week at each DirecTV call center, people gather to evaluate taped calls. The group includes Matrixx employees of every rank, plus managers from DirecTV. Everyone at these "calibration sessions" rates calls as they are played back, and then the group discusses each person's ratings. The result is a permanent conversation about quality, performance, and standards.

Why spend so much time on such small details? Because Matrixx sees a clear connection between the attitude of its reps, the quality of their performance, and the amount of information they gather. Over time, information about short-term problems generates long-term insights. With DirecTV, for instance, Matrixx has learned that a large increase in call volume follows the start of football season. It's learned a lot about juggling multiple promotions at one time. And it's learned that when the time comes for equipment changes (every so often, customers must replace one credit-card-sized access chip with another), it's best not to have 2.7 million customers perform the operation at once.

Great service is an art. But it's an art that lends itself to a certain kind of science. A good call is subjective -- literally a judgment call -- but that doesn't mean it can't be measured. It just can't be measured on automatic pilot. At one time, for example, Matrixx evaluated service quality with precise rating forms -- until it discovered that agents were striving not to provide great service but to get high scores. "People actually started working to the checklist," says Renee Kuwahara, who runs the DirecTV account. "But we realized they could do all the things on the list and still not satisfy the customer. The key question is, Are they satisfying customers?"