Chasing Quality

Chasing Quality

Utility Safety Partners is serious about its responsibility to provide safe, reliable service to Alberta’s digging community, asset-owners and other stakeholders and members.

To consistently provide our best service requires that quality of service is a priority at all levels of the organization. Our commitment to quality starts with our ISO 9001 certified Quality Management System (QMS) and ensuring that every USP employee from the President on down is aware of our QMS. Maintaining quality means we define our quality objectives and procedures, audit our delivery of services and adherence to procedure, identify gaps and non-conformances, and take action to prevent non-conformances from re-occurring. USP has been ISO-certified for the past two years, and despite the odd grumbling about excessive documentation, the program is resulting a group effort to continuously improve. 

With that goal in mind, we took a hard look at service delivery in our annual review of the Contact Centre’s performance delivery in 2022. Our QMS experience tells us that we won’t be perfect, but we can always improve. We identified two service levels we wanted to focus on improving in 2023:

Ticket Quality – every ticket transmitted to a member should be error-free and provide accurate information to enhance safety in the field for members, locators and excavators.
Workforce Management – with a shrinking Contact Centre workforce, it became apparent this year how much service can be impacted when one or two agents are unavailable for a scheduled shift.
Our first steps toward improvement were to create a Quality Team, whose responsibilities will be focused on these two particular goals. Our new Quality Control Supervisor, Kyle Huhn, will manage a team of three Quality Control Agents, who will monitor agent interactions alongside the Team Leaders. Our goal is to provide consistent accurate feedback to the agents from a larger pool of monitoring staff. By also analyzing repeated errors, we can take action to improve quality across the contact centre.

The Quality Control Supervisor will also be responsible for scheduling and workforce management. It will be important to make shift adjustments and shuffle resources to meet our service delivery goals when agents are unexpectedly absent or unable to complete their shift. By making a single position accountable for managing our resources, we remove the watered-down responsibility shared among three Team Leaders and the Contact Centre Manager and tighten up our focus on a consistent approach to how we assign and re-assign staff to different tasks.

I am looking forward to supporting Kyle in this new position. I am certain that he will take ownership of the delivery of services in the contact centre and will lead us to new levels of quality throughout the new year.

Sher Kirk - USP Operations Director