Customer Service Quality Assurance (QA) – Everything You Need to Know
One of the most effective ways to get newcomers up to speed is through coaching. In new agent training programs, conversation reviews are an efficient coaching tool.
Additionally, if your onboarding routines are set up so that all new agents’ responses are evaluated before they are delivered to clients, you’ll be able to let new hires handle actual support issues right away without worrying that a customer would receive an incomplete response.
All of your training, coaching, and quality control processes are in line with your internal quality standards thanks to customer service QA. By doing this, you’ll consistently deliver high-quality customer service to all agents and support channels. Your clients will value that.
What does quality assurance in customer service mean?
Monitoring the calibre of customer interactions is known as customer service quality assurance. You may evaluate and enhance the performance of your staff and the broader support system with regular conversation reviews.
For the following conversations, the majority of teams use support QA:
Samples of all interactions with support
Obtain a summary of the team’s performance and monitor the level of support over time. Reviewing a variety of conversations ensures that your quality program doesn’t focus too heavily on identifying errors in your agents’ responses and offers insightful input on cases that were handled successfully.
Even a simple “well done, continue” from a customer is valuable feedback. This kind of appreciation is frequently undervalued.
The majority of support interactions (about 90%) fall into this category, therefore reminding agents that they typically handle situations correctly can help them stay motivated and aware of their abilities.
All discussions that customers rate as being satisfied
Customers utilize customer surveys to give feedback on a variety of aspects of their customer experience, not simply the calibre of your service. Companies receive their overall CSAT score from these surveys.
First, going over these discussions will help you decide whether to provide customer feedback to the product, marketing, sales, or any other team.
Because of this, using CSAT surveys alone won’t provide you with a clear assessment of customer service performance.
Second, examining encounters that resulted in favorable or negative feedback from your consumers will help you figure out what increases and decreases customer satisfaction. You’ll discover what to avoid doing to stop repeating the same errors over and over again and which communication styles to adopt to increase client satisfaction with your offerings.
During the onboarding of new agents
One of the most effective ways to get newcomers up to speed is through coaching. In new agent training programs, conversation reviews are an efficient coaching tool.
Additionally, if your onboarding routines are set up so that all new agents’ responses are evaluated before they are delivered to clients, you’ll be able to let new hires handle actual support issues right away without worrying that a customer would receive an incomplete response.
All of your training, coaching, and quality control processes are in line with your internal quality standards thanks to customer service QA. By doing this, you’ll consistently deliver high-quality customer service to all agents and support channels. Your clients will value that.
How to establish a good program among your support staff
Create a support quality program for your staff before you start your client contacts. This will provide your QA efforts with a framework and ensure that everyone is working toward the same support vision.
According to Zendesk’s 2021 research, 75% of customers are eager to spend more money with businesses that offer satisfying customer experiences. Let’s begin, then.
To set up a quality and QA program for your customer service team, follow these steps:
- Define your team’s definition of “quality” by defining your support vision and goals. : Every firm has a distinct idea of what is most important to its operations and clients. Some companies prioritize providing individualized support to increase customer loyalty and upsell their products, while others would choose to make their contacts brief and efficient.
- Establish internal quality criteria : Create standards for your support agents to adhere to while dealing with customers based on your support vision and goals. To determine how closely your team’s responses adhere to your quality standards, use these criteria in your support QA reviews. Watch the video here to learn more on “How Multi-Dimensional Quality Scorecard” help you improve your CX. Click here: https://transmonqa.com/multi-dimensional-quality-score/
Regular support QA reviews are carried out by 69% of customer care teams.
The majority of teams employ three grading criteria: completeness/correctness of the solution, accurate product knowledge, and suitable empathy/tone.
Who will conduct the reviews?
Most of the time, managers are in charge of giving agents feedback, therefore they also support QA. To prevent overtaxing the managers and to devote more time to discussion evaluations, more teams are transitioning to peer reviews or hiring quality assurance specialists.
Select the discussions you want to review. The majority of teams typically examine a random sample of their client interactions. Additionally, the majority of support teams go over all of the tickets that users have rated to determine if their internal quality standards line up with those of their clients.
Teams are becoming more conscious of the value of data literacy. Consumer assistance To determine which interactions are appropriate for you to evaluate and filter accordingly, AI software use machine learning and language processing.
Establish a feedback loop among your team. Just as crucial as conducting conversation reviews is what you do with the QA outcomes. Track the progress of your team’s performance over time, discuss it in team meetings, and provide each member of the team feedback in frequent one-on-one meetings.
Negative feedback is necessary for support agents to advance professionally. Look at these feedback strategies to learn how to give it to your team if you’re unsure of how to do so diplomatically and productively. This template for a one-on-one customer service meeting may be helpful to you as well.
You’ve developed a comprehensive framework for your support QA and prepared your team for success when you design your customer service quality program from your support vision to how you will follow up on the review results with your agents in one-on-one meetings!
How do you build a scorecard for quality assurance in customer service?
The base of your quality program is the customer service QA scorecard. The criteria will be used to evaluate how well the support interactions between members of your team adhere to internal standards.
When developing your customer service QA scorecard, bear the following in mind:
- Use rating categories that are consistent with your support standards and goals.
Make sure your scorecard has at least one rating category for each of your quality criteria. - The more (rating categories) the less (reviews)
Keep your rubric brief and straightforward. It becomes less probable that you will really perform routine support QA the more rating categories you have and the more complicated the scorecard becomes.
It’s typical to use 3 to 5 rating categories. - Make your rating categories a priority.
Your rubric probably includes elements of varying relevance. Increase the importance of the categories that matter the most, and make some of them crucial, so that failure in one of them would result in the failure of the entire ticket.
Choose the rating scale that meets your needs
From 2 points to 11 points (and more), your choice of rating scales can affect your conversation review rates. The larger the scale, the more precise the results – but, at the same time, the more complex assessments will become for the reviewers.
Customer service quality assurance issues
In order to comprehend how large teams with 25 agents or more evaluate their interactions, we went into TransMon’ anonymized usage data. Here is what we discovered.
Customer service quality assurance questions
Solution: 11% of big customer service teams ask, “Did the agent deliver the proper answer and directions to customers’ questions?” as the most popular rating category. Support’s primary duties include resolving customer problems, so it is only fitting that it be included among the most well-liked rating categories. It’s also crucial to keep in mind that answers are frequently assessed from two angles: their correctness and their completeness.
The second most common rating factor once more highlights the fact that each squad has its unique requirements that they must satisfy.
The scorecard is the backbone of your quality program. The results of your support QA depend on how you’ve set up the rubric. Take your time to make sure it covers all the right aspects to give you an adequate overview of your team’s performance.
The second most common rating factor once more highlights the fact that each squad has its unique requirements that they must satisfy. 11% of customer service teams assess if responses from agents adhere to their internal procedures, including:
- Tickets were accurately categorized and tagged.
- If necessary, cases were properly sent to other teams.
- The intended macros were utilized.
9% of customer service teams rate the interactions of their agents on their product knowledge. This includes technical expertise in everything from problem-solving to giving customers precise counsel and instructions.
Depending on the tone of the organization, the agents may be required to engage in a formal and professional manner or with a warm and relaxed demeanor. It would be hard to provide tone and style recommendations that would work for all businesses. It’s a feature that needs to be assessed through your QA process and described in internal standards.
One further requirement for meeting the standards for inclusion in the most well-liked rating categories is deserving of mention. 7% of customer service teams evaluate how well their agents verified that they correctly understood the problems of the customers. It’s important to ask the appropriate clarifying questions to ensure that they are aware of the problems they must address.
When it comes to measuring the level of customer service quality, there is no one size fits all approach. If these figures and graphs whetted your appetite, read the complete article on the various support QA areas.
When should you use a QA tool for customer service?
The process of quality control can take a long time. Teams may spend hours on managerial chores connected to the maintenance of the system if they were done manually, in addition to the time it takes for reviewers to assess the interactions and offer input.
For small teams with modest levels of support (and review), a straightforward spreadsheet may be sufficient. However, manual copy-pasting and reporting can become a support QA bottleneck as the team and quantity of chats expand.
- Connect to their support desk and have discussions automatically pulled in for review,
- Provide personalized scorecards to meet the requirements of each firm, To evaluate the performance of the team, calculate the internal quality score.
- Create useful reports that aid in monitoring the quality of the support received over time, Agents should be informed of the comments they have received by Slack, email, etc.
- Utilize AI-driven features to accelerate the quality assurance process and deliver data insights.
- You can quickly set up and try out TransMon, a tool for ensuring the quality of customer service.
- Use the browser extension or connect it to your helpdesk software to review conversations in any online setting.
Across all industries, Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is one of the most popular support metrics. Every customer-centric organization must measure and monitor the level of client satisfaction with its services. But CSAT does not provide a whole picture. The following three factors will help you understand why you should integrate customer feedback with internal assessments and support QA:
- CSAT doesn’t just show how well your help is provided.
Customer attitudes toward your product, marketing, sales, and other aspects of the customer experience are factored into your CSAT score. - Customers are unaware of how complicated their questions are.
Some bug fixes or feature requests may seem straightforward to a customer, but the product team may spend weeks implementing them. Therefore, some low CSAT ratings are a reflection of users’ dissatisfaction with that, not the caliber of your agents’ work. - Your quality requirements are unknown to your customers.
They are only able to provide feedback on how closely your team’s performance fulfills their standards for quality customer service. Your staff may occasionally be held to greater standards by your internal standards than by your clients. - You can compare client satisfaction with your internal quality standards via conversation reviews.
You can receive a complete picture of your team’s performance based on both internal and external feedback if you combine CSAT with IQS.
By switching from spreadsheets to TransMon, Customer Service Quality Management Platform the organizations are able to cut their support QA time in half.
Every business has a special quality program based on its own internal standards and objectives. Different teams favor various review formats: some employ QA experts, while others turn to manager, peer, or self-reviews. No approach is correct or incorrect. Instead, pick the format that works best for you
