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August 24, 2024
Customer happiness is the heart and soul of every business. But how do you ensure your support team is providing a positive experience in every interaction?
That's where quality assurance comes into play. In this blog post, we'll explore what quality assurance is, why it's essential for delivering awesome customer support, and how you can implement it in your customer management strategy.
Let’s begin!
In customer service, quality assurance or QA is the act of ensuring that the products or services you provide satisfy the quality standards you have established for your business. This involves tracking and reviewing customer interactions, such as support calls, messages, social media mentions, etc.
Implementing a QA process provides benefits beyond immediate quality concerns, including the following:
Quality assurance can offer rich insights into customer interactions,which in turn can improve your customer's experiences.
Getting an accurate view of your present customer service allows you to quickly discover business trends, support teams' strengths and weaknesses, and detect the core reason for any inadequate service efforts.
A strong coaching programme ensures that your agents possess the right product expertise and uphold the high-quality standards of your brand.
This assistance can boost agents' confidence when answering queries and improve their response time. Moreover, when agents are aware that they are being monitored, they are more inclined to perform their tasks correctly.
Not being able to get the right support frustrates customers. By integrating QA into your support system, you can consistently identify customer pain points as well as agent performance.
When you offer support in a timely manner and it's effective, it makes customers happy. And happy customers will buy more and stay loyal to your business.
Learn More about Digital Customer Experience
Before starting the QA process, define what successful customer service looks like for your business. Your present business position provides an excellent starting point for identifying your data sources.
If you are a new business, start by gathering data from the following sources:
And, for businesses that interact with customers frequently, consider collecting customer data from the sources mentioned earlier in addition to these:
Once you have gathered customer data, iterate over the information to form the basis of your customer support strategy. Look out for common patterns, such as their needs, their preferred way of communication, feedback on areas like resolution speed, and then develop your framework.
A scorecard is essentially a checklist with a set of questions and metrics that serve as a benchmark for your quality standard.
Based on your goals from step one, pick up the metrics for your scorecard.
While each business has its own preferences, some of the most popular metrics used on scorecards are:
Pro Tip: Make sure to keep your scorecard simple and straightforward. This will empower your team to use the criteria frequently.
Each criterion is then assigned a certain number of points by the reviewer. Based on that score, you can identify whether the agent's performance was satisfactory or not.
Pro Tip: If you are providing support through multiple channels, make sure to create a scorecard for each channel. This will help capture the nuances of every medium.
Once you have created your scorecard, share it with your team members to receive feedback. Additionally, implement the scorecard on previous interactions. This will help you quickly spot any metrics that might be missing from the scorecard.
Now that you have created your scoring system, identify who or which group of people is going to evaluate the scorecard. Depending on factors like company size, several titles from your business can review the interactions, including:
In most businesses, they are the most common type of QA reviewers. This is due to managers being both cost-effective and adaptable. They have a deep understanding of the company's needs as well as the strengths and weaknesses of agents, making the review process seamless.
If you are a large-scale business, you may decide to hire a full-time QA specialist. They can consistently monitor your quality standards, create experimental scorecards based on new industry regulations, and recommend solutions for any issues that arise.
In peer review, each agent evaluates the work of other team members based on the standard scorecard. This approach is particularly effective for smaller teams with broad objectives. It not only provides agents with first-hand knowledge of QA initiatives but also promotes collaboration.
Every customer message counts. But if you are a business that experiences hundreds of customer interactions per day, it can become difficult to review every single one.
Therefore, remember to work smarter, not harder, when it comes to reviewing questions. While you might feel like picking random interactions or the most recent ones from your conversation window, you may have to go through some irrelevant conversations, which can be time-consuming.
Here are some suggestions for the type of conversation you might look out for:
Manual QA is effective, but AI-powered QA software offers an opportunity to deliver simpler and more accurate quality assurance results at scale.
During manual quality assurance, reviewers have to go through extensive volumes of customer messages to make a decision. This means that reviewers have to invest a lot of work hours to gain performance data.
By integrating AI into the QA process, you can automatically analyse entire threads of customer-agent interactions, helping you find trends and insights that you may otherwise overlook.
This includes reviewing customer interactions through several metrics, such as — support call quality, response time, compliance, etc., — to evaluate whether the support provided satisfies your vision of quality support. Furthermore, AI scoring removes human biases, offering your business a chance to develop consistent and fair assessments.
Pro Tip: Observe AI is AI-based QA software that automatically audits all customer interactions and scores agents' performance against the set guidelines. Plus, you can use the performance feedback to optimise your coaching workflows and proactively train your agents.
While integrating a well-functioning QA system into your business looks simple, it can be quite complicated. Here are a few ways you can facilitate the process:
Following a set of guidelines in a conversation may not come naturally to many agents.
A company that wants to ensure their support team is better at serving customers through quality standards must first be open to an adaptable mindset, willing to compromise any work schedule conflicts during this phase.
Team leaders need to offer hands-on training in QA initiatives and answer questions in such a way that the overarching idea is reinforced.
You need robust customer feedback and survey information at each touchpoint to understand whether your service standards are improving the customer's experience.
Three key feedback scores that can help you understand your customer’s level of satisfaction include:
Pro Tip: You can use feedback tools like Mevrik AI CSAT to automatically deploy a CSAT survey in seconds after the contract ends. You can then systematically collect and analyse the feedback scores through an intuitive dashboard.
Knowing how to deliver feedback can be tricky. There is a fine line between offering constructive and destructive criticism that QA reviewers often struggle to navigate.
Thus, make sure to deliver feedback that precisely highlights the issues in QA scorecard evaluation and delivers it with real-world examples and actionable insights. Make sure to follow up and offer any additional support to empower their learning journey.
Remember, the right encouragement can transform your agents as well as your team's performance for better.
Your service quality will be remembered for a long time, even after the price is forgotten. Therefore, make sure to create an excellent QA process that ensures customer happiness.
That being said, quality assurance doesn't need to be a painful task. You can use AI-powered softwares like Mevrik CX AI that automates your customer service and QA workflows from one platform.
Sign up for Mevrik CX AI today.
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