Guide to Building Call Center Quality Monitoring Scorecards

Creating a quality monitoring scorecard for your customer service team or call center can be a scary task. Questions abound. How many items should it hold? What type of scoring method should we use? Which questions matter the most? And which are the ones that don’t? Will it lead to increased agent performance?!

What makes it even scarier is that the call center scorecard is the foundation of a great quality assurance program. A bad scorecard can lead to scores that don’t represent what a quality interaction actually means to your brand or worse still—result in inflated customer satisfaction metrics that your team can’t use to improve (GASP!). 

But as Jeremy Watkin, long-time QA professional, tells us, creating a quality management form doesn’t have to be scary. There are some tried and tested methods that companies can use to think through the process of creating a quality form that works really well for their unique business (and their unique customer base). 

These articles walk you through various methods of thinking about what should go into your agent scorecard, starting from your first, to your second, to your 30th quality assurance scorecard/rubric. Ultimately, these changes will lead to improved customer satisfaction, a better customer experience, and increased customer loyalty. But first, let's define what call center scorecards are and explain why they are so necessary for your call center.

What is a Call Center Monitoring Scorecard?

A call center monitoring scorecard is an evaluation tool used to gauge how well your contact center is performing. It can provide you with details on how to analyze agent performance, client responses, and compliance or noncompliance with your business' SOPs. A good call center scorecard is objective, allowing you to pinpoint the team's or an individual's strengths and weaknesses.

Scorecards are effective because they are agent-focused across all channels, including phone, email, chat, social media, etc. With this you can keep track of, inform, and improve customer experiences across your company.

Simply put,  call center monitoring scorecards serve as a framework for call center agents to improve, by providing measurable metrics that impact customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.

Key Metrics and KPIs Tracked in the Scorecard

Some of the key metrics that are tracked in a quality assurance scorecard include call resolution rate, call handling time, customer satisfaction score, first call resolution rate, and adherence to script or call flow. By tracking these metrics, call center managers can identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions to improve the overall quality of service provided by their agents.

Additionally, KPIs such as agent attendance, punctuality, and compliance with company policies and procedures are also tracked in the scorecard. These KPIs help ensure that agents are adhering to company standards and are performing their duties in a professional and timely manner.

Why You Need a Call Center Quality Monitoring Scorecard

In today's highly competitive business landscape, it's crucial for call centers to prioritize quality assurance. It can make the difference between a satisfied, loyal customer and a lost opportunity. Call center quality assurance is an investment that pays off in the form of happy customers, increased revenue, and a positive brand image. You’ll find more ways in which it can benefit your customers, call center agents, and overall business below. 

Benefits for Your Customers

Firstly, having a quality monitoring scorecard in place ensures that customer concerns are addressed and resolved quickly and effectively. This leads to improved customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. Additionally, a quality scorecard helps identify areas where agents may need additional training, leading to more competent and confident agents who can provide better customer service.

Benefits for Your Call Center Agents

In terms of benefits for agents, a quality scorecard helps to promote consistency and fairness in performance evaluations. Agents can see where they excel and where they need improvement, leading to more meaningful feedback and better opportunities for professional development.

Benefits for Your Business

Finally, having a quality monitoring scorecard in place can ultimately benefit the business as a whole. With improved customer satisfaction and agent performance, businesses can expect to see increased revenue, decreased customer churn, and a stronger reputation in their industry.

If you are ready to go really in-depth into building QA scorecards that will generate insights and trustworthy data for your Customer Experience (CX) team, look no further than our Ultimate Guide to CX QA Scorecards, or keep reading for more information on how to build your own!

How To Build Your First QA Scorecard

What does Roman urban planning have to do with building a QA Scorecard? Lots, as you’ll find in this article. There’s one key difference, though. Building your first QA Scorecard is going to be way easier than planning a whole city. 

With your training wheels firmly attached as you speed down the Via Maestro, you’ll learn:

👉 What is a QA Scorecard and why your CX team needs one

👉 The tools you can rely on to build that first Call Center Quality Monitoring scorecard

👉 Three examples of companies who’ve gone and built their scorecards from the ground up with our process.

👉 The essential CX software integrations you need to get up and running.

And while Rome wasn’t built in a day, your first call center QA scorecard certainly can be!

Read this article to learn how.

Choosing the Right Metrics

‍An effective call center quality monitoring scorecard is essential to ensuring that customers are receiving the best possible service, agents are performing at their highest level, and businesses are meeting their goals. To build an effective scorecard, it is important to choose the right metrics that are relevant to your business and goals. This could include metrics such as call handling time, first call resolution, customer satisfaction, and agent performance.

Setting Achievable Goals

When setting goals for your scorecard, it is important to make them achievable and measurable. Goals could include reducing call handling time by a certain percentage or increasing first call resolution rates. 

Measuring and Reporting Progress

Measuring progress is also critical in ensuring the effectiveness of your scorecard. Regularly reporting progress to stakeholders and making adjustments as needed can help ensure that your scorecard is effective in improving call center quality.

Training and Coaching Agents

Training and coaching should focus on areas identified by the scorecard as needing improvement. This can include topics such as communication skills, product knowledge, and problem-solving techniques.

Additionally, agents should be provided with feedback and coaching based on their individual performance metrics. By addressing specific areas of improvement, agents can make targeted changes and improve their overall performance.

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Kickstart your QA Scorecard Research Process

First scorecard done and dusted? The work doesn’t stop there. Unlike a foundation (yes I’m still hanging on to the Roman city analogy) that gets buried under feet of rubble and concrete, you can always pull out your call center scorecard, reassess if it’s carrying the weight that it should, and rebuild if you have to.

This article helps you to think critically about the many great examples that we feature here on the website. While every customer that we feature here is a successful example of how to build your own QA scorecard (and program!) from scratch, QA is not really one of those things where you can buy off-the-rack.

In this article, we feature 5 common questions that we’ve seen appear in many scorecards, and tear them down to expose the logic behind each question.

Through that process, you’ll be able to learn:

👉 how the pros are thinking about their call center quality monitoring scorecards

👉 how you can apply that to your own QA scorecards

Read the article here.

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Omnichannel Contact Center Assurance Scorecards - The Definitive Guide

So you’ve iterated on a few scorecards, you’re feeling fairly confident about your scorecard-building skills, and your QA program is working like a charm. CSAT and customer satisfaction is at an all-time high📈, and more importantly, your agents are motivated and doing better than ever 💪.

You lean back in your chair, thinking you’ve earned some rest when….

“Next quarter... let’s take our CX omnichannel.”

Drats. Bosses never take breaks, do they?

We’ve got your back. Building an omnichannel call center quality assurance scorecard doesn’t mean tearing up your old scorecard and rebuilding it from scratch. Think of it more like an upgrade, where you take a hard look at your existing parameters and figure out if they still make sense as you move to an omnichannel strategy, or as your brand evolves over time.

In this article, we apply Jeremy Watkin’s 4C framework to planning an omnichannel scorecard that will get your boss off your back - until next quarter, that is.

Catch a break here.

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‍Creating a Customer Service Quality Assurance Scorecard Doesn’t Have to Be Scary

Speaking of Jeremy Watkins, this article by him imparts 20 years of customer-facing experience to help guide you along the process of building out a call center quality assurance form on any medium, be it in a spreadsheet, or an omnichannel QA platform.

The first step is to consider your company’s brand, how you want to be perceived by your customers, and what good looks like for your specific company and customers. This includes: 

👉 What you call your customers (and what your greeting script is)

👉 What the philosophy or mission of your company is and (equally importantly) what the mission of your support team is 

👉 What good looks like for your company, and support team (is there a list of things that make up a “good” customer interaction for your team, etc) 

The next step is to think about quality in three separate areas: 

👉 Accuracy: Did you provide the right answer? In the right way? Were all internal processes followed?

👉 Compliance: Did the agent handle PII in the right way? Did you protect the log-in information of your customer? 

👉 Connection: THIS ONE IS LAST-BUT-DEFINITELY-NOT-LEAST, WOW! Did the agent have an authentic interaction with the customer that will differentiate your brand from the other companies that customer has talked with? Was it real? Was it human? Did the agent thank the customer for their time? And so on... 

Then, how do you think about the ways that you use this customer service quality assurance checklist to create different scorecards for each channel (or do you use the same form?), and what should you look for in a support tool to support your team goals? 

Read this article, and be not afraid!

(Another fun read – the only difference between fear and courage is the action that you take). 

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Creating an Omnichannel CX Quality Management Form

More from our guest blogger Jeremy Watkins here - use this to guide your omnichannel QA scorecard building process. There are two schools of thought about how many call center quality monitoring scorecards companies should have. Some believe that you should have a different form for each support channel. After all, each channel requires a very different set of communication skills. 

For instance – tone of voice matters over the phone, and doesn’t really exist for other channels. And grammar might be more important in an email than over SMS, where an agent could be a lot more casual with a customer. 

Others think that a single quality monitoring scorecard should be applicable for every customer interaction so that it better reflects the customer experience. After all, each channel should be aligning to a standard of excellence that applies to every interaction a customer has with your brand, right? 

For adherents of the second school, this article lays out a game plan to create scorecards that work across all your channels:

👉 Communication Skills – How well did the agent communicate the message?

👉 Customer Connection – Did the agent make a human connection with the customer?

👉 Compliance and Security – Did we follow all essential policies and procedures to keep the customer and the company safe?

👉 Correct and Complete Content – Did we give out correct AND complete answers and use our tools effectively to arrive at those answers?

...and covers the nuances of how these pillars can mean slightly different things on different communication platforms. 

It also goes into the benefits of omnichannel customer service scorecards, and considerations for creating this type of form. Including: 

• Keep your form relatively simple 
• Create a quality definitions guide 
• Use N/A for certain questions 
• Grade the entire interaction 
• Slice and dice by channel and question in your reporting 
  

Start livin’ la vida omnichannel! 

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Using Company Core Values to Build Your Quality Management Scorecard

FullStory has a simple mission – they believe that everyone benefits from a more perfect online experience. To help accomplish that mission, they have some watchwords (read: brand values) to guide them. These are: empathy, clarity and bionics. 

The watchwords give everyone at the company a framework from which to make decisions, and guide both their product decisions as well as how they operate their call center internally. 

Fullstory leaned heavily on their watchwords when building their quality monitoring scorecard, and it allowed the support team to align with the efforts from marketing, sales, and product.

Learn more about what they did here.

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Building a more Human Quality Assurance Scorecard

SeatGeek built a ticket search engine with the knowledge that scoring tickets to your favorite band, or ringside seats to a boxing game can be an intense affair.

Behind the tech, they also put together a personable, human CX team to ensure that their clients received the support that they needed.

When the time came to add a QA program, they wanted the same humanity and care to be shown to their agents as well.

Read about how SeatGeek built a more human QA process here‍