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You probably use quality assurance (QA) to evaluate the performance of your customer service teams. You listen in on recorded calls to learn if protocol was followed and to find out if customers were satisfied with your services. You may need to coach an agent after a call or take disciplinary action.
The process is mostly about fixing mistakes - which is an inherent part of assuring quality for your customers. But, have you thought about the ways QA can help you avoid mistakes altogether?
If you use QA software, you’re sitting on a goldmine of data that can be used to learn about your agent experience and to identify opportunities for team growth. Use this data to evaluate how your customer service teams are performing now, and set realistic goals for how you expect your customer service team to perform in the future.
Regardless of what your specific customer service goals end up being, QA can help you get there. Start by targeting high-impact areas in the customer experience, looking at interactions from the agents’ perspective, and setting up calibration sessions to ensure your customer service goals align with your team’s actual needs.
As a QA manager, you should identify and review high-impact moments in the customer experience, like when a customer call is escalated to a supervisor. These moments contain insights you need to work toward your goals.
If you find, for example, that customer tickets are routinely escalated for a certain product or scenario, it may be that you need to provide more documentation for your agents on that specific product or scenario.
QA software allows you to find these pivotal moments more easily. With a QA automation solution, you can customize filters and tags to help you identify the triggers and root causes for areas that need improvement. You can then use these moments as a guide for future customer service training sessions.
If your quality assurance software includes screen capture, which records an agent’s screen while they chat with customers, you’ll be able to provide more context for agents on their scores. This feature allows graders and coaches to relive the customer interaction in granular detail, allowing them to see the exact steps an agent took to resolve an issue.
Rather than only seeing end results of interactive exchanges, screen capture provides QA managers access to blind spots and an inside scoop to everything agents go through with their customers. With this information, quality assurance managers get vital context: what steps did the agent take to resolve this ticket? Are we able to improve our internal processes to help the agent get to resolution faster?
For customer service goals to be effective, everyone on the customer service team needs to be aligned. How can you work to make that happen? By implementing calibration sessions. MaestroQA’s team calibration sessions remove judgment or unintentional bias that may be present in a QA score, and helps align all graders and managers on the same standard.
In these sessions, different graders evaluate the same ticket individually before comparing their scores and aligning how they will grade future tickets. It’s the best way to prevent the perception of inequity and variability in your QA program and to ensure all agents are graded on the same standard. Some QA software solutions will automatically schedule calibrations, so grades are in sync with the grading standards the company put in place.
Once you have a clear understanding of what needs to be fixed, you can set your goals and, more importantly, determine how you’ll achieve them.
Customer service goals can be anything from an increased average CSAT score to better integration of digital tools in the customer experience. The important thing is these goals address problems that need fixing, and their success can be measured. Eight common goals include:
All of these goals are measurable, so you track progress quarter-over-quarter. While it’s okay to have more qualitative goals, these benchmarks will be your best indicator of overall progress.
Setting goals is moot if you don’t have a clear path to achieve them. Some popular options for customers service teams include:
Quality assurance should be your first and last step when setting and measuring goals. At the end of the quarter or year, review your quality assurance data to learn how your team has progressed. Are they still struggling in the same moments? If not, continue what you’re doing - it’s working! If not, it might be time to consider new training techniques. Once the data analysis is out of the way, create questions on your quality assurance scorecard that match the goals you’ve missed this quarter to help guide your team towards achieving them.
If your business needs help collecting quality assurance data, request a demo of MaestroQA. Our quality assurance software makes it easy for QA managers to find those “high-impact moments” in the customer experience, so you can quickly identify where agents may be undertrained or lacking the resources needed to perform at their best.
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