Streamline your sales development process for Quality Assurance

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In a world… where customer service is at the forefront of almost every business, you want to make sure that yours is delivering excellent quality for your customers. But how do you measure customer service quality? The term quality assurance is often associated with engineering teams or production lines, but QA in a customer service setting is just as important. Customer service quality assurance is the practice of monitoring support quality through regular conversation reviews. This provides regular feedback directly to your agents, while also delivering a detailed overview of how your support department is doing over time. It allows you to track your team's IQS, or Internal Quality Score. While metrics such as CSAT and NPS have dominated the customer support world, both of them track quality from a customer's point of view. CSAT and NPS are sometimes corrupted by factors that are out of the agent's control. Neither of these metrics will tell you how your team is performing based on your own set of standards. Take this example – a customer leaves you a great CSAT rating, but your agent did not follow internal policy and gave a refund that was not valid. Is this reflected in their CSAT score? Unfortunately… …not. On the flip side, you might receive a negative CSAT score on a conversation where the agent followed internal policy purr-fectly, but the customer was simply upset with your product, rather than the support interaction. By reviewing your own support interactions based on criteria defined by you, you can now calculate your Internal Quality Score – the perfect addition to any customer service metrics you're already tracking. To begin reviewing your support interactions, you first need to build a scorecard to track aspects that are important to your company or team. The most common rating categories used by support teams are related to the agent finding a solution, having the right product knowledge, and following internal processes correctly. You can definitely make good use of these, but be sure to use categories that reflect your own support goals and standards. Next, choose a rating scale that you will use to rate each category, such as a binary, 3-, 4- or 5-point scale, depending on how granular you want to go. For each category, you must assign some weight, meaning – are all categories equal? Or are some more important than others? Perhaps some are absolutely critical? It's up to you to decide how much weight each category carries. If your support goal is to be more solution-oriented then giving the Solution category more weight than the others makes sense. You can play around with the weightings until your scorecard is aligned with your overall quality goals. Now, you're ready to begin reviewing conversations using your scorecard. But which conversations should you review? You should be looking at all of your support channels and trying to get a representative sample from each. However, Klaus knows from experience that not all conversations are created equal and there will be some you don't need to review. Setting up some filters can help you get a good cross-section of all relevant conversations. Finally, you need to decide who will perform your reviews and how many reviews you should do. There are several options, such as having a QA specialist or your support managers do the reviews. You can even have your agents perform peer and self-reviews. Whatever works best for you is the right choice. Find a number of reviews that your team is able to perform regularly as consistency is key to a successful quality program. That's it! That's all you need to know to begin improving your support quality. You can get started by creating a QA spreadsheet to track your IQS and agent performance over time, and you could switch to a dedicated QA tool when you need a more systematic process. Want to learn more about customer service quality? Check out our channel for more videos or head to qualitytribe.com to join in on quality discussions.