How can you design a customer service quality assurance program that aligns with expectations and goals?

Quality assurance criteria are the pillars of the service you want to provide. Set out and create a vision - a goal- worth striving for and then find the SMART-goals that will allow you to reach them. This will allow you to find out what your customer needs before they even think of it and then develop your voice. Think about the value you and your product can provide first and foremost, then let the quality metrics guide you to them.

Define your support vision and goals. All companies have a unique concept of what matters most for their business and customers — some focus on delivering personalized customer assistance, while others might prefer to keep their interactions short and speedy. Communicate the new customer support quality assurance process to your agents. If your team is on board with your customer service goals and what you’re aiming for, they’ll understand that internal reviews will help them achieve those objectives. Based on your support vision and goals, write down guidelines for your support agents to follow in their customer interactions. Use these criteria for your support QA scorecard to see how well your team’s responses meet your QA standards.

Simplicity is key in QA criteria. Complex standards confuse CS professionals and reviewers, leading to inconsistency and uncertainty. Clear criteria empower CS teams and facilitate objective assessments for reviewers, ensuring consistency and driving improvement. Simplifying QA policies enhances clarity, consistency, and confidence, ultimately improving customer satisfaction.

Quality gets harder to manage as you scale. And there is no other way of knowing whether your agents deliver the same customer experiences across all support channels. So, the question is not whether or not to do conversation reviews – it’s how to do them. Spreadsheets are usually enough for small teams with low conversation volumes, as long as the maintenance of the document doesn’t take up the largest part of the time dedicated to internal feedback. As the team and number of conversations grow, manual copy-pasting and reporting can become a bottleneck in your customer service QA. For large or growing teams, data management can eat away more than 70% of the review time, which is why they often opt for dedicated QA tools.

Methodology finding the right methodology is a very personal journey - so preferences will vary. I like to orient myself on the best practices and apply the Pareto-principle to them. It needs to remain scalable, but also leave you enough room to experiment and find hidden areas of improvements in your data. I found Ischikawa to be the most adaptable. This in combination with a strong QA tool, that allows for high levels of automation of admin tasks - allow me to unearth hidden QA-gems

Leveraging technology, particularly AI, streamlines QA processes, reducing manual workload and complexity. AI can automate tasks like call monitoring, email and chat review, and even self-assessment, freeing up human resources for higher-value activities. Innovations such as natural language processing enable AI to analyze interactions for tone, empathy, and accuracy with precision. This not only improves efficiency but also ensures consistent and objective evaluations across customer service channels. By embracing AI-driven QA methods, businesses can enhance performance, drive efficiency, and ultimately deliver superior customer experiences.

Start by figuring out what 'quality' means for your business, then verify your assumptions, and set specific goals for your team. You can add as many categories as needed, but too many categories can lead to decision fatigue for your reviewers, whereas using too few might not provide you with enough insights into your support operations and agent performance. According to Klaus' Customer Service Quality Benchmark Report, the most popular categories used by customer service professionals are: Solution Grammar Tone Empathy Personalization Following internal processes Going the extra mile

Your scoring system needs to reflect your values and KPI. I like to use the same scorecard, but change the weighting of the categories when one KPI becomes more important than the other. This will allow you to keep your data comparable.

Follow this checklist to implement your QA process: - Understand why customer service quality assurance is important for your business. - Define your support vision and goals. - Communicate the new quality assurance process to your CX team. - Decide who will review conversations - Pick rating categories for your QA scorecards based on your customer service goals. - Choose which customer conversations to review. - Plan calibration sessions to align QA scores. - Combine internal and external evaluations. - Track and review data to continuously improve your QA process and the customer support team’s performance. - Take advantage of AI to have all your conversations reviewed in less time, without missing hidden gems of information.

Implementing and introducing your process is a collaborative effort. It is not something you can do top down if you want your agents to actually adopt it, instead of fighting it. So get them onboard. Explain the benefits and then ease into it.

QA processes are incredibly valuable for helping customer service teams shine. By taking a look at their scores, you can identify areas where some extra practice might be helpful, or even celebrate their strengths and build on them. Coaching sessions are a chance to work together on specific goals, using real-life examples from QA to make things clear. Focus on positive reinforcement, open discussions, and maybe even some role-playing to address tricky situations. By meeting regularly and setting clear action steps, you can track progress and ensure everyone on the team feels confident and empowered to deliver top-notch service.

Ao monitorar regularmente o healthscore (dashboard com a vis?o holística da saúde do atendimento ao cliente) e o mapa de risco (painel que mapeia vulnerabilidades no processo de atendimento), você pode identificar tendências, padr?es e áreas de melhoria, garantindo que o programa de controle de qualidade da equipe de atendimento esteja sempre alinhado com as expectativas e necessidades dos clientes. Importante: Os indicadores a serem monitorados em ambas ferramentas, devem ser escolhidos de forma alinhada às metas de cada empresa.

Even if you start using a QA platform, manual reviews will still play a big role in your QA program. The human element is crucial for interpreting complex situations, offering detailed feedback, and realizing the full potential of automated quality management and AI. Because of that, automation and manual efforts aren’t mutually exclusive. However, there’s no doubt that automated reviews can analyze a large volume of interactions — and do it fast. In fact, automating QA can amplify your conversation review capabilities by up to 50x, offering 100% coverage. This allows you to gauge the overall customer sentiment and team performance without the team opening each individual ticket, irrespective of the volume of interactions.