Quality assurance of customer support services is a crucial practice in ensuring excellent quality. It involves monitoring support quality through regular conversation reviews. The method provides regular feedback directly to agents and delivers a detailed overview of how the support department performs over time.
How Do You Measure Quality in Customer Support Services?
Customer support service centers generally use metrics such as CSAT and NPS, but they only measure quality from a customer's point of view. You can find CSAT and NPS metrics corrupted by factors that are out of the agent's control and do not always reflect team performance.
The Internal Quality Score (IQS) measures performance against the company’s standards. Having an Internal Quality Score (IQS) is crucial for customer support services to track their customer support service quality. It will enable them to assess how well their agents are following company policies and meeting the expectations they have set. The IQS can provide more accurate insights into the performance of your customer support services.
How Will You Calculate Your IQS?
To calculate your IQS, you must develop a scorecard with rating categories that reflect your support goals and standards. Common categories include finding a solution, product knowledge, and following internal processes. However, you should tailor these categories to the specific needs of your customer support services. Once you have your scorecard, you can review customer support interactions and rate them accordingly. It gives clarity on how well your support team is performing, enabling you to make data-driven decisions.
Reviewing Conversations
By using IQS in addition to traditional customer support service metrics, you can gain a more comprehensive understanding of the performance of your customer support services. Once you set up your scorecard and rating scale, it's time to start reviewing conversations. Reviewing a representative sample from each of the channels in your customer support services is essential. However, not all exchanges are created equal, so setting up filters can help you get a cross-section of all relevant conversations.
When reviewing conversations, you should use your scorecard to rate each category and assign a score. You can create a scorecard with rating categories and weightings that align with your support goals and standards. You can use a binary, 3-, 4-, or 5-point scale to rate each category. It will allow you to calculate an overall Internal Quality Score for each discussion. It's also important to leave comments explaining your ratings so your agents understand why they received a specific score.
Creating a QA Spreadsheet
You can choose who will perform the reviews and how many reviews you should do, whether it's a QA specialist, support manager, or agents performing peer and self-reviews. Consistency is vital to a successful quality program, so find several reviews that your team can perform regularly. To track your IQS and agent performance over time, you can create a QA spreadsheet or switch to a dedicated QA tool when you need a more systematic process.
Assessing the Internal Quality Score
As you review conversations, you'll see patterns and trends emerge. You may notice that specific categories consistently receive low scores or that certain agents struggle in certain areas. Such information can help identify areas for improvement and provide targeted training to your agents.
It's also essential to track your team's progress over time. Regularly reviewing conversations and following your Internal Quality Score lets you see if your team's performance is improving or declining. It can help identify areas in customer support services that need you to focus your efforts.
In addition to tracking your team's performance, you should also use your Internal Quality Score to recognize and reward high-performing agents. It can help motivate your team and improve morale.
Conclusion
Overall, quality assurance of customer support services is critical to any successful support team. Teams must build a scorecard to track aspects important to their company or team. To perform reviews, teams should look at all support channels and filter relevant conversations to get a representative sample. Teams should decide who will perform the checks and how many they will conduct regularly for a successful quality program. You can then identify areas for improvement, track progress over time, and recognize high-performing agents.
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The video ‘What is Customer Service Quality Assurance?’ by ‘Klaus’ inspired this blog.
