Quality Assurance
Jul 27, 2022
Think beyond CSAT
Quality management ensures customer-facing teams deliver top-notch experiences to customers. Unlike CSAT surveys that rate the quality of the overall support interaction, quality management monitors, analyzes, and evaluates the quality of every interaction to ensure agents meet both customer and company expectations. However, quality management is no easy feat without the right tools.
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Spreadsheets don’t cut it for quality management
While spreadsheets are great for recording data and applying complex formulas, they are not suited for contact center quality management. They are cumbersome, static, and don’t scale with growth.
Spreadsheets take a long time to put together and even longer to extract meaningful insights, costing businesses a significant drain of time and resources from the get-go.
With limited automations, grading using spreadsheets takes time, resulting in a lower number of tickets being reviewed, and the scored tickets are almost always out-of-date and stale by the time managers meet with agents to review results.
Spreadsheets don’t offer the versatility needed for in-depth reviews and performing comparisons between different timeframes without a ton of manual work.
With large amounts of data stored in individual spreadsheets, there is no single source of information to effectively process, categorize, and analyze data to efficiently extract insights, share results, and forecast trends.
If businesses want to make changes to scorecards and goals, all the underlying data and formulas become invalid, and the entire spreadsheet has to be redesigned.
Using spreadsheets for quality management and assurance limits the ability to share and collaborate effectively. Comments are lost in mounds of spreadsheets, and monitoring progress over time is almost impossible.
Though spreadsheets can valuable for many business processes within an organization, they don’t offer the flexibility, usability, and collaboration capabilities crucial for building a scale quality management process for customer service at scale.
Invest in a Quality Management Platform to deliver exceptional customer service at scale
Quality management is vital, rigorous, and a time-consuming process. It takes time for managers to review, grade, and provide meaningful feedback on customer service interactions. Doing it manually using spreadsheets adds additional complexity, creating a bottleneck as teams would need to spend hours on managerial tasks to keep them up-to-date.
Investing in a quality management platform can streamline the process, allow you to review a larger volume of support interactions, and secure a high level of QA coverage. But with so many tools out there, it can be hard to pick the one that best suits your needs. Outlined below are key capabilities to consider and look for when choosing a quality management platform for your support organization.
Support platform integration: The platform you choose should automatically sync and import support conversations from your customer support platform. Whether it is Zendesk, Salesforce, Five9, or any other platform, the quality management platform you choose needs to be fully integrated with the helpdesk your team is currently using. This ensures your team can access and review data from a single screen, eliminating the need to switch between multiple tabs or windows to copy-paste ticket data.
Side by Side QA in Echo AI
Omnichannel support: Customer support is delivered through multiple channels — email, chat, messaging, phone, and more. Using different quality management platforms to evaluate omnichannel interactions increases operational costs and creates process inefficiencies. Finding a solution that enables businesses to easily monitor, analyze and score the quality of conversations across multiple channels from a single platform can deliver efficiencies at scale.
Side-by-side view: The purpose of quality management is to provide focused feedback on specific interactions between the customer and agent. The quality management platform should offer a side-by-side view of the ticket and scorecard to enable QA graders to score and deliver feedback quickly and efficiently.
Custom scorecards and weighting: No two businesses are the same. Company standards and customer expectations vary vastly, and each has a different definition of support quality. The ability to customize the scorecard and adjust the weighting of the different categories to meet business needs is vital when choosing a quality management platform.
QA Scorecard in Echo AI
Root-cause analysis: Support teams deal with hundreds to thousands of support tickets on a daily basis, and have multiple teams supporting them. Getting a holistic view of how each team or individual is performing helps support leaders to quickly identify areas of improvement and excellence. It is therefore important to pick a platform that has built-in root cause analysis that allows support teams to drill down conversations by QA scores to identify specific interactions that resulted in a poor CSAT, customer churn, and other custom variables.
AI driven insights include phrase tracking and sentiment.
Automatic Assignments: With large volumes of support tickets, it can be hard to identify which conversations needs to be reviewed by whom to maintain support quality. Manually picking and assigning conversations is not scalable, and critical interactions that need review and feedback can be easily missed. Finding a quality management platform that allows automatic assignment using custom criteria such as ticket status, tags, and other fields can be a game-changer and ensures thorough coverage.
One time, or repeating auto-assignments can be scheduled.
AI-enabled assistance: Quality management process is manual by default, takes time, and it is easy to miss some crucial errors and misses. AI can help eliminate some of the manual work and make QA processes smarter, faster, and frictionless. It can automatically detect spelling and grammar errors, analyze sentiment, and highlight specific phrases that don’t meet quality standards within the interaction. When looking for a quality management platform, make sure the platform has AI capabilities that can automatically detect communication gaps to save time and improve efficiency at scale.
Save graders time by assisting their ticket analysis.
Annotations: A customer support conversation has multiple back and forth interactions between the customer and the agent. When reviewing a customer service interaction, graders may want to provide feedback on a specific interaction. That’s where the ability to annotate and add comments to provide individualized, hyper-focused guidance and feedback is super beneficial.
Grade sharing: Eliminating manual processes however small the task may be can drive incremental efficiency. For example, the ability to automatically share or schedule grade sharing can streamline the feedback process and save time.
Appeals: When graders are evaluating a conversation, their score is based on their perception of the interaction and they might not have the entire picture. It is therefore important to give the agent the ability to make an appeal and provide context on a particular grade or issue. it ensures fairness and is crucial for building trust and morale. Don’t forget to check if the quality management platform has a seamless appeal process built into the platform.
Grade the grader: As important, as it is to grade an agent, it is equally important to evaluate the grader to ensure fairness and accurate grading. Looking for the ability to grade the grader when evaluating a quality management platform.
Dashboards and reporting: A big part of support QA is to be able to view large amounts of data organized in a meaningful way. It is important the view the performance against goals, how quality score is changing over time and across categories, how many conversations have been reviewed, and more. It is vital to have access to detailed reports and the ability to slice and dice data based on multiple criteria in the quality management solution.
Integrated Performance Management: While quality management offers insights and visibility into the performance of a support team, the ability to deliver individualized coaching and configuring goals is vital for improving agent happiness, boosting job satisfaction, and reducing employee turnover. This is where an integrated performance management solution with quality management can make a huge difference. Finding a platform that offers both quality management and performance management in a single platform can drive dramatic improvements in service quality, agent satisfaction, and customer satisfaction.
Customer service quality management is essential for businesses that want to achieve growth. It can take customer support to the next level, boost satisfaction rate, and build loyal and trustful relationships with customers and employees. With a platform that checks the key features highlighted above, it is possible to maintain the highest support quality on a daily basis with ease.
Echo AI is the first Performance Intelligence platform purpose-built for brands to monitor, analyze, and optimize team performance. By unifying performance data across multiple platforms in a single-screen view, managers and agents get unprecedented visibility and insights on performance, empowering them to achieve their professional best. Integrating Quality Management and Workforce Optimization workflows into a single platform, allows businesses to dramatically improve customer experience quality and reduce the cost and complexity of service operations.
Take your customer support team to the next level with Echo AI. Schedule a custom demo today.
