Customer Service and Support

Why Quality Assurance is Vital for Exceptional Customer Service

Whether it is a product/service or support, your customers expect a certain degree of quality from it.

Sure, the idea of quality is extremely subjective and changes from customer to customer. And you cannot possibly appease all your customers. However, what you can do is introduce quality assurance in customer service so that everybody on your support team sings the same note.

In doing so, they will be setting up consistent and baseline expectations of the kind of support and service that your customers can anticipate.

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Importance of Quality Assurance in Customer Service

The importance of assurance in customer service can be summarized in the following points:

  • It Boosts Customer Confidence: Businesses that focus on maintaining quality and consistency, especially in the manner in which they handle customer queries, instill confidence.
  • It Improves Customer Experience: Making quality assurance a norm in customer service is a way of letting your customers know that you care about and prioritize them, which greatly inflates customer experience.
  • It Establishes Brand Reputation: Quality assurance is a pillar of brand reputation, especially when it comes to a directly customer-facing business activity like support.
  • It Attracts Long-Term Business: A blend of elevated brand reputation, improved customer experience, and stronger customer confidence lay the foundation for long-term customer loyalty.
  • It Increases Profits: Acquiring and retaining customers, in the long run, increases the revenue potential of the business. Further, customers are willing to pay a premium for high-quality support and service.
  • It Ensures Consistent Results: Quality assurance in customer service helps maintain consistency in the high standards of customer experience.
  • It Assists Support Employees: Quality assurance eliminates any ambiguity regarding the level of service support agents have to extend to the customers. At the same time, it allows them to review performance and compare it to the benchmarks to improve.

What are the challenges one faces in Support Quality Assurance?

Running QA becomes increasingly hectic simply because of the plethora of support queries a business receives in a single day. There is simply too much data to look through.

Support queries can run long. If one wishes to read each support query in its entirety, they would very well have to say goodbye to the other work they had planned to take care of during the day.

Way too much time would go into this manual method of ensuring quality. How are you supposed to do any other work if you take the task of going through a heap of customer queries daily?

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What one often overlooks when giving feedback to their support team regarding their work is how harsh this feedback could sound. Of course, you want to make sure that good replies are going out to your paying customers who your sales team brought in with so much effort.

However, let’s be understanding here. Understand that it is a natural human tendency to feel flustered when someone raises an objection to them.

Moreover, when you add objections to their methods and quality of work, you very well would have a scornful and resentful employee at your hand. And it is completely understood – they could have made a mistake or overlooked a detail.

However, it is important to cut down on all these minute mistakes, too, so that your customers have a seamless support experience.

5 Steps for Implementing an Effective Quality Assurance Plan

Now that you understand the challenges and opportunities of implementing a customer support quality assurance plan, here’s how you can make it happen:

Step 1: Define Quality in Customer Support

The first and most obvious step is to define “quality” in customer support.

As we’ve mentioned, everyone has a different understanding of quality. And so your business has to set the benchmarks for quality in customer support and service. Fortunately, you will have your business mission, vision, and values to give you direction on this front.

Further, the historical data of previous interactions can also establish what is acceptable and what is not. Pair all this information with customer feedback, and you will have a well-rounded view of what quality means to your business when it comes to customer support.

Step 2: Identify the Appropriate KPIs

Since you have a broad idea of the qualities that you need to measure, you can use this knowledge to identify the corresponding key performance indicators and metrics. By doing so, you will add a qualitative and quantifiable aspect to measuring QA standards.

Some common metrics that you will encounter at this stage include Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), First Contact Resolution, Time to Resolution, and more.

Step 3: Develop a Quality Assurance Scorecard

Using all the details and findings from the previous section, you can start by developing a customer support quality rubric. It should contain the different performance metrics, ideally clubbed under 4-5 themes, that you will be measuring while assessing the quality of customer support.

Combine it with the appropriate scale to measure the weights of each quality. We have shared a sample customer support quality assurance checklist for your reference in the subsequent section.

Step 4: Build a Customer Support QA Team

Next, put together a customer support QA team that will work dedicatedly towards improving the quality of support your agents extend to the customers.

Empower them with the right QA review processes like leader reviews, specialist reviews, manager reviews, self-reviews, etc., to compare performance in this department.

Step 5: Measure the Impact of QA Efforts

Apart from measuring the support agent or team’s performance, also measure the overall impact of your QA program. Correlate the change in QA policies with its impact on the customer experience, satisfaction, etc. Use the trajectory to understand in which direction you are heading.

In addition to listening to the customers and their opinions, also make it a point to collect employee feedback on how the QA program is affecting them.

Customer Support Quality Assurance Checklist

You can use a customer support quality assurance checklist for internal purposes or to collect customer feedback and name it a quality assurance scorecard. Either way, the document for ensuring quality assurance in customer service will measure the following elements:

1. Effectiveness

It helps measure the support agent’s efforts in terms of the outcomes. It evaluates:

  • Whether the agent was successful in resolving the customer’s issue
  • Accuracy of the resolution
  • Helpfulness of the resolution
  • Sufficiency of the resolution

To understand this sentiment, you can measure metrics like Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Resolution Rate, Replies Per Ticket, Customer Effort Score, Service ratings, Service Quality, Customer Success Ratio, etc.

2. Efficiency

While effectiveness measures the outcomes, efficiency measures the journey to reaching the outcome. It will check for the following:

  • The clarity and conciseness of the resolution
  • Time taken to reach the resolution
  • Responsiveness during the interaction
  • Articulate while communicating

Companies can measure efficiency by tracking First Contact Resolution, Average Resolution Time, Average Response Time, Number of Forwards or Follow-ups, etc.

3. Knowledge

Knowledge tests the agent’s understanding of the product or service that is being pushed as the business offering. You will have to look for the following:

How much does the agent know about the product
Are they aware of all the features, specifications, and configurations
Can they communicate product/service-related information without jargon

Naturally, the last thing you would want is to be caught red-faced, not knowing about what you are trying to sell!

4. Productivity

Running quality assurance tests on the productivity of your customer support agents ensures team health. It makes sure that your star performers are not left picking up the slack and burning out in the process while the low performers cruise along.

You can test the productivity using the following metrics:

  • The average number of customer interactions
  • Time spent in conversations vs. idle time (utilization ratio)
  • The peak number of simultaneous conversations
  • Number of customer requests or issues resolved

Measuring such entities will allow you to improve workload distribution as well.

5. General Etiquette

General etiquettes revolve around a number of qualities, such as the tonality, friendliness, and approachability of the customer support agent. It will look for:

  • Whether the agent started the conversation with a warm and polite greeting
  • Tonality and use of positive language
  • The use of empathy and assurance statements
  • Level of engagement while talking to the customer
  • Offering additional support

General etiquette is quite broad and businesses will have to define their own parameters to define how agents can maintain brand voice and reputation.

Best Practices for Customer Support Quality Assurance

Here are some best practices for customer support quality assurance:

Collect Feedback After Every Interaction

Collect customer feedback at the end of every interaction when the customer sentiments are fresh. Ask open-ended questions regarding the agent’s attitude response times, satisfaction rates, and willingness to reconnect. Such feedback will offer the QA team perspective on the agent’s performance.

Use a Centralized QA Software

Use tools like JustCall, which is your one-stop shop for all things QA-related. The team managers or QA experts can use this centralized platform to analyze high volumes of data and use it to decipher agent performance.

Prioritize Agent Coaching

With QA enforcement, you will identify agents that are doing exceptionally well and those that are struggling. Introduce performance improvement programs that can help the laggards improve their game. Once again, software solutions like JustCall can help with live and one-on-one mentoring.

Keep Quality Assessment Channel-Specific

Certain KPIs make more sense over certain channels than others. As such, make appropriate tweaks to the QA parameters according to the channel to make it hyper-personalized than vague or generic.

Pick Up Only a Specific Category of Queries Each Day

When you or your QA teams have high volumes of support queries to review, pick up only a specific category and start from there.

You could even consider ignoring queries that have a narrow scope. For e.g., login assistance. On the other hand, you could maybe aim to go through technical support queries on a regular basis. This random selection method allows you to ease up your work and also ensure quality.

Conduct Feedback Sessions with Your Support Team

To make sure that your support team does not take these quality checks to be micromanaging and insulting, bring them together and explain to them the purpose of these quality checks.

You could talk about the impact good quality replies would have on keeping the customers happy and, in turn, reducing churn. They could be made to understand that good quality work from their end without much scrutiny from your end would result in promotions.

Final Thoughts

In the end, how you handle a matter is all that matters. You could either let it become an unsolvable issue, or you could take methodical steps to tackle it straight ahead.

Remember, quality assurance in customer service does not have to be a painful task. The cumulative effect of the smallest of efforts in improving the quality of customer support and service can transform the customer experience entirely!

Frequently Asked Questions

What is quality assurance in customer support or service?

Quality assurance in customer service is the act of maintaining high standards while serving customers and their requirements.

Why is quality assurance important in customer service?

Quality assurance builds brand reputation, nurtures long-term customers, improves agent performance, enhances customer experience, and several such benefits.

How does quality assurance impact customer satisfaction?

Customer support quality assurance fosters a customer-centric work culture, which improves customer satisfaction.

What is the difference between quality assurance and empathy in customer service?

Empathy caters to the emotional aspect of connecting with the customer, whereas quality assurance focuses on improving customer support and service deliverability to boost customer experience.

Vijaya heads the Global Support team at JustCall, where he has played a pivotal role in expanding the support team and diversifying its channels and services. Under his guidance, the team consistently earns top customer satisfaction scores. With a passion for team-building, Vijaya is committed to empowering his staff to deliver unparalleled customer experiences. In addition to his managerial responsibilities, he is a certified Leadership Coach, specializing in helping leaders overcome their unique challenges to achieve success.

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