A good quality assurance process involves five key steps.
First, you must measure the quality of your service. This typically involves taking a random sample of customer interactions and assessing agents on a list of criteria, such as process adherence, compliance, and customer experience. It’s also a good idea to assess agents on their soft skills, such as etiquette, confidence and empathy.
Second, you’ll need to score the quality of your service. It’s up to you how you wish to score each criteria – for example, a pass/fail for compliance or a rating out of 5 for confidence – but it’s important all interactions are assessed in the same way. Using a standard scorecard can help to maintain consistency, reduce bias, and ensure scores can be properly analysed and compared over time.
Third, scorecards must be analysed. This will produce a wealth of data that you can then use to identify trends (e.g. an improvement in customer satisfaction after training agents in de-escalation skills), areas of strength (e.g. empathy), or areas for improvement (e.g. product knowledge or adherence to scripts).
Next you’ll need to provide your agents with constructive feedback. Without feedback, quality assurance becomes a simple data collection exercise. But with feedback, agents can identify where they’re excelling and where they need to develop their skills to provide better service for customers.
Finally, you should consider how you can improve your wider contact centre operations. By assessing interactions, analysing the data, and speaking to agents, you may uncover pain points in your workflows or customer journey that you hadn’t noticed before. For example, you may find agents are having to switch between multiple applications to resolve a certain type of enquiry, leading to long wait times for the customer. Quality assurance can therefore help you to identify and rectify these barriers.