The One Contact Center Quality Assurance Scorecard You Need

Tell me what’s on your Call Center Quality Assurance Scorecard and I will tell you what’s the quality of your customer service. Ever heard this support QA proverb?

Your QA scorecard defines the success of your quality monitoring program because:

• Rating categories determine the content of your reviews – you will only get answers to the questions that you ask.
• The structure of the rubric can affect the quantity of the results – the longer and more complex it gets, the less likely your reviewers are to conduct the reviews.

 

Continue reading to learn more about contacts center scorecards.

Setting up your Conact Center Quality Assurance Scorecard

Before you get down to writing the rating criteria for your conversation reviews, create a framework around your QA program, and set up your quality monitoring workflows. Make sure to include those details in the spreadsheet because this shared document is going to be the central repository for your conversation reviews.

Here’s what to include in the rubric (besides the obvious rating categories):

• Reviewers and agents: List all the participants of the QA process in the QA document to make the processes clear and transparent.
• Review period: Use a new spreadsheet for every week, month, or quarter, depending on your support volume. Keep the review lists short, easy to follow, and quick to load.
• Review goals: Define the proportion (%) of your conversation volume that you want to review every month. This will help you scale your support QA program as your team grows.

By including this information in your call center scorecard, you engage your entire team in the process and make sure everybody works towards the same goals. Customer service is a team game; use your call center QA scorecard as your gameboard.

Also, check out this step-by-step guide to building your call center Quality Assurance program to learn more about this.

Building your Support QA Scorecard

We’ve made it to the main part of your quality monitoring scorecard: the rating section. The decisions that you make here will have a huge impact on the results of your conversation reviews.

Here are the main things to consider when building your call center quality monitoring scorecard:

• Rating categories determine the information that you’ll gather in your QA sessions. Make sure that these categories reflect your customer service goals and quality standards, and that they are universal enough to be applicable to all of your customer service calls.
  Our scorecard template comes with five rating categories based on the most popular support quality criteria used by large support teams. Read more about this study here.
• Rating scales define how detailed your review results are but they also affect the usability of your scorecard. The larger the rating scales become, the more difficult it is to choose how to score the calls. Consequently, if reviewers understand rating scales differently, the complexity of the rating scales can make reviews incomparable.
  Our spreadsheet scorecard comes with a binary rating scale, allowing reviewers to mark whether the agent met the criteria or not. Our customer service QA and conversation review tool Klaus comes with multiple rating scales that you can choose from. Read more about the pros and cons of different scoring systems here.
• Category weights give more importance to the rating categories that matter most to you. For example, many teams believe that providing the right solution to your customers is more crucial than following all grammar rules.
  The quality monitoring scorecard that we crafted for your call center allows you to adjust the category weights. These specify the importance of each criterion in your rubric and affect the tickets’ Internal Quality Score calculations.
• Critical categories represent quality criteria that define whether the entire call passes the review. A negative score in a critical category marks the entire case as failed.
  If critical categories are a crucial part of your call center quality assurance program, give Klaus a go. Klaus comes with all the abovementioned solutions, including critical categories – and it’s free for up to 10 reviews per week.

That’s it, your support QA scorecard is ready to use. Go ahead and do a test review with the spreadsheet or the support QA tool Klaus. Tweak your rating categories and scales as necessary before launching the quality program for your team. You can also check out this list of quality assurance questions for customer service to get inspired.

Read more: What Gets Measured, Gets Manipulated

Creating quality programs that stick

There’s one principle that we can’t emphasize enough: conversation reviews only work if you really do them. Keep that in mind when building your scorecard and setting up your quality monitoring program.

• Keep your QA scorecard short and simple. Avoid any unnecessary criteria and complex rating scales that make scoring difficult.
• Switch to a call center QA tool when the time is right– i.e., before the managerial tasks take over most of your quality monitoring time.

Spreadsheets usually work for small teams with low conversation volumes. The more people access the document and the more calls you review, the heavier the spreadsheet becomes. That means that it takes more and more time to load the document, and the process itself becomes less enjoyable for everyone.

We had a chat with Ahmad Baydoun, Operations Manager at a leading customer experience management company. Ahmad started his journey in the company 11 years ago in a level one position, working as an agent. In the following years, he grew in the position and took on many different roles before realizing that quality is his favorite part of customer service. (Us too, Ahmad…)

Today Ahmad works on quality with the operations team. The company operates in more than 80 countries and has around 430 contact centers. Within the 330,000 (!) person company, Ahmad leads an account for 500+ employees. Pretty impressive, huh?

Listen to the fireside chat podcast with Ahmad right here:

Here’s how Klaus helps you manage your call center quality monitoring processes:

• Connects to your customer service software and pulls call recordings automatically in for review. That means that you will never have to copy-paste any ticket information manually (phew!)
• Allows you to create custom scorecards with unlimited rating categories. You don’t have to worry about building formulas to track your IQS. That’s a good few hours saved for you with every iteration of your scorecard.
• Creates meaningful reports that help you track your team’s performance over time. It’s also easy to share the results of your quality program with managers and execs in your company.
• Keeps agent feedback private and secure. The information that you include in the QA spreadsheet will be visible to your entire team. Switch to Klaus if you want to send personal feedback to your agents and manage who gets to see your review details.

Whether you decide to switch to a call center QA software right away or give the spreadsheet template a try, we hope our insight helped you solidify your quality program.

Reach out to us if you’d like to learn more about how Klaus can help you conduct QA in your call center.