Tell me what’s on your Call Center Quality Monitoring Scorecard and I will tell you what’s the quality of your customer service. Ever heard this support QA proverb?
What is a call center quality assurance (QA) scorecard?
A call center quality assurance (QA) scorecard is an evaluation form that helps you review customer conversations as objectively as possible. When done properly, customer service scorecards speed up the review process while making feedback specific and measurable.
Your call center scorecard defines the success of quality assurance programs because:
- For every conversation you review, you’re going to check their quality based on the rating categories on the scorecard, over and over again. As you can imagine, choosing the categories is a pretty important step.
- The structure of the call center scorecard affects the results. Too many categories can lead to decision fatigue for your reviewers, whereas using too few might not provide you with enough insights into your support operations & agent performance.
The trick is to build a call center scorecard in a way that best supports your customer service goals, quality assurance standards, and customer expectations.
✨ Here’s a free call center quality monitoring scorecard — Excel template
A call center scorecard template is the quickest way to get going with customer service quality assurance if you don’t have a QA program in place yet — or if you’re looking for a way to revamp your existing QA scorecard.
How to customize your call center scorecard template
Here’s what you can include in your call center scorecard template:
- 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.
Now, for the fun part…
Rating categories
You can add as many categories as needed. To focus on specific aspects of support quality, you can rate the tone, format, rapport with the customer, product knowledge, and much more.
According to Customer Service Quality Benchmark Report 2023, the most popular categories used by customer service professionals are:
- Solution
- Grammar
- Tone
- Empathy
- Personalization
- Following internal processes
- Going the extra mile
Technically, there’s such a thing as too many cat-egories, but we think every business can find a sweet spot between 3 and 7 of those. In fact, around 89% of our customers use between 2 and 4 rating categories for their internal conversation reviews.
Category weights
You can give equal weight to all of your categories, or assign different weights if some are more important than others. For example, many teams consider delivering the correct solution as more crucial than perfect grammar.
For our team, “Investigation” and “Tone” that’s emphatic, professional & friendly are the top rating categories. If support reps didn’t get their investigation right in the first place, they may not have done a good enough job to find out what the issue actually was, which affects customer satisfaction.
Then, the category that’s also important for us is “Internal note”. If someone reaches out to another department, their note should be complete — including the who, what, where, when, why, and what they expect the colleague to do in order to help. If they have to call or message for clarification, then it shows that the note was incomplete and we’re wasting time.
Besides your team’s customer support objectives and values, the specific categories and their importance will vary based on the type of support interaction. For call center agent performance scorecards, aspects like Tone, Empathy, and Closing the call take precedence over Grammar, Follow-up, or Personalization, which are more crucial when dealing with emails or chat interactions.
Rating scales
The rating scale you choose will define how detailed your review results are going to be. But, they also affect the usability of your call center scorecard. The larger the rating scales, the more difficult it is to choose how to score the conversations.
Many teams use a binary rating scale to rate categories on a call center quality monitoring scorecard, although rating scales can be far more granular:
- 2-point rating scale is used by 47.3% of surveyed customer support professionals
- 3-point rating scale — 35.3%
- 5-point rating scale — 10.9%
- 4-point rating scale — 6.5%
Read more about the pros and cons of different scoring systems →
Agent feedback
Last but not least, if there’s anything to improve or comment on, make sure to include a space for constructive feedback on agent performance on your call center scorecard. For better results, combine conversation reviews with regular, well-structured coaching sessions to help everyone in your team understand their QA scores and grow their skills.
By including this information in your call center agent performance 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. Speaking of…
Agorapulse involved its whole team in developing the quality monitoring scorecard and QA program. At their annual company retreat, they collectively brainstormed to create a scorecard that was universally understood and accepted. After establishing their quality assurance initiative as a collaborative endeavor, it became straightforward to involve everyone in evaluating conversations.
Moreover, managers have found it effortless to review two conversations per agent daily since they began using the specialized quality management software. For more details, check out the full case study →
Consider using a contact center quality control software instead
A call center scorecard Excel template like the one above is generally enough for smaller teams with low support volumes. However, for larger support teams, these solutions can quickly become disorganized. The more team members accessing the document and the greater the number of conversations being reviewed, the harder it becomes to manage those review spreadsheets effectively.
We might be a little biased, but we recommend using a dedicated quality management solution like Zendesk QA (formerly Klaus) to build your own call center quality monitoring scorecards, generate call summaries, and automatically review support conversations.
It takes the emphasis away from the scoring and focuses on what’s more important — using the insights to improve customer service and drive revenue.
Time to bring your call center scorecard to life
That’s it, your call center quality assurance scorecard is ready to use. Whether you opt for a specialized quality management platform or start with a call center scorecard Excel template, we hope you’ll begin reviewing support conversations.
Remember, your call center quality monitoring scorecard is not set in stone. Feel free to adjust rating categories, category weights, or scales as needed. However, always keep your call center agents in the loop about any changes you make, as even minor tweaks can affect the existing customer service workflows.
Bonus: Life in a Contact Center
We talked 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…)
Watch our Fireside Chat with Ahmad, or listen to the podcast about his experience with contact and call centers. Enjoy!
Published in April 2020; last updated in September 2023.
