You know your CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) and NPS (Net Promoter Score), but do you have a grasp of your IQS (Internal Quality Score)?
Most companies have become used to obsessing about what customers think, and we’ve become pretty good at measuring that through surveys. But only a third of support teams track IQS – your guiding light for improving customer service quality.
What is IQS?
IQS (Internal Quality Score) is a customer support metric that shows how your team is performing according to internal quality standards. It is the essential metric for customer service quality. Review support conversations and score them against predefined categories to find out your team’s IQS.
It comes down to internal validation. How would you rate your customer service? Do you think that your agents are emphatic enough in their conversations? Do all of them have the most up-to-date product information?
Unless reviews are part of your support QA process, you cannot know the answers to these questions.
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Why are reviews essential for customer service QA?
Why are reviews essential for customer service QA?
CSAT and NPS only tell us half of the story. They reflect how satisfied our customers are with what we do.
However, they say nothing about, for example, how well our agents followed our internal guidelines for the tone of voice, or even if they provided a correct and full solution to the customer’s inquiry. The only one to know the answers to these questions is you.
Leaving the quality of your customer service only for your customers to judge is flawed in many ways:
- Customers give feedback to the product and company, not just customer service. For example, customers tend to express their disappointment for declined feature requests in customer satisfaction surveys, even if the case was actually handled nicely by the support rep.
- Customers don’t see the complex processes behind their inquiries. At times, customers are dissatisfied because your team is unable to meet their unreasonable expectations. Customers cannot know how much time it would take to fix a bug or to build a completely new feature. Again, this might have little to do with how your agents interacted with the user.
- Customers don’t know your quality standards. They rate your interactions from their subjective perspective, based on what they think is right. At times, your quality standards might be higher – for example, when talking about product knowledge.
For these reasons, it is essential to analyze your customer service interactions based on your internal quality standards.
Read more: Customer Support Quality Assurance Software Guide
How to calculate your Internal Quality Score
Conversation reviews provide a systematic way of giving feedback to customer support agents. In essence, it means rating tickets in pre-defined categories like “Tone”, “Solution”, and “Product knowledge”.
Read more about setting up customer service QA reviews.
How Klaus calculates your IQS:
- Ratings for each category
Some teams prefer binary ratings and pick a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down, others go for the more granular approach with scales of up to 5 points. - Category weight
This helps to give more importance to some categories and less to others. For example, some companies prioritize product knowledge over grammar; thus, they adjust IQS calculations accordingly with category weights. - Critical categories
The most paramount aspects of the conversation, where there is no room for mistakes, should be marked as critical. If a ticket receives a negative rating in a critical category, it automatically gets an overall score of 0%, regardless of the assessments received in other categories.
So, for example, let’s set up a simple scorecard with four categories:
- “Product knowledge”: 1,5 weight and critical.
- “Tone”: 1,0 weight.
- “Solution” : 1,25 weight.
- “Grammar”: 0,5 weight.
If a conversation receives a positive rating in all categories, the ticket’s IQS will be 100%. If a ticket gets a negative rating in the critical “Product knowledge” category, its IQS will automatically be 0%.
Let’s say that a ticket receives a positive rating in all categories, except for “Tone”, which gets a thumbs down. In this case, the ticket score will be 76%. If another ticket receives a thumbs down in the “Grammar” category and positive ratings in all others, this ticket’s IQS will be 88%, because “Grammar” weighs less than the “Tone” category in the previous example.
Free download: Customer Service Scorecard Template for Quality Assurance (QA)
Why you should track IQS
If you systematically review your customer interactions, you will be able to calculate your average ticket score during a specific time. This is your overall Internal Quality Score.
Customer service QA reviews give you unique opportunities to track how your team is doing overtime. It also helps you get insight into your agents’ individual progress, and provide personal feedback to boost their professional growth. Use conversation review results as input for coaching and other feedback sessions.
Keep an eye on your Internal Quality Score over time. Just like you look at your monthly and quarterly CSAT and NPS results, see what is happening with your IQS, as well. Also, see how much your internal assessment agrees with what your customers are saying in CSAT and NPS.
Read more about how your IQS affects CSAT.
Looking for inspiration? Read how companies like Livestorm and Rentman are keeping up excellent customer service.
