So, whether you’re contemplating a career change, seeking to recruit a quality expert for call center, or feeling a bit disoriented—welcome aboard!
In the realm of customer service, quality reigns supreme. Specializing in this field proves advantageous for support professionals who relish delving into the intricacies of processes and customer service performance. Likewise, hiring a specialist serves as a strategic move for businesses aiming to gain a competitive edge.
What are (call center) quality assurance interview questions?
Now, let’s delve into the realm of interview questions for quality assurance in customer service. Whether you’re interviewing candidates or applying for a QA Specialist role yourself, it’s crucial to evaluate knowledge, skills, and relevant experience.
The specific questions may vary based on the position and the nature of the business. For instance, call center Quality Analyst questions might differ from more “standard” QA interview questions due to the unique operations of call centers.
Nonetheless, let’s explore the most common interview questions for customer service Quality Assurance specialists—and how to effectively respond to them.
Job brief
Customer Service Quality Assurance Specialist (or Manager or Analyst) is quite the hairball-inducing mouthful – the role is sometimes known just as Support QA.
The responsibilities boil down to improving quality and maintaining high customer service standards by:
- Establishing and/or strengthening a support QA program
- Conducting/assigning internal feedback reviews
- Tracking quality metrics
- Providing insights for coaching purposes
Your role is to make sure the wheels of your 360° support QA program are turning smoothly. This involves examining customer service processes and guidelines, reviewing conversations or organizing reviews, providing actionable feedback to team/s, identifying coaching opportunities, and using data analysis tools to track progress and, eventually, improve customer service.
Customer service Quality Assurance Specialist interview questions
✨Why are you applying for this role?
✨How do you define customer support quality?
✨How do you measure quality?
✨How do you improve customer satisfaction?
✨Which tools do you have experience with?
✨What is the greatest challenge you’ve faced in quality assurance?
And now we bring you the answers to these QA interview questions that will hopefully get you the role!
Why are you applying for this role?
This is a common question that frequently arises during interviews. It may also be phrased as “What makes you the right fit for this role?” or “Why are you interested in becoming a customer service QA specialist?”
However, your response should be anything but generic.
It’s crucial to showcase a thorough grasp of the job description and the company’s current performance. In essence, demonstrate to the interviewer that you’ve conducted thorough research.
Discuss the significance of customer service quality: emphasizing how enhancing customer satisfaction leads to increased loyalty and reduces the likelihood of them turning to competitors in the future.
If you’re aware that the company you’re applying to has a strong reputation, articulate why you admire this and express your desire to contribute to maintaining their standards. Conversely, if you recognize that the company could improve its reputation, refrain from stating this explicitly. Instead, elaborate on your aspiration to elevate the support team to a higher standard.
Incorporate any relevant experience you possess. If you haven’t previously worked as a quality specialist, that’s perfectly fine—especially if you have a background in support. Utilize specific examples to illustrate times when you went above and beyond to deliver exceptional service to customers.
How do you define customer service quality?
Customer service quality is defined by:
- Ensuring ease of use for the customer
- Providing prompt responses to customer inquiries
- Maintaining a correct and consistent style and tone of communication
- Prioritizing the customer’s needs and preferences
- Delivering outstanding customer service
From a business perspective, quality customer interaction may also involve support representatives driving product engagement and fostering growth.
While you needn’t memorize this list, you should demonstrate your understanding of the comprehensive nature of customer service.
For added impact, consider sharing an example of exceptional customer service. This could involve a personal experience as either the customer or the agent, or even a noteworthy instance from the company you’re interviewing with. Alternatively, you can draw inspiration from engaging examples found online.
How do you measure customer service quality?
As a quality specialist, your role involves monitoring the performance of the support team and ensuring that processes align with objectives. This can be achieved through two primary methods: internal reviews and metric tracking.
Internal conversation reviews are integral to the quality assurance process as they enable the measurement of agent performance against internal company standards and goals. These reviews facilitate the identification of process strengths and weaknesses, providing team members with actionable feedback. It’s essential to consider specific topics, such as accuracy, style and tone, or personalization, when conducting these reviews.
Bonus points for mentioning customer service quality assurance tools that help you automate and track quality reviews (spoiler alert: manual reviewing is tedious and prone to error).
Running customer surveys and tracking “external” quality metrics is also a vital part of your job. Companies will expect you to mention CSAT — Customer Satisfaction Scores — a golden metric for many support teams. However, you also need to include IQS (Internal Quality Score measured through internal reviews), FRT (First Response Time), and NPS (Net Promoter Score).
The exact metrics you track will depend on on support channels offered. For example:
- For customer service calls, a call center quality analyst would most likely focus on AHT, FRT, FCR, Service Level, Call Abandonment Rate, IQS, and Customer Satisfaction Ratings.
- Typical live chat metrics tracked by QA specialists, on the other hand, are FRT, AHT, Total Chat Volume, Missed Chats, Self-service Rate, IQS, and CSAT.
How do you improve customer satisfaction?
While the role of a customer service QA specialist may appear to entail a multitude of responsibilities, its essence lies in ensuring customer satisfaction.
Your primary objective is to facilitate a seamless experience for agents in achieving this goal. This involves:
- Ensuring the effectiveness and comprehension of processes
- Providing teams with actionable feedback to enhance performance
- Tracking metrics to pinpoint areas for improvement
- Analyzing customer feedback to inform decision-making
- Contributing to the development and reinforcement of onboarding and coaching programs.
It’s important to recognize that support teams are not merely cost centers for resolving customer issues. Instead, customer satisfaction should be deeply ingrained in company values, driving product development and informing sales and marketing strategies.
Check out how Rentman embed these values into their company ethos →
Which tools do you have experience with?
This point is quite straightforward, but don’t fret if your hands-on experience with various software tools is limited.
Instead, focus on discussing best practices for utilizing tools. Demonstrating your understanding of the support QA tools and customer service software landscape will impress the interviewer, even if you haven’t had extensive hands-on experience with them.
What is the greatest challenge you’ve faced in quality assurance?
Some examples for inspiration:
Manual QA
Using spreadsheets for quality reviews often leads to maintenance hassles. Many support professionals understand the administrative challenges of support quality assurance without access to the right tools.
Sound familiar? Here’s an opportunity to discuss how understanding, improving, and scaling support quality becomes much simpler with a QA platform. Not only does it save time, but it also provides a more sophisticated perspective with data tracking, automation, and AI capabilities.
Aligning reviewers and categories
As a QA specialist, you may find yourself personally conducting every review. However, as teams expand, managing this becomes increasingly challenging.
With multiple reviewers, there’s a risk of differing opinions. Cohesion is crucial for any useful outcome—if a conversation is reviewed differently by three individuals, it poses a problem.
Highlight the importance of conducting regular calibration sessions and emphasize your role as the quality expert in aligning reviewers and advocating for the value of constructive feedback.
Purrfect for if you have experience as an agent, but not yet in QA:
You did everything right but the customer left a bad review
This scenario is common—for instance, a customer might be upset because they weren’t offered a refund or a free trial, leading them to rate the conversation as unsatisfactory. However, upon reviewing customer feedback, it becomes evident that as a support representative, you adhered to the guidelines meticulously when addressing customer complaints and issues.
Emphasize the significance of quality assurance in distinguishing between what a customer perceives as poor service and actual poor service. A robust review program would identify issues like this, mitigating the risk of red herrings being mistaken for red flags.
Last but not least, remember to smile.
Now you’re clued up on how to answer all the interview questions for quality assurance in a call center or customer service team that might be thrown your way (or know what to throw if you’re the recruiter!).
Time for you to wander the online support quality realm for more advice, or to find your dream role:
Our community for CX quality professionals
A hub for anyone working in support
Originally published in January 2022; last updated in November 2023.
