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Top Customer Service Quality Assurance Interview Questions

Quality management10 MIN READNov 1, 2023

Customer service QA interview

So you’re here because you’re considering a career hop, want to hire a quality expert for your contact/call center, or are a little lost — in any case, welcome!

In customer service, quality is currency.Specializing in this niche is a smart move for support professionals who like digging into the why of processes and customer service performance. Hiring a specialist is a shrewd step for businesses wanting a competitive edge. 

What are (call center) quality assurance interview questions?

When interviewing candidates or applying for a QA Specialist position, it’s important to assess knowledge, skills, and experience related to the role. That’s what QA interview questions are for.

The exact questions will depend on the position and the type of the business. Call center Quality Analyst questions are likely to differ from “standard” QA interview questions, given the specificity of the call center operations.

Regardless, let’s look at the most common interview questions for customer service Quality Assurance specialists — and how to answer them.

Klaus asking call center QA interview questions.

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 definitely get you the role!*

*Job offer not guaranteed. Klaus cannot be held responsible for recruitment outcomes. Answers and advice intend to inspire and add juice to your existing cognitive functions & experiences, not to be repeated verbatim. Feline guidance advised.

Why are you applying for this role?

A general question you can expect in most interviews. Can also come under the guise of ‘what makes you suitable for this role?’, ‘why do you want to be a customer service QA specialist?’, etc. 

However, your answer cannot be general.

You want to demonstrate a solid understanding of the job brief and the company’s current performance. In other words, show the interviewer that you’ve done your research. 

Talk about the importance of customer service quality: making a customer happy will increase their loyalty and make them less likely to go to your competitor next time. 

If you know that the company you’re applying to has a solid reputation, talk about why you appreciate that and want to bolster their efforts. If you know that the company you’re applying to needs to improve its reputation, don’t say this outright, but elaborate on why you want to help bring its support team to a high standard. 

Include experience that you already have. Never been a quality specialist before? No problem — if you come from a support background, use specific examples of times when you went the extra mile to ensure you provided quality service to your customers. 

Customer support problems

How do you define customer service quality?

Customer service quality is defined by: 

  • Ease of use for the customer
  • Quick response time to customer inquiries
  • Correct and consistent style and tone of voice
  • Being customer-centric 
  • Offering excellent customer service

From a business point of view, quality customer interaction is likely to also entail the support rep driving product engagement and growth. 

Find the definition of customer service quality in greater detail here.

Of course, you don’t have to memorize this perfectly. But you have to be able to show your awareness of the full scope of customer service.

Bonus points for including an example of exceptional customer service. Maybe it’s a circumstance in which you were the customer, or the agent, or even something you can find on the company you’re interviewing with. Failing all that, find a fun example online.

Klaus crossing things off a quality assurance checklist.

How do you measure customer service quality?

As a quality specialist, it’s your responsibility to track support team performance and align processes with goals. There are two ways to do this: internal reviews and tracking metrics. 

Internal conversation reviews are a vital part of the quality assurance process. It is the only way to measure agent performance against internal company standards and goals. Customer service quality reviews help you pinpoint weaknesses or strengths in processes and give team members direct, actionable feedback. You might mention specific topics that you think are important to include in reviews such as accuracy, style and tone, or personalization.

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?

Although it may seem like a customer service QA specialist has a huge cluster of responsibilities, it really comes down to making the customer happy. 

Your role is to smooth the path for agents to do this. This means that you: 

  • Make sure processes are effective and understood;
  • Provide teams with the feedback they need to improve;
  • Track metrics to identify weak points;
  • Analyze customer feedback;
  • Help to construct and bolster onboarding and coaching programs.
Tip: Talk about how support teams are not just a cost center for customers to solve their problems. Customer satisfaction should be embedded deep into company values, fuelling product development and sales/marketing strategies. 

Check out how Rentman embed these values into their company ethos →

Klaus showing that conversation reviews improve CSAT by 12 percent.

Which tools do you have experience with?

This one is fairly self-explanatory, but don’t worry if the list of software you have hands-on experience with isn’t lengthy. 

Talk instead about best practices for using tools. Some help you connect with customers – channels like Intercom and LiveChat. Some help you conduct quality reviews and track progress – platforms like Klaus and Maestro QA. Showing that you understand the landscape of support QA tools and customer service software will impress the interviewer, even if you haven’t used them extensively. 

Klaus support QA Tool

What is the greatest challenge you’ve faced in quality assurance?

Some examples for inspiration: 

Doing manual QA 

Using spreadsheets for quality reviews causes maintenance commotion. Many support professionals know how cumbersome the admin of support quality assurance becomes when you don’t have access to the right tools. 

Sound familiar? Here’s your chance to discuss how understanding, improving & scaling support quality is a lot easier on a QA platform. Not only is it time-saving, but you are given a much more sophisticated outlook with data tracking, automation, and AI at your disposal. 

Klaus AutoQA

Aligning reviewers and categories 

As a QA specialist, you may be conducting every review personally. But as teams scale, this gets much harder to manage.

When there are multiple reviewers, you also run the risk of multiple opinions. You need cohesion for any outcome to be useful – if a conversation is reviewed differently by three different people, you have a problem. 

Discuss how important it is to conduct regular calibration sessions. And how as the quality expert, you will take charge to align reviewers and promote 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 happens a lot — for example, the customer is angry because they weren’t offered a refund or free trial, so marks the conversation as unsatisfactory. But, once you review customer feedback, it shows that as a support rep, you followed the rulebook to a T when handling customer complaints and issues.

Talk about the importance of quality assurance in separating what a customer thinks is bad service from actual bad service. A stellar review program would catch problems like this, and you wouldn’t have to worry about red herrings looking like red flags. 


Last but not least, remember to smile. 

Happy agents equals happy customers. Here's a unique shot of Klaus wearing a 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: 

Join Quality Tribe

Our community for CX quality professionals

Join Support Driven

A hub for anyone working in support

Originally published in January 2022; last updated in November 2023. 

Written by

Grace
Grace Cartwright
Grace is perpetually working on a self-help book entitled ’Where Did I Put My Keys?’. In her free time, she writes for Klaus.

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