Customer Service Scorecard Categories: General or Granular?

When it comes to evaluating your team for their support quality, you need a customer service scorecard that is efficient and actionable. This means choosing rating categories that help reviewers and support reps recognize strengths and impurrove weaknesses.

When you choosing your rating categories, think about your customer support goals and the priorities behind your conversations. There are two competing factors to consider:

✨ The case for more granular rating categories:
Each conversation needs to be reviewed in accordance with your universal quality standards.
✨ The case for more general rating categories:
Reviews should be (relatively) quick and easy for the reviewer and reviewee.

If you want to focus on specific aspects, you can add as many categories as you deem necessary. You can rate the tone, format, rapport with the customer, use of screenshots, answers to possible follow-up questions, and much more. This determines the information that you’ll gather in your QA sessions.

But there are dangers with going overboard and rendering the entire review process obsolete by overcomplicating it.

Are you creating a scorecard for the first time?
Go to our Customer Service Scorecard Template for Quality Assurance (QA) for a free download and guide.

Don't always have to use all the quality criteria in your support scorecard

There’s such a thing as too many cats

I know, right? Shocking.

By default, your Klaus account comes with three rating categories:

Solution
Empathy/Tone
Product knowledge.

However, you can add and customize to your heart’s content. But take a meowment to consider your reviewers, how many reviews they undertake, and how long you want your support reps to spend on considering their feedback. In other words, don’t turn an informative exercise into one that triggers Decision Fatigue – more on that a little later.

Comments are your friend. While you have to balance your rating categories, reviewers can elaborate and go into as much detail as they like in comments. Klaus also gives reviewees the chance to respond and dispute any comments too.

We think every business can find a sweet spot between 3 and 7 cats (and categories). Our scorecard template comes with five rating categories, based on the most popular support quality criteria:

Solution
Process
Product knowledge
Tone
Validation

Make it fun, make it meaningful

When creating your customer service scorecard:

Look at existing conversations for a general idea of the challenges your agents face.
Leave comments when necessary.
Tag recurring problems that you see.
Celebrate the fact that most agents (hopefully) do the right thing most of the time.

Instead of agonizing over 10 different rating categories, invest your time into leaving meaningful comments and following up on them in your 1:1s. These notes will help you decide whether to go more granular – and just HOW granular.

Whatever you do, keep your customer service goals in mind.

Decision fatigue in customer service quality reviews

What is Decision Fatigue and why does it matter?

In decision-making and psychology, decision fatigue refers to the deteriorating quality of decisions made over a long period of time. It is now understood as one of the causes of irrational decision-making.

For instance, judges in court are said to make decisions of poorer quality later in the day.

If you expect yourself, or your team, to make more than 10 rating decisions for every single ticket review, you are setting yourself up for failure. After a short time, you’ll mechanically click through those categories without focusing too much on the content.