Quality assurance (QA) is like a good scratch post for your customer service team. It keeps their claws — and skills — sharp:
- QA starts with reviewing conversations your team is having with your customers, and evaluating specific areas that you’ve identified as essential to providing high-quality support.
- Then you can assign scores in each of those areas (AKA your quality standards).
- Finally, these are combined into an Internal Quality Score (IQS).
Hopefully, you have lots of customers providing your team with feedback through metrics like CSAT and NPS. Layering in a metric like IQS enables you (or your managers, or your QA team) to also provide feedback to your team and assess the quality of the service you’re providing.
Sounds great, right? But let’s be real: building a great manual QA program can be time-consuming, and investing in AI-powered QA automation tools costs money.
Spoiler alert: that investment is worth it.
Here’s why.
Why companies do support QA — and why you should, too
Quality assurance plays a big role in plenty of companies for many reasons:
- It helps you improve customer satisfaction.
- Insights from QA can reduce customer churn.
- It provides opportunities for growth and development for your agents.
- Quality assurance can be the best way to identify blockers in your customer experience.
Improve customer satisfaction
76% of organizations agree that conversation reviews help improve customer satisfaction. Plus, satisfied customers contribute 17 times as much revenue as somewhat dissatisfied ones.
Evaluating customer conversations in a standardized way means your support team consistently improves their responses. It also enables you to get actionable insights on how to improve customer sentiment and exceed customer expectations.
Reduce customer churn
A quality assurance process allows you to find conversations from customers who’ve churned and determine why they left, whether it’s a failure in your customer service, a problem with your product, or a combination of both.
It also arms you with concrete data about those issues that you can take back to your product and engineering teams to work together to combat future churn.
Provide opportunities for growth and development
Quantitative insights via typical customer support metrics are valuable in assessing your agents’ performance. But it’s only when you combine these with qualitative data that you can really target areas to improve.
77% of teams agree that conversation reviews are useful for team members’ professional growth. Quality assurance ensures that feedback is normal and baked into your culture.
Identify blockers in the customer experience
Thorough quality assurance can essentially function as a Voice of the Customer program. This is especially true when you’re using something like AutoQA, which leverages AI to evaluate 100% of your customer interactions.
It will help you pinpoint blockers and inefficiencies in your processes. It also puts you right next to customers and their complaints so that you can gather insightful feedback for your customer and product teams.
Our complete guide to customer service quality assurance elaborates on these points and offers more if you need help presenting the pawsibilities of QA to your company.
Examples of successful QA programs
But don’t take our word for it.
Check out these real results from companies who have invested in quality assurance programs for their customer service teams.
Pipedrive achieves a nearly perfect CSAT score
Pipedrive is a CRM solution for marketing and sales teams with a 90-person support team. They offer two-tiered support in five languages to 100,000 businesses across 179 countries.
Pipedrive had great metrics even before they began using Klaus for quality management, to the tune of a 95% CSAT score and an 86% IQS. But they were driven to improve even further.
They decided to use Klaus to:
- Identify areas for agent training,
- Create a fair and centralized review process,
- And provide custom insight for other teams in the company.
Pipedrive’s QA specialists and managers aim to review at least 7% of customer interactions across all of their channels, conducting regular calibration sessions to ensure grading is consistent. They use a two-point rating scale, and each of their agents receives a minimum of four points of feedback every week.
By implementing a customer service quality assurance system, they managed increases above already high baselines: achieving +1% in CSAT and +5% in IQS.
Helloprint saves up to 30 minutes per review
Helloprint is Europe’s leading marketplace for customized print products, serving over 650,000 customers. Their Customer Experience team is 140-strong, providing support to 13 countries.
Like Pipedrive, they also have impressive customer experience metrics: 89.9% CSAT and 94.6% IQS.
Importantly, Helloprint has a high-trust culture that embraces a growth mindset. Their agents are empowered to make customers as happy as possible, and they need feedback – both from customers and from managers — to make that happen.
Helloprint transitioned to Klaus to automate conversation reviews, score calculations, and reporting, as well as make it easier for their agents to access their scores and feedback.
Using tools like the Complexity filter to quickly find conversations with negative CSAT and Klaus’ browser extension to review those conversations, Helloprint has been able to save 20-30 minutes per piece of feedback given.
This time-saving allows them to focus more on helping struggling agents, even identifying high-performing agents to pair them with for mentoring.
Deliverect uses quality control to deliver top-tier service consistently
Deliverect is a global restaurant technology company with over 60 support agents servicing countries from Australia to Mexico.
Serving a worldwide clientele meant expanding their support team to new continents and across time zones, which presented challenges in maintaining service quality while scaling so rapidly and widely.
They needed a robust and centralized tool for managing support quality effectively. They use Klaus to provide a structured and consistent quality review process without overburdening their Quality & Training team.
Klaus’ Sentiment analysis allows their team to target and review areas where the highest-impact improvements are needed. That way they can deliver top-tier customer service to restaurants without focusing only on negative feedback, which can be demoralizing for their support agents.
Klaus fosters communication and collaboration between what’s most important to Deliverect: their support team and their customers.
Geckoboard improves product engagement and upsells
Geckoboard is a software company that helps businesses create live TV dashboards showing the most important metrics.
When considering how to implement conversation reviews, Geckoboard decided the best fit for their team was peer reviews.
Peer reviews:
- Allow the team to review more conversations even as they grow,
- Bring every team member into the feedback loop,
- Boost knowledge sharing among the team,
- And offer agents a structured framework for growing their coaching and mentoring skills.
Support agents dedicate 30 minutes every day to conversation reviews, ideally completing two reviews each day or ten reviews per week.
Conducting peer reviews in Klaus has enabled Geckoboard to provide ten times more proactive help to fellow agents, which has resulted in big gains in product engagement and upsells.
Found used AI to help agents improve faster
Found is an evidence-based weight care program with customer service as an extension of its core services. Their support agents play an important role in their members’ experience, sometimes acting as healthcare educators, cheerleaders, and product advocates in a single customer interaction.
Because Found memberships have many moving parts, their quality assurance tool needed to automate conversation reviews so that agents could improve quickly.
Found used Klaus’ Assignments feature to automatically give reviewers their assignments, complete with pre-selected conversations:
- QA Specialists complete two reviews per week per team member.
- Team leads do one review per week per team member.
This means all team members received the same number of reviews and a consistent amount of useful feedback.
They also took advantage of Spotlight, Klaus’ AI-powered conversation discovery feature. Spotlight automatically highlights complex conversations that must be reviewed to reveal the biggest learning opportunities, customized to each company’s unique needs.
Combining automated assignments with AI-powered conversation discovery means that team leads can directly identify high-impact areas for growth so they have more time to focus on helping agents grow.
Customer service quality assurance helps your team always land on their feet
Quality assurance programs are flexible. No two programs will look the same, which means your company can develop an individualized plan to target the areas you want to work on.
While the structures might vary, the benefits and importance of quality assurance are consistent.
No matter how you approach QA, as long as you invest in doing it regularly and use the data it provides, you’ll see an improvement.
QA fosters a culture of continuous improvement, empowers agents with the tools and feedback necessary for professional growth, and helps identify and address systemic issues within the customer experience.
These improvements lead to higher satisfaction ratings, more efficient service, and ultimately, a stronger connection between your support team and your customers.
But it also builds a stronger connection between you and your team, so that your agents don’t feel like they’re stuck on a tree branch alone, afraid of falling.
A thoughtful quality assurance program helps them remember that you’re up there with them, giving them the skills they need to take a leap and land on their feet.
Want to see similar results?
