How does Quality Assurance Improve Customer Satisfaction?

Unless you’re hitting 100s across the board, chances are you are on the perennial path to improving your CSAT score. While there’s no magic formula, an airtight quality assurance program will improve customer satisfaction. 

If some of your customers are suffering from a bad case of the Mick Jaggers (they can’t get no satisfaction), you need to roll your stones back a few paces to find out where things started going downhill. 

Quality assurance helps you take a proactive approach. 

Customer satisfaction is an ever-moving target. Expectations consistently rise and evolve, which means there’s no quick-fix method. It takes consistency to keep your CSAT high.

Ding ding, here’s your problem

Conversation reviews are the best indicators of areas where you can improve. When you set up your quality assurance program, customer service reviews need to be at the core of your efforts. Dig into your interactions to understand not just how agents are interacting, but to understand what customers are saying. 

By all means, you could pluck a few support interactions at random or even ALL conversations for a complete overview. But that’s not really the most efficient customer service review strategy. 

Be more specific about which conversations you review to find your Achilles’ heel(s).

So, you want to improve customer satisfaction, but what can you control?

Within a customer service team, there are limits on how in control you are of customer satisfaction. 

Controllable factors include team performance and support processes. When you conduct quality reviews, you want to identify variables which you can change: agent knowledge or tone, for example. 

But you might notice that the customer dissatisfaction applies to factors outside your sphere of influence, like poor product performance or limited support channels. Maybe there are recurring issues with the product itself. Maybe they wanted to speak to you on the phone when you only offer live chat or email.

Your CSAT won’t differentiate between these variables – that’s up to you to investigate.

Don’t ignore what may appear to be out of your control. Customer satisfaction should be a company-wide goal – if you see recurring uncontrollables, take this to decision-makers and/or other teams who can make wider changes. 

Train your team to always ask the questions that get to the bottom of customer problems. Since listening is a key tenet of excellent customer service, your support reps might need to do a little probing.

How does your team measure up? 

Your CSAT will only be as good as your lowest-performing team member. 

So, when we talk about the importance of consistency, we’re not just referring to a QA program. 76% of customers expect consistency across agents and channels. This requires a methodical approach to identifying agent weaknesses and feeding that into a coaching plan that brings everyone up to par. 

How to identify agent weaknesses: 

Set up review categories that align with your internal standards
Rating your agents on Solution and Product knowledge is important, but remember to include the less tangible attributes like Empathy or Going the extra mile. Check out these rating category trends for more insight.

Monitor conversations over some time
Set review assignments to keep the QA kettle boiling. Think like a scientist and don’t muddy experiments with poor sampling – take a longer approach. Patterns and trends are more valuable to you than one-off conversations.

All about that IQS

Internal Quality Score is the key metric for customer service quality assurance.

And it’s calculated through internal reviews. The conversation reviewer (whether a manager, peer, or specialist) understands support goals and is thus qualified to rate support reps based on predefined rating categories. 

Therefore, understanding how agents measure up to internal standards gives you a more direct path to improving customer satisfaction. 

If your IQS is high yet CSAT is low
This indicates that there are more uncontrollable factors at play. 

If your IQS and CSAT are low
It’s time to put on your coaching cap and get a handle on what your team can control. 

A coach’s toolkit

Helpful feedback and effective coaching is the last (but not insignificant) stop on the path from cat to CSAT. 

You need to provide regular feedback to your support reps based on their performance. But giving them feedback without constructive advice is as useful as a chocolate fireguard.

Use Zendesk QA to manage how you coach and make sure you’re giving agents the time and tools they need to impurrove:

• Pins for coaching
  Pin specific conversations to an agent or reviewer’s folder. So, when feedback sessions come around, you have examples at your fingertips.
• Quizzes
  Scientifically proven to help humans learn AND you can make them fun. Design custom quizzes based on which skills they need to brush up on, e.g., Onboarding quiz, Product knowledge quiz, etc. 
• Coaching sessions
  Everything in one place: your sessions dashboard tracks talking points and action items. It also gives you an overview of the agent’s key metrics, so you can track their progress.