Found, an evidence-based weight care program, recognizes customer service as an extension of its core values. Their support team has to step into the roles of healthcare educator, supportive cheerleader, and product advocate – sometimes all within the same conversation.
Automating shortcuts and review cadence
So, how do you measure and improve their performance when each member seeks a different type of support?
Let’s put a magnifying glass over their process, and find out how Zendesk QA (formerly Klaus) helps them go over and above for their customers.
Which automations improve their workflow?
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Message shortcuts
As Kalyn likes to call them: “juicy shortcuts”. She has created a bank of prewritten emails that provide the team with a quick and efficient shortcut to respond to customer inquiries with all necessary information. Enough juice to satisfy their issues, so to speak.
This offers a baseline from which to spring. These messages help the support team feel comfortable and confident to combat the stigma around weight loss, a challenge especially when first starting out.
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Review assignments
Gaining comprehensive insight into team performance is of utmost importance, and this requires setting review targets.
Manually managing this process often becomes a burden for QA specialists. While chasing individuals to complete reviews may not be in their job description, it often becomes part of their routine. A part that consumes valuable time that could be better spent elsewhere.
Kalyn’s strategy has alleviated much of this burden – and meant that she has a much bigger impact on elevating customer service performance.
The assignments feature is the easiest way to remove the heavy lifting from the review process. Kalyn is able to set up the entire process within Zendesk QA – every review cycle, each reviewer is given their assignment with pre-selected conversations. This way, all team members receive an equal number of reviews, and are given a reliable stream of constructive feedback. This saves time not only for Kalyn, but for the other reviewers also.
How Found uses Spotlight to review what’s important
“I don’t look at any other conversations without using Spotlight. It’s my favorite Zendesk QA feature.
Spotlight is so important for us because it shows conversations that have more back and forth. If there is more back and forth, that’s a cause for concern, or at least something that we want to look into. Why is this member having to write in multiple times in one conversation to get a resolution?
It also means we aren’t having to search through conversations – we have other responsibilities.”
Spotlight is the AI-powered Zendesk QA conversation discovery feature. It automatically highlights complex conversations that fall into the must-review category and reveal the greatest learning opportunities.
Kalyn uses Spotlight in combination with automated assignments so that team leads have the best conversations for review put directly in front of them.
This AI filter does a multilevel statistical analysis of your communications metadata. In other words, the parameters of the conversations crucial for Found to review might look different to conversations other companies would find important.
Incentivizing growth through reviews & 1:1 coaching
Since managing the review process is partly tackled through automation and discovering the right conversations to review is wholly tackled through AI, Kalyn can make a much more significant impact on performance.
Incentivizing growth among support teams is a tricky endeavor.
So Found does things a little differently. Agents are scored out of five for:
- Product knowledge
- Clear understanding of the issue
- Solution
- Grammar
- Use of a shortcut
However, getting a five in every category is not easy. For example, using a shortcut but not modifying it will result in a four (for the shortcut category).
Involved, 1:1 sessions using reviews as material to showcase where agents need to learn and improve is Kalyn’s long-term strategy. What makes agents feel more confident and capable in their learning abilities is seeing and tracking their growth over time. Her 1:1s are an open space to thoroughly discuss feedback, so they can feel empowered to improve.
How QA feeds these coaching sessions
Once a month, Kalyn goes through the Zendesk QA dashboard with each team member focusing on:
- Overall IQS
- Category averages
- Individual tickets
Through this, Kalyn doesn’t operate as a separate entity that just reviews conversations and offers feedback. She’s a resource who they can come to when they want to.
Kalyn finds that the most significant impact she’s had as a QA lead has been through these monthly 1:1 Zoom calls with every team member. Finding the time and data for this would be almost impossible without Zendesk QA.
