How Glovo uses QA to Maintain High Quality Support across BPOs and Borders

Glovo is a Barcelona-based startup that’s risen to become the fastest-growing delivery player in Europe, Western Asia, and Africa.

Their support department consists of 350 people, managing operations across 25 countries. This includes both internal agents and external agents (via customer service BPOs).

As a global team which operates at such a huge scale, there are significant challenges that come with maintaining standards. No matter where their users reside, Glovo’s support goal is to provide them with only the best experiences. 

So, how do they carry out this mission across countries, across agents, and across BPOs?

Miguel Ribeiro Alves is the Global RTO Quality, Processes, and Training Lead at Glovo. We talked to him about the best practices for maintaining high quality with support when agents are globally dispersed among partners.

Fast forward to: 
⏩ Onboarding
⏩ Quality for widespread support teams
⏩ Tools are better than spreadsheets
⏩ Automated assignments
⏩ QA Specialists
⏩ TLDR

Develop a thorough onboarding structure

It all starts with a robust onboarding process for their support agents. 

Newcomers start with a set 10-day training at Glovo, which consists of several stages. 

• Theoretical knowledge
  Agents learn the ropes before putting their knowledge into practice. Glovo connects customers, businesses, and couriers, so the customer service team needs a solid understanding of the lay of the land before they can graduate to the frontline. 

• Job shadowing
  Towards the end of week one, new recruits start observing how the role looks in practice. This teaches them more about the customer – common issues and how to handle more complex queries. In any team, job shadowing promotes an open learning environment.

• Test
  Before embarking on week two, the new agents must prove that they have absorbed enough knowledge about the company, customers, and processes.

• Nesting period
  During the final days, newcomers transition from more job shadowing to taking on tickets themselves. Although they have ownership during the nesting period, they are under guidance and observation to give them the confidence to adopt the right tone and champion the missions and values at Glovo. 

How to maintain consistency with a large team

At Zendesk QA, we advise our customers to first set their support goals and internal standards before starting with reviews. 

Glovo tackled this by establishing a thorough knowledge base to ensure agents have easy access to the same information at all times.

The larger the ticket count, the harder it is to maintain response consistency. But consistency is increasingly important to customers of today, so having a single point of reference (via an internal knowledge base) is a low-cost means of keeping everyone on the same page. Your customers should be able to trust that they will get an aligned response regardless of who they talk to: be it an agent who has worked with Glovo for years, or a matter of days. 

Glovo’s KB lets them bridge the gap between expectation and reality globally.

From Sheet to Sweet

Before using Zendesk QA, Glovo had a quality system implemented in Western Europe. However, this was managed entirely on Google Sheets, which came with a number of problems.

They struggled with the complexity of accessing information. A template created by HQ was shared among BPOs, but hassles ensued with even the smallest of changes. Some BPOs were copying the template and using it offline. There was no way to be confident, even with assurance, that they were using the newest version of the file.

This culminated in each vendor using their own version of the file, and simply sending the final results. The entire review process was relentlessly cumbersome and time-consuming.

Each individual review took at least 10 minutes. 

Manually checking that the metrics were aligned was impossible (let alone understanding the root causes of results). The data was, therefore, unusable.

With Zendesk QA, Glovo has gained easy access to the audits done by all the BPOs on a single dashboard. Changing scorecards across the board is easy, with no risk of miscommunication. 

Automate assignments to keep the quality clock ticking 

Glovo has 11 people dedicated to quality, plus one person in their Barcelona headquarters totally dedicated to providing support to the quality assistants.

They use the Assignments feature to pick conversations at random to ensure variety in what they’re auditing. Their day-to-day goal is to survey a range of conversations and ensure that the quality process is ticking over and expectations are met across the board.

They focus on if agents followed the correct procedures while also looking at efficiency metrics, like the number of orders they can manage and the time they take to do it.

Drilling down on specifics

Glovo’s golden rule is to make the weekly audits with a balanced number of audits per agent. However, their QA specialists sometimes carry out extra audits if they spot patterns of mistakes. 

Larger teams are always advised to hire QA specialists for precisely this reason. A specialist is much more likely to clock trends and understand performance in more minute detail. While peer reviews and manager reviews have their place, a QA specialist has the expertise and time to drill down on specifics to problem-solve on ground level. 

QA goes hand in Glovo with great customer experiences

Glovo has seen the benefits of using Zendesk QA and plans to continue rolling out its implementation at a global level.

They want to further focus on improving the quality system they have in place to make it even more agile and to use the data to improve their overall operations.

“By providing visibility to everyone, Zendesk QA assures an agile and honest feedback process between quality and agents. This obviously results in an improvement of our quality results and assures agents keep being developed and coached to do better.”

Miguel Ribeiro Alves

Glovo