Livestorm’s IQS and CSAT sit steady at 95% – even though their team grew 5x bigger in one year. Elif Koral, Head of Customer Experience at Livestorm, tells us how Livestorm’s support team preserves quality and culture with Zendesk QA (formerly Klaus).
When Livestorm joined Zendesk QA in October 2019, their team of customer experts numbered just four. Quality assurance consisted of hands-on internal conversation reviews. But the company was accelerating fast, and hands-on just isn’t sustainable at scale.
Livestorm offers powerful, pain-free video engagement – their client base now includes Fortune 500 companies, and they’ve hired over 100 new employees in the last year alone. There are now 23 employees within their customer support team.
“We have been on a steep growth trajectory,” Elif tells us, “growing remotely across different time zones all over the world – all the reason why we needed to have a more systematic approach.”
Jump to:
- Why manual customer support quality control doesn’t cut it
- How to review new team members
- Takeaway advice for growing support teams
Scaling customer support quality with Zendesk QA
Working within Livestorm’s support team is complex: their experts deal with varying vendors & tools, and maintaining in-depth knowledge of the product itself goes without saying. They connect with tech and product teams regularly, and customer feedback defines their roadmap. To add to the complexity, Livestorm’s quality-driven team is all remote.
Elif knew that a robust feedback system is necessary for a team to continuously improve, especially when they sit next to each other virtually instead of physically.
But with the team growing so quickly, their support team was having trouble providing the necessary feedback with their existing manual approach to conversation reviews.
Why manual customer support quality control doesn’t cut it
Details tend to slip through the cracks when quality control is run manually. It’s also unnecessarily cumbersome. Cats may have nine lives, but startups tend to just have one – time is precious.
So, when Elif learned of Zendesk QA’s conversation review platform on Support Driven, it didn’t take long for Livestorm to pounce on the opportunity. Zendesk QA helped them solidify their support values with dedicated categories and provide valuable feedback asynchronously to their remote team.
“Some of the things that really stood out to me were: the integrations with Slack and Intercom, the easy binary rating system, the granular reporting/analytical features, and the transparent pricing.”
Luckily, there were very few growing pains when it came to getting started with Zendesk QA:
“The Zendesk QA team were very reactive and solution-oriented around those. Medea, our CSM, was especially very helpful. We were able to become operational in a short period of time thanks to the training she provided and the overall support we had from the Zendesk QA team.”
Onboarding with all paws on deck
Hiring is not taken lightly at Livestorm. As a remote-first company, their processes need to be rigorous to encourage team strength and continuous improvement.
It doesn’t matter that their support team spans continents and timezones, their internal clockwork needs to be in sync. Reviewing conversations improves customer support training and aligning.
“When a new team member finishes their first month of onboarding, we start including them in our Zendesk QA review cycle. This helps us establish a starting point to track progress. In addition, it’s very interesting to see how a team member progresses in the next months. Overall, a rewarding experience.”
Elif also stressed that they don’t just focus on a newcomer’s overall IQS. They analyze how their experts score across different categories to spot knowledge gaps and training opportunities.
How to review new team members
Livestorm takes the ingenious approach of weighing categories differently during the onboarding period. This brings candidates up to speed in the right areas.
- At the beginning it’s all about their communication skills
Team members are not expected to immediately have absolute product expertise. But they should still shine when talking to customers, so all categories under Communication are given higher value in reviews. - Seasoned team members need expertise
Comparatively, Solution and Product are heavily weighted categories for the more experienced support experts. Team members usually make the jump into this group after six months.
Read more about setting up and rating different categories
Maintaining values: categories & quality metrics
Livestorm’s 2021 IQS and CSAT are both an enviable 95% – they measure their customer service KPIs monthly and weekly. Reviews are crucial for ensuring quality ticks all the right boxes continually.
Elif shared how they’ve set up categories on Zendesk QA to adhere to their value set: Communication, Solution & Product.
Support experts are reviewed according to the following categories:
- Tone/Empathy
- Language/Grammar
- Structure
- Details
- Troubleshooting/Investigation
- Solution
- Product/Technical knowledge
- Documentation
“The naming of the categories also changed a bit over time with the calibrations our management team conducts. These calibrations help our team be aligned while conducting these reviews to have a unified approach. “
Team leaders review ten conversations weekly per expert. Zendesk QA helps them quickly identify opportunities for improvement and strengthen their all-important feedback loop.
They prioritize reviewing longer conversations. Feedback is provided asynchronously through comments on Zendesk QA and sometimes on weekly calls when required.
Tip: To narrow your reviews down to the most consequential conversations, Spotlight uses AI to hand you the interactions in which the customer issues are more complicated.
What advice does Elif have for growing customer support teams?
Want to avoid sacrificing customer support quality as your team grows?
