Valentina Thörner is a former Happiness Team Lead at Automattic. With a sharp focus on the quality of customer support, she believes in peer feedback and sees it as a part of the company culture.
Customer service conversation reviews, aka quality assurance, can be conducted by managers, dedicated QA specialists, or peers. With people outside the customer service teams evaluating customer interactions, you run the risk of communicating a lack of trust to your agents.
On the other hand, peer reviews come with a number of advantages:
- Knowledge sharing among peers, like sharing great workarounds, answer templates, etc.
- Improved trust levels among peers, knowing that others do their best, too.
- Discovering knowledge gaps, helping each other grow.
- Accelerated onboarding for new agents with real-life examples.
- Peer reviews are scalable and distribute review load among all agents.
Valentina’s remote team uses Zendesk QA (formerly Klaus) as their review tool and rates customer service conversations in four categories: tone, validation, answer, direct/guide. Every week, each team member rates 10 tickets of one agent to understand the voice of the particular agent.
“As a remote company, these quick check-ins are a great conversation starter to get to know people that are on different support teams, or in another time zone.” Valentina Thöner
