Your rating categories depend on your company’s perception of what great customer support looks like. Get inspired by the most common rating categories used by Klaus customers or define your own by looking at your internal goals and support principles.
RILEY YOUNG: Today, we will look at one of the most important decisions that you will make when implementing your quality program – choosing which categories to rate depends on your company’s priorities and what you want to review.
Your categories make up your scorecard, meaning that for every conversation you review, you will be checking the quality based on these same categories over and over again. By doing this, you can track trends over time to determine where things are going smoothly or spot any troubled areas.
Around 89% of our customers use between two to four rating categories for their internal conversation reviews. Now, that doesn’t mean that you can’t have more. However, keeping things as simple as possible has its benefits.
NARRATOR: Too many categories can lead to decision fatigue for your reviewers. Whereas using too few might not provide you with enough insight into how your team is performing. Take your time. Choose your rating categories so the balance is right for you!
To help decide which categories would be best for your scorecard, it’s a great idea to start with looking at your internal goals or support principles.
RILEY YOUNG: Does your support team already have a goal or mission? If so, that’s the perfect place to start. For example, at Klaus, some of our core support values are to be human, be solution-oriented, and to correctly follow up with our customers. We chose our rating categories for QA based on these values.
For the value of “Be human”, we use the category Tone, where we assess whether or not our support was able to match the customer’s tone and not come off sounding like a robot.
We went with the category Solution to match our value of being solution-oriented. Here we assess whether or not our support rep was able to solve the customer issue or provide a workaround.
Our third category is based on our value to follow up with our customers. Therefore, we use the category Clear follow-up. This is where we assess whether or not our support rep gave sufficient information about the next steps and what else Klaus can do to help.
This gives us three pretty important categories to assess and ones that we hope our support reps are succeeding in regularly.
NARRATOR: Once you have decided on which categories to use based on your internal support goals or values, the next stop when choosing your rating categories comes from looking within. Only you will be able to determine whether or not your support reps followed your internal processes – such as refund procedures or escalations – correctly, which makes this an excellent additional grading category.
RILEY YOUNG: Would a customer know if your support had followed these processes correctly or not? Probably not, right? By tracking and grading your processes, you can also gain some pretty handy insights.
For example, if you notice your CSAT scores are higher when refunds were done incorrectly, yet lower when the refunds were made correctly, then it might be a good idea to review your refund process, as it’s clear that this is impacting your customer satisfaction.
NARRATOR: By now, you should already have your base categories that reflect your support goals and internal processes. It’s time to decide whether there is anything else you want to look out for when reviewing your support conversations. Here are some of the popular rating categories that are used by Klaus customers.
RILEY YOUNG: Aside from the categories already mentioned, the most common categories we see are Empathy, Product knowledge, Grammar, Accuracy, Communication, Closing, and Tagging. Get creative with your category selection. Remember, it’s about picking the ones that match your company’s perception of what great customer support looks like.
Bear in mind, your categories may change slightly depending on your support streams. For example, if your support is mainly handled via phone, then your categories should reflect that. Your rating categories could look something like this – Did the support rep greet or introduce correctly, use empathetic listening skills, provide a suitable solution to the customer, or close the call correctly? Quality management platforms such as Klaus let you create multiple scorecards so you can create a unique scorecard for each of your support streams.
That brings us to the end of the first part of this lesson. In the next video, we will explore how to set up your category weights and better understand how your categories will work in your review process. We’ll see you there!
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