Deciding who will perform your conversation reviews is the foundation to building a successful conversation review program. There are several options you can choose from – in the first episode, we cover specialist and manager reviews.
RILEY YOUNG: Welcome to Klaus’ Courses. My name is Riley Young, I’m an Educational Content Creator here at Klaus, and this course is designed to help you set up your own conversation review program by going over the fundamentals of conversation reviews.
We will cover all of the crucial decisions that need to be made to implement a successful review program, starting with – who should be performing your conversation reviews?
NARRATOR: Deciding who will perform your conversation reviews is the foundation to building a successful conversation review program. There are several options you can choose from, such as specialist reviews, manager reviews, peer reviews, and self-reviews.
RILEY YOUNG: Let’s start with specialist reviews. Having a dedicated, full-time QA specialist to perform your conversation reviews is definitely recommended for those who have the budget allocation to hire for such a position.
You can also expand the position into a full-blown QA team, so that your quality program will be able to keep up with the rest of your company’s growth. Think of your QA specialist or QA team as an investment towards maintaining amazing support interactions as you handle more and more conversations.
NARRATOR: Depending on your volume, one dedicated QA specialist may be enough. However, if your support volume is on the larger side, consider adding more QA specialists to the team. This means you can free up the time of your managers or team leads, while also reducing grading bias and misalignments that can occur when managers perform reviews.
RILEY YOUNG: A dedicated QA specialist is also able to provide more meaningful insights by means of regular reporting and analyzing particular trends that your review program has produced.
It’s important to give your specialist time to create these reports alongside performing their reviews. By correctly balancing your QA specialist’s workload between reviews, reporting and analysis. You can gain some helpful insights into your team’s performance and start seeing where things need to be improved on a team-wide level, as well as on the individual level.
NARRATOR: A monthly quality analysis is a great example of a recurring report that can be shared with each team lead, as well as the rest of the department to keep them informed
about the state of your support quality.
Another area where QA specialists can shine is by forming a close relationship with your training team, as insights from your conversation reviews should highlight any training needs for your agents.
RILEY YOUNG: If you can’t involve a dedicated QA specialist, then a common option is to have each manager or team lead regularly perform the reviews.
This has a number of benefits, such as a regular feedback cycle between the manager and their support reps, as well as having more aligned scores, as each support rep in the team is being graded by the same reviewer. This approach is best for small to medium-sized support departments, where your support is made up of multiple teams.
NARRATOR: An important aspect when implementing reviews is to make sure you and your team have the capacity to perform them consistently.
If your support team is constantly hiring new agents and your managers are responsible for other tasks outside of their managerial role, then be careful not to overload them with reviews that they don’t have time for.
RILEY YOUNG: If your teams are stable in terms of size and retention and your managers have the time, then manager reviews could work for you.Here are a few things to keep in mind when implementing manager reviews.
Make sure that your managers have dedicated and uninterrupted time to perform conversation reviews. That they regularly discuss the feedback with their support reps during 1:1s. That they hold regular calibration sessions so that all of the managers are aligned, and that your grading guidelines are very clear, so that one manager isn’t being unfair on their team’s results.
If you cannot guarantee these points, then consider opting for a dedicated specialist
to perform your reviews and let your team leads do what they do best.
Join us in the next video as we explore two more options you have when deciding who should be doing your conversation reviews.
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