What Should I Be Doing As A Quality Analyst In Digital Customer Service?

As a quality assurance specialist in customer service, you play a crucial role in your contact center’s success. You have the power to improve customer experiences as part of an ongoing quality assurance program. Without your expertise, the management team may not understand where agents are struggling and they may face challenges in achieving excellent customer service.

However, not knowing what is required and expected of the quality analyst team can confuse contact center managers. Let’s take a closer look at the definition of a quality analyst and what goals to keep in mind as a quality assurance worker, from your duties to implementing changes.

How Would You Help Contribute to the Success of the Organization as a Quality Assurance Team?

Becoming a good quality analyst starts with examining strong quality assurance standards. Here are several steps you can take to ensure you’re equipped with the necessary quality assurance skills for success.

1. Understand the Company Values and Mission

Every business has its own values and objectives, even if they’re almost identical from one to the next. For contact centers handling inbound and outbound calls, its important to understand the company’s core mission if you’re going to uplevel your customer service performance.

Discuss this with managers and investigate ways in which values have been upheld. What has worked well so far and what could they improve? How are targets being hit? Or why are they being missed? And how do these connect to the organization’s mission overall?

Understanding the core values at hand will help you know what to watch out for when evaluating agent performance over time and creating strategies to achieve higher customer satisfaction.

2. Monitor Interactions

A quality analyst job description typically mentions monitoring phone calls, live chats, and other customer interactions as a crucial part of the role. Why? Because observing communications between contact center agents and customers is a fundamental part of being a customer service quality analyst.

Typically an analyst will leverage a call recording or a digital transcription to effectively review a conversation with a customer. Listening or viewing a live conversation is also a best practice for a quality team because it allows for immediate feedback to the agents. Some contact center software has the ability to deliver live coaching built directly into the platform to make for a seamless process.  The purpose of reviewing these conversations is to not only identify areas of opportunity where an agent could deliver a stronger experience, but also identify where an agent may be excelling so those examples can be used to help other agents improve.  Quality scorecards are the forms that are used by analysts to score the call, and are typically developed by management and other stakeholders to measure behaviors that are directly related to the company’s objectives, such as customer experience or sales. 

It is critical to understand the expectations behind each behavior in a quality scoring form.  These are typically defined by stakeholders, but fine tuned through a calibration process.  Calibration is a process put in place to bring together various independent scorers, have them all score the same call, and then discuss discrepancies.  This flushes out inconsistency in scoring, but also helps further define the criteria so expectations for analysts and agents are consistent and clear. 

3.  Deliver Feedback, Coaching And Training

After conducting internal evaluations for any service team members that have conversations with customers, you’ll share your findings with them to encourage continuous improvement. It’s important to link your feedback to overall objectives so agents understand why it matters. Your feedback should also be a balance of good and areas of opportunity.  If you are constantly talking about only the bad, the agents will become disengaged and feel like they are never successful. 

This can be a delicate process (which we’ll go into in greater detail below), but providing constructive feedback is a valuable opportunity to help employees grow. They may not be aware of certain mistakes they make, or struggle to understand their lack of motivation, until you help them.

Your work may fall under the title of “quality analyst,” but you’re truly part of the customer service team. These contributions are fundamental to an effective training program, guiding employees to deliver a more positive customer experience based on hard data. Base coaching on your findings, tailored to each member of staff. You may do solo, or you could do it alongside team leaders and managers. 

What Obstacles Do You Face as a Quality Analyst?

One of the major challenges you may face as a quality analyst is resistance. Service agents and dedicated team leaders could feel resentful of your work if they don’t fully understand what your goals are.

For example, they might believe you’re monitoring their interactions to help management identify weaker employees. This means managers have done a bad job implementing the quality assurance program, and have to be more transparent with staff to encourage cooperation. This is also why its important to balance both good and bad feedback. Reinforce the quality team is not the police, they are here to help drive exceptional customer experiences. 

Another potential impediment is outdated or poor quality software or poor internal processes. You need a solid QM platform to help manage your quality process. This empowers you with direct access to different data from across multiple channels. Management must invest in the best QM software to ensure you have a tightly integrated system to not only evaluate interactions, but also coach and motivate employees to perform.

How to Evaluate Customer Service Agents’ Performance

You’ll evaluate service agents’ performance using quality management solutions including contact center and customer relationship management (CRM) software. This allows you to review conversations between employees and customers, measuring the quality of customer service based on specific metrics.

Do this at random, and without bias. Favoring one agent over another can lead to unbalanced performance measures. You may miss mistakes that cause problems down the line, possibly dragging down the entire team’s performance.

Create custom scorecards that reflect the company’s goals and values. You can gather customer feedback too, using post-interaction surveys.  Or you can use AI-driven solutions that automatically identify churn risks or bad experiences so you can quickly react and also train agents how to improve. This gives you direct views on agents’ performance and identifies growth opportunities.

How to Deliver Feedback to Customer Service Agents

As a quality analyst in customer service, it’s important to have strong communication skills. Telling people where they’re going wrong in their job can be problematic if you’re not sensitive to their feelings.

Make sure you focus on the positives and prevent your critiques from coming across as a personal attack. You should support your criticism and suggestions with evidence, using data from your monitoring.

Invite agents to review their own interactions and share their thoughts on your comments. Do they agree with your findings, or do they think you’re being too harsh? What ideas do they have to improve their service?

Be empathetic and transparent. Be friendly and willing to listen. If you cannot get service agents bought into the process and it’s importance, they’re less likely to take your guidance on board.

How to Share Results and Insights with Team Leaders

Team leaders and managers must implement necessary changes into everyday processes based on your findings. They’re essential for bridging the gap between yourself and the agents themselves. If they cannot get involved, your job is likely to be much more difficult.

Hold one or two meetings each week to keep team leaders and managers aware of any issues you’ve flagged during quality reviews and coaching. Use the comprehensive reporting tools available in your QM software to show them the impact poor service has on customer service, and work together to create improvement strategies.

The goal is to educate agents and motivate them to work to a higher standard. Everyone in the contact center must be involved in the quality program to make it as effective as it can be. That’s why full transparency and collaboration are so vital.

As a quality analyst in customer service, you have a large part to play in your contact center’s ongoing success. Your monitoring, evaluation and feedback are all fundamental to driving growth, benefitting both employees and customers alike.

Follow the tips explored above to make the most of your role, take advantage of the best tools available, listen to customers and always focus on agents’ positives.For additional quality management support, explore how Playvox can help.