Who Does What In A Quality Assurance Process?

Your customer service team may handle hundreds or thousands of calls every single day. Each one of these must be handled with the utmost professionalism and provide the caller with a satisfactory experience, even if they’re unable to get the exact result they have in mind.

Quality assurance is a vital process to ensure your call center agents deliver the best customer service they can, across all kinds of interaction (complaint, query, technical support, sales etc.). With an effective QA system in place, you can cultivate transformative improvements in the quality of your customer experience — but who is responsible for quality assurance in a QA process?

In this article, we’ll cover:

Appointing a QA analyst in your call center/customer service department
Preparing your customer service agents for the quality assurance process
Delivering constructive feedback in a sympathetic way
Providing targeted customer service training to customer service agents during/after the quality assurance process

Appointing a QA Analyst & Manager

You have two options when considering a quality assurance process: you can either bring hire from the outside or implement an in-house QA system for a more independent, self-managed procedure.

First things first, you’ll need to appoint a QA manager and/or team leader. Depending on the size of your customer service, determine if you need more than 1 person to manage and improve your CX team.

These people will likely have in-depth experience with customer service and managing a team. They’ll understand your customer’s needs and the metrics to measure their satisfaction. They’ll also be able to synthesize information and use it to improve your customer service.

You’ll also need a QA analyst, responsible for analyzing your data and improving your QA process. They’ll need strong analytical, communication and observational skills. All of these will help identify issues so the QA manager and/or team leader can take the appropriate actions.

Introducing a QA system like Playvox would allow you to reduce costs on staff thanks to the software’s reporting system, training platform and monitoring capacities through the various integrations.

Preparing for your QA process

Define the goals of your QA process before you start implementing it.

Who will be monitoring calls, how many will be heard (an equal amount per agent typically helps) and how will they be chosen at random. In this situation, a platform that randomly assigns customer service interactions to their managers/team leaders helps eliminate unfair treatment.

Be sure to create well-thought out scorecards as well. Make everyone aware which metrics they will be held accountable for, why and what criteria is required to achieve good scores.

It’s essential agents realize scorecards — and the entire QA process — are in place to help the team and company grow, rather than to catch people out.

To help everyone see the benefits and opportunities QA presents, consider inviting agents, team leaders and managers to contribute to the creation of scorecards, drawing on their own experience and knowledge to identify the most important metrics.

Discuss the QA software that will be used and cover the main points of its function. Playvox can be integrated with multiple CRM and service software to minimize disruption to established processes. Highlight the ways in which the system will provide real, tangible benefits to agents too.

Delivering feedback effectively

The person who is responsible for monitoring the QA process also needs to be able to deliver constructive feedback.

When done right, feedback is a powerful aid: more than 80 percent of employees appreciate feedback, whether good or bad.

Make sure the person responsible for quality assurance can deliver feedback in an empathetic yet constructive manner.

Playvox enables managers and team leaders to give feedback through real-time messaging after a customer interaction or a training has been completed, offering valuable advice and guidance to agents in an informal context. Team leaders can integrate suggestions into an agent’s work immediately, without being pulled away for a feedback meeting with the person responsible for quality assurance.

This doesn’t mean feedback shouldn’t be given face-to-face on a regular basis, but it allows agents to improve on the spot without being blindsided when they do receive their periodic feedback.

As a result, the QA process can foster a more collaborative and connected workplace.

The power of targeted training

Training is a critical outcome of the QA process. Whoever delivers the training — a manager, a line manager, a supervisor etc. — will have a wealth of data upon which to base it.

Scorecards are the go-to when it comes to delivering training. Using a quality assurance software like Playvox allows for call center managers to see performance according to individual or team performance and see which metrics need to be worked on.

Through our powerful reporting feature, they’ll also be able to better analyze agent performance in order to deliver targeted training with engaging multimedia content.

Gone are the days where general training was given to everyone hoping it would make a difference. Thanks to the amount of data available, QA managers can put their energy where it’s most needed.

No matter how many people are responsible for quality assurance in your CX team a high-quality QA system will give you the tools you need to evaluate, train and improve your customer service.

Now that you know who does what in a quality assurance process, why not get started implementing one in your customer service team?