Are you using quality assurance to improve your customer service?
As you exit the startup phase and start scaling your business, customer service interactions have the power to set you up for either success or failure. In a time where 40% of customers switch brands or services because a competitor offers better customer support, you can’t afford to overlook the quality of the customer service experience. Implementing quality assurance practices in your support environment will enable you to enhance the quality of customer interactions, ensure customer satisfaction, increase efficiency, and optimize performance.
The role of customer feedback in customer service QA
Quality assurance (QA) in customer service can be seen as a means to evaluate the characteristics that make customer service effective. A well thought out QA process will make your helpdesk stand out and give you an advantage in today’s hyper-competitive market.
For greater results, consider building customer feedback in your helpdesk QA efforts. Customer feedback, in the context of customer support, will provide you with insights on how your clients perceive their experience when interacting with your agents and will broaden your perspective on the elements that render customer support effective.
Implement a customer feedback process in your helpdesk with Surveypal
Support is a key touchpoint in the customer journey because a superior customer service experience positively affects retention, loyalty, and upselling. That is the reason why you should be making it easy for customers to give feedback. The easiest way to implement a customer feedback process in your support environment is to use surveys. You can seamlessly integrate Surveypal into customer support software, such as Zendesk, and start collecting real-time customer feedback immediately. Choose the right instant to deploy customized surveys, tap into what your customers really think.
The benefits of a customer support survey integration:
- Collect data on agent performance: Your agents are a living, breathing representation of your company. Collecting feedback on their perceived performance is key in any future efforts to improve the quality of your support.
- Get insights about training needs and purposes: Track down what your customers think about the service they receive and figure out your support shortcomings. You can use customer feedback data as the foundation upon which to build staff trainings to enhance desired skills and behaviours.
- Process efficiency: Complex internal structures and workflows might hinder the efficiency of your customer support. Measuring how satisfied your customers are with how your resolve their issues will shed a light on internal process efficiency and indicate ways to simplify day-to-day tasks.
- Stay on top of customer service KPIs: Measuring metrics such as the Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Customer Effort Score (CES) will help you benchmark your performance against industry standards and determine the success of your customer service management and measure the customer experience.
MaestroQA can help you ramp up your QA and improve customer service
While it is possible to build out a quality program using spreadsheets, you ultimately get what you pay for, which is to say, not very much. And unless your staff is highly skilled in complex Excel formulas, you won’t get meaningful insight from all of your auditing.
Some benefits of a quality tool include:
- Nimble form creation and calibration: A quality assurance tool is a centralized place for monitoring the performance of your team. As your company changes and learns from its customers about what matters to them, you should easily be able to change your rubric and make sure graders are aligned in what quality means to the team. With a tool that enables quick and easy changes to rubrics, and with calibration functionality, you turn something that’s a headache in spreadsheets into an easy component of the quality workflow.
- Easy tracking of agent progress to target coaching and training: The right tool will help you put all of the auditing that you’re doing to good use – you can easily look at how your team is performing over time, as well as how individual agents are performing. You can break down success by rubric, by rubric section, or by question, and zoom in and out temporally to understand how agent/team performance is changing over time to inform coaching and progress.
- Compare quality metrics with other KPIs: Comparing quality scores to other KPIs within your organization gives a fuller picture, and helps inform when changes need to be made. Say you start to notice that many of your customer interactions have high QA scores, but negative customer responses to surveys. When you look closer, you notice a trend – in interactions where the agent handled everything correctly, customers are still dissatisfied. Upon further review, you notice that these customer responses include mentions of a confusing billing process. Combining customer feedback with QA scores allows you to see the full picture of the customer experience, and make process changes as you need to.
- Automate assignments to keep up with grading: As your support operation scales, it can be a challenge to stay on top of grading. Each agent might need a certain number of tickets from each channel graded each week – that’s a lot to track. By having a tool that automates the assignment process and integrates with your ticketing system, you can ensure that graders are served tickets to grade as they need to be graded – and that these tickets span whatever requirements your support team has, to give you a representative sample of your customer interactions.
MaestroQA + Surveypal: Boost your customer service QA with customer feedback
Incorporating the voice of your customers in your QA efforts will empower you to determine a more holistic approach towards measuring the impact of your customer service. Use Surveypal and MaestroQA together to make your feedback data work harder towards improving the customer experience, increasing satisfaction and reducing customer effort. Input feedback data collected with Surveypal into MaestroQA to measure the success of your QA program and evaluate newly implemented quality processes against your clients’ expectations and standards.