Quality Assurance (QA) is a metric with nearly as many variations as there are companies in the world. Every company has an idea of what they want the quality to look like, and each creates a system they believe will bring them to that standard of quality. It’s easy when setting up a QA system to make it too complicated. Everyone involved has something they think is critical to the contact. When all those things end up in one form, they create a jumble of expectations that frustrate agents and supervisors alike.

The first key to Quality Assurance is simplicity.  How do you want your customers to feel about dealing with you?  Listen to some calls or read some emails and chats that you believe embody the customer experience you want.  Boil each one down to its essence.  What do they have in common?  How did it happen?  That’s what you want to replicate.  Your QA plan should measure each contact against these.  Where did they match up?  What are the gaps?  What actionable steps can be taken to make each contact more like these?

The second key is feedback. How your supervisors and QA staff handle the feedback from the monitoring makes all the difference in how it’s received and put into practice. You’ve created a simple form that agents and supervisors understand. It shows the gaps between the current contact and the ideal contact. It’s actionable. Feedback has to make the desired action clear. A “drive-by” where the form is dropped on the agent’s desk while they’re involved with another customer is not feedback. It’s the supervisor just checking a box, and it’s not moving your company and its quality in the right direction.

Contacts can be monitored live or recorded. Either way, being able to share the recording during the coaching can be useful. I once had an agent swear his call was not as bad as the resulting QA score reflected. I told him to bring the recording in and play it for me. We listened together for less than 30 seconds before he shamefacedly said, “Never mind, I see it now.” We then had a good conversation about opportunities for improvement.