QA Scores

If you’re looking for a key performance indicator that high-performing contact centers measure, it has to be Quality Assurance (QA).

We’re taking a closer look at how those high-performing contact centers are improving their QA scores.

First, let’s break down the basics. Feel free to skip ahead to the good stuff.

What is a QA score and what does it measure?

A QA score is a measurement of several factors that impact the customer experience. Most contact centers have some combination of the following:

• Average Speed of Answering
• First Call Resolution
• Average Handle Time

If your contact center does not have these metrics broken down, that is your first step. If your QA isn’t defined, then how are your agents supposed to live up to your expectations?

Rule #1: Define the metrics to which you are holding your agents accountable.

Why is there so much focus on QA scores?

QA scores are important to contact centers because they measure the quality of the service you are providing to the customer. Most managers monitor QA scores to help them identify areas that need attention. Which then allows them to better prioritize their call coaching and training.

Whether you’re looking at this from an operational, tactical, or strategic point of view, QA scores are vital to contact centers.

They help you identify weaknesses and where more training, process improvement, or changes in your agents need to be.

But what most managers miss is only focusing on weaknesses.

Rule #2: QA Scores will in turn tell you where your strengths are.

Focus on building on those, not just your agent’s weaknesses.

The “How To” for Improving QA Scores

There are multiple factors that go into improving QA scores – one small change isn’t going to make a big difference. But changing too much isn’t going to change either. There is a balance in how you adapt and adjust to fit your contact center’s needs as well as your agent’s needs.

The customer will always be the priority so anything that can be done to improve overall customer satisfaction is a win.

Here is what we’ve found to be the biggest difference makers:

Identify Strengths of Agents

Building off of what we said above. Focus on strengths just as much as weaknesses. If an agent is doing something right, share that and allow them to teach the other agents why/how it works.

This builds confidence and team chemistry which will only improve their ability to speak to customers on the phone which will, in turn, improve customer satisfaction.

Track Agent Performance

This not only helps managers, but it helps agents too. Understanding where they fall performance-wise or even being able to compare to when they started, will help improve their performance over time.

Rule #3: If you’re doing this manually, stop.

That’s why companies have created real-time call scoring. This relieves the burden on managers who have to spot-check to ensure agents are meeting their QA scorecard goals.

Scoring only 1% of calls does not give you a statistically significant QA score and opens you up to missing compliance missteps.

So make your life easier and look into real-time call scoring tools, like Abstrakt.

Find Ways To Reward Agents

In order to reward agents, you need to have performance baselines to measure QA scores against. What type of QA score does a great agent have vs. an average agent?

Then give your agents goals as individuals as well as team goals.

As goals are met, new goals are created.

In high-performing contact centers, managers are consistently striving for incremental improvements. This is the perfect way to do it.

Let agents dispute evaluations

Sometimes bad calls happen. That leads to a bad review. And sometimes that’s out of the agent’s control.

Allowing your agents to challenge bad customer service reviews gives them the opportunity to take pride in their job and learn to articulate situations. Will you always overturn those bad reviews? No, absolutely not. But you can listen and help coach your agents on the situation.

Overall, this makes the agent feel truly heard by the company. It allows them to get an accurate picture of where their performance needs improvement.

Hire slow, fire fast

While we don’t love writing this, if you run any type of business, it’s important to hear. The high-performing contact centers do just this.

If you hire the right people and take the time to train them, good things will happen.

This goes for agents and managers.

The agent training process should also be extensive and include real-life examples of both excellent and not-so-excellent interactions. If your contact center isn’t there yet, then more time shadowing and learning will be needed.

What’s missing? Real-Time Call Coaching

Call coaching is great and the trust that is built between a manager and an agent isn’t replaceable. But what if you could take all of that knowledge and make it live on the call for agents to use? Who wouldn’t use that?

That’s why real-time call coaching is used when improving QA scores is the goal. Agents get live training that they can utilize when needed on calls. No more whispering on the phone and distracting pop-ups. Abstrakt is simple, and easy to use, and agents love it.

Utilizing real-time call coaching will absolutely improve your QA scores for agents.