Being able to provide your customers with adequate support is essential to build a stronger relationship with them. And for you to do that on a consistent manner, you need to have a good quality assurance process. Here is how you can build and integrate it into your customer support system.
Understanding quality assurance in customer support
Quality assurance is the ability of your business to maintain the desired level of quality in your products or services. In the context of customer support, this refers to a means of evaluating your support staff’s ability to effectively handle and resolve customer issues regularly.
While it is a part of any customer support effort, outsourcing companies like Virtua Solutions put an even greater emphasis on quality assurance. This is because it is where their businesses are built around.
The first challenge when doing quality assurance for your customer support staff’s service is defining what you exactly mean by quality service. There are four elements you need to consider when coming up with a definition.
Reliability
For reliability, there are two components to weigh on: what your customer support promises to deliver and what the client actually gets. The goal here is to make the two match as closely as possible. As such, you need to track the kinds of promises the team makes. You would also want to make sure the promises match with the expectations customers have about your services.
Competence
Competence in customer service refers to the ability of your support team to build a relationship with the customer and respond to their needs promptly. It can also be seen as a measure of how well support agents apply the training they received.
As there are many skills involved in customer support, you need to have a good tracking system to have a better picture of your team\’s overall competency. You also need to be aware of the industry standards to serve as a benchmark for the team.
Delivery
This refers to how efficiently your support staff can provide the solutions the customer wants. It includes variables like wait times, call quality, and busy signals. Defining reasonable levels for these parameters will help you determine which areas to improve in to be more efficient.
Solutions.
Customer support quality assurance also requires you to keep track of the actual solutions your staff provides. You also need to track of customers’ responses to see if they are satisfied with these solutions. Make sure that your team’s library of solutions is cohesive to provide better results and customer satisfaction.
Defining your Key Performance Indicators
Now that you understand the different aspects of doing quality assurance for customers, you need to know what exactly to keep track of and measure. When choosing the key performance indicators, make sure that these match the overall goals you have for customer support. For instance, if you are focused on the immediate delivery of solutions, call length and wait time should be highlighted.
Your KPIs also need to conform to the specific channels your team is using. With phone calls, some of these KPIs are:
- Caller hold time
- Number of agents who handled the call
- If the problem was resolved during the first call
- Average call abandonment rate
- Call cost
With live chat through dedicated channels or social media and email, the following are some of the common KPIs.
- How responsive agents are
- The handling time
- Invitation acceptance rate (if your website prompts visitors to use chat)
- The level of professionalism that you display.
Be sure to thoroughly study your customer support process to better identify the right metrics. This will help your quality assurance team to get a detailed overview of the customer support team’s overall performance.
Conducting a quality assurance review
Customer response to your support team will be the foremost indicator of your service. You want to get that as soon as possible. There are three main kinds of surveys you can utilize for collecting customer response data.
Customer satisfaction survey
This survey focuses on the customer’s feelings about a particular engagement with your support staff. As such, it is typically implemented as a post-customer service survey. By determining the common assessments from each review, you will have a good idea of the specific service elements that customers like and the ones you have to improve on.
Net Promoter Score
A limitation of the customer satisfaction survey is that it doesn’t tell you how loyal your customers will be in the long run. For this one, you need to get the Net Promoter Score. This measures the likelihood that a particular customer will recommend you to others. The survey is conducted on a regular interval This gives you a richer insight into your customers’ preferences and values, which will help in further refining your definition of quality service.
Customer Effort Score
Customer Effort Score focuses on how much effort customers feel they had to make to get support. With this particular survey, your customers can pinpoint where in the support process they had difficulty with. A bug in your ticketing system, for instance, might make it hard for them to send requests. By combining this with a customer satisfaction survey, you get a better picture of overall customer loyalty.
Getting employee feedback for quality assurance
Aside from customers, your team members also play a big role in doing quality assurance and improving your support service. Since they are the ones directly engaging with customers, your support staff can help pinpoint issues that might affect how well they perform their job.
Create a system that will make it easier for your personnel to send in feedback. This can be something as simple as doing a short Q&A session at the end of their shift for them to report about their experience. You can also hold a peer review session that will let your team members learn from each other.
An important part of the employee feedback process is your team providing suggestions on how to improve your support service. Consider these suggestions thoroughly and assess how these would fit into your support system more effectively
Keep track of quality assurance and make your customers happy
Quality assurance is a continuing process. As you improve how your staff handles customer questions and complaints, you will likely encounter new issues. Be diligent in doing quality assurance reviews and your patrons will be more satisfied and loyal.