The number one goal of a successful call center operation is to create a consistent customer experience across all touchpoints that exceed your and your customers' standards. By keeping an eye on the entire customer journey, you ensure that the promise of stellar Customer Experience (CX) is maintained and consistently offers superior customer service.
It sounds simple enough, but you can use many different criteria when evaluating your call center CX. Well-constructed call center quality assurance scorecards expertly and thoroughly handle this critical task.
A QA Scorecard is a kind of checklist that a QA manager (or sometimes an agent) uses to measure the effectiveness of a response to a customer. When you compile the results of many scorecards, you can measure overall customer service quality, agent performance and several additional essential quality standards. A well-done quality assurance scorecard can serve as a framework for call center agents to improve by providing measurable metrics that impact customer satisfaction and loyalty.
QA scorecard specifics can vary from call center to call center as there can be different sets of QA metrics that need to be measured, but there are generally three broad categories these tend to fall under:
Be careful to avoid putting too much emphasis on a that is tied to internal processes rather than criteria that focus on improving customer experience. Sometimes, an agent might effectively solve a customer’s issue. Still, they may have failed to adhere to specific script requirements outlined in a scorecard so that the interaction can go down as a failure. You ultimately want your call center quality assurance scorecards to provide an accurate and fair measurement of success and failure, so be aware of the ambiguity that internal processes criteria can create.
There are other situations where exact wording is necessary, such as compliance, data compliance or data protection. Regulated industries such as financial services and healthcare have strict guidelines for call centers. Agents must follow regulatory policies, such as reading specific scripts before performing tasks like helping a caller apply for a higher credit limit or muting the caller when they read a total credit card number.
If your agents do not comply with those rules, your call center can receive substantial fines. Addressing compliance issues on your scorecard not only rates agents on how well they follow the regulations specific to your industry but also on how well they handle the calls.
If you use multiple channels (phone, live chat, email/text, social), you’ll also want to track how the interaction occurs. Each of those channels will have different scoring criteria.
A scorecard for a phone call should rate the agent on behaviors such as confidence, enthusiasm and following a predetermined procedure. The agent’s skills and abilities should also be considered. Your agents must be able to de-escalate problems efficiently and effectively to move on to other callers, keeping your call volume and labor costs as low as possible.
Sometimes being phone-efficient might mean transferring the caller to another department for further assistance or escalating the issue to a supervisor’s attention. In these situations, the call center quality assurance scorecards should evaluate the employee's ability to recognize this incident's urgency or exceptional circumstance. A well-designed and well-thought-out scorecard will be a tool to help your agents be the best they can be, even in situations where there is a transition to a third party for final remediation.
When it’s over the phone, the scoring criteria should include:
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While agents who handle customer service via email/text have the same goal as phone call agents - customer satisfaction - they have different circumstances and factors to consider in their work. Customers who communicate via email cannot hear the agent’s voice, so the agent must be evident in their writing and stay compliant with applicable laws. There is also a strong desire to be comprehensive in solving the issue in as few emails as possible. Multiple email communications can create a sense that the agent isn’t ‘putting themselves in the customer's shoes and proactively predicting future questions.
Email/Text scoring criteria to consider:
Online chat is an increasingly popular method of customer service. Many customers prefer to use chat rather than talk on the phone, as it combines the speed of a phone call for more immediate remediation while still not requiring them to be actively holding a phone up to their ear. The chat scorecard rates the agent’s quickness to respond and their compliance with regulatory rules, and using proper grammar.
Below is a non-numeric scorecard with behind-the-scenes numeric values and weightings. The scorecard uses ‘pass’ or ‘fail’ items on a checklist. Your chat agents can be assured of achieving high scores if they adhere to the process and resolve customer problems efficiently.
Live Chat criteria to consider:
With over 2.3 billion combined users on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook alone worldwide, it’s a genuine possibility that your customers are interacting with your company through social media. If your call center is not taking advantage of social media to interact with your customers, you’re missing a significant opportunity to engage.
Social media was designed to foster conversations and build relationships. As marketing took a more active role in managing social channels years ago, corporate social media pages became a dumping ground for press releases, marketing content, and the like. As contact centers now begin to take a more active role in managing social media, these channels are now being used more for listening than broadcasting.
Beyond staying attuned to (and responding to) customer requests, support teams can also set up listening triggers and keywords to manage customer complaints proactively, gather complaints about the competition, and get a clearer picture of the customers' wants and needs. And all this needs to be a part of your QA Scorecard.
Social Media scoring criteria to consider:
The various skills your call center reps bring to the table are a strong indicator of the experience your customers will get. As a baseline, call center reps should be able to communicate effectively, maintain a professional and friendly demeanor, learn, solve problems, gain customers' trust, and demonstrate emotional intelligence.
You can monitor and track these skills with scorecard questions like:
Building an effective QA scorecard makes it easier to align your call center’s goals with customer expectations and keep track of how agents perform against those expectations. And as you read above, this isn’t a one-size-fits-all process, as call centers may need different scorecards for different teams depending on their varied roles in the customer journey.
Ultimately, a QA scorecard will assure your agents that if they meet the criteria on the scorecard, they will be successful, which alleviates work stress and anxiety. It also makes it easier to pinpoint exactly which areas need work to make your call center more successful and efficient.
Find out more about call center quality assurance scorecards now. Request a demo with the Scorebuddy team.
