Customer service quality assurance: Why your business needs it

If you’re running a small team, you may think there’s no need for customer service quality assurance. But that’s like saying only five-star restaurants need to taste the food before it’s served. Any company — no matter the size — should be reviewing the quality of its customer service interactions.

If you have a bad meal, would you give the restaurant another chance? A report by marketing platform Emplifi found that 18% of people would leave a brand after one poor customer experience. While no company can be perfect 100% of the time, regularly reviewing interactions with your team helps you address issues head-on.

In this article, we’ll cover how to establish a customer service quality assurance process. Short on time? We’ve also got some tips to make sure you’re as efficient as possible.

What is customer service quality assurance?

Customer service quality assurance (QA) consists of two key components:

1. Standards for customer service interactions
2. A review process to make sure those standards are met

While many companies set standards, they often fall short with the review process. And if you’re not reviewing interactions regularly, you have no idea what customers are actually experiencing. 

During your QA reviews, you’ll assess customer service interactions based on specific criteria. For example, you determine the criteria for a “high-quality” phone call or email, train employees accordingly, and then review interactions to ensure they meet those standards. 

These reviews (plus customer feedback) can help you pinpoint areas that need improvement.

Why quality assurance makes a huge impact on customer service

Quality assurance will lead to a better overall customer experience, which directly impacts your business and bottom line.

With good customer service, your customers might:

• Be more loyal and less likely to churn
• Promote or recommend your company 
• Spend more

In a Forrester report commissioned by customer engagement software Khoros, 83% of respondents said they are more loyal to brands that respond to and resolve their complaints. 

Since customer service plays an important role in retention and customer loyalty, you can’t assume interactions meet your standards. Quality assurance reviews can help improve customer service in ways you may not have considered.

Improves the customer experience

Customer service quality assurance does more than assess whether customer interactions meet your quality standards. You can also see how customers respond to interactions. 

For example, your support process may include step-by-step troubleshooting, but reviews reveal customers prefer to troubleshoot on their own. This information can lead you to create a more comprehensive knowledge base, improving the overall customer experience beyond customer support. 

Better consistency

You want customers to have a consistent experience, no matter who they talk to. When you establish customer service standards, you’ll also want to specify how those standards are met. “Be polite” is vague: if you give your reps specific customer service scripts to follow, you can provide your customers with a consistent experience. 

This becomes even more critical as your company grows. Maintaining consistency is difficult without clear guidelines and a process to review and enforce them.

Higher customer retention

With so many options available, customers won’t hesitate to take their business elsewhere if they’re unhappy. A quality assurance review ensures your customers’ issues are resolved quickly and to their satisfaction.

Customers will also stay with a company when they know what to expect when they reach out — which only happens with a consistent customer experience and good customer service management.

Saves time

Customer service quality assurance might sound like it adds more work to your customer service processes. In fact, the opposite is true. Once you’ve taken the steps to systemize interactions with your customers (like with customer service scripts and quality standards), you’ll spend less time training and correcting mistakes. 

Improved job satisfaction

Customer service is a tough job. When your reps understand what’s expected and what success looks like, it’s better for morale. They don’t feel like they’re chasing unclear objectives and ever-moving goalposts.

You should also be transparent about your customer service quality assurance process. That way, reps know how they’re being reviewed and can work to make sure they’re meeting standards.

Related: Struggling with customer service issues? Learn proven techniques to identify customer service problems and causes.

How to create a simple customer service quality assurance process (even if you don’t have a huge call center)

Customer service quality assurance doesn’t have to be a complicated process or require a special QA tool. There are ways to automate parts of your QA process to save time while still getting the information you need to assess performance. 

Establish QA standards

You first need to prioritize which aspects of customer service to include in your QA review. If your list is too long, the review process can be overwhelming, making it difficult to address everything. 

Instead, your QA program should focus on a few key elements. (You can always change these later!) As your customer service team improves and consistently meets standards, you can shift to spot-checking instead of conducting full reviews. You can then add new criteria into the mix.

Here are some key focus areas for your QA review:

• Security checkpoints. Do reps verify the customer’s identity to prevent unauthorized account access?

• Solution accuracy. Are reps providing accurate information? Do they identify the root cause of an issue? Is first call resolution high, or do knowledge gaps exist? 

• Tone and communication style. Are reps’ responses aligned with company best practices and scripts? Do they recognize and address customer dissatisfaction?

• Call greetings and closings. Do reps use proper phone etiquette, introduce themselves professionally, and end calls by offering further assistance and thanking the customer for calling?

Create resources and train team members

No matter what interactions you review, your team members should have easy access to company guidelines and expectations.

Store documentation, like a customer service quality assurance checklist, in a centralized location — whether it’s Notion, Google Drive, an FAQ page, or another app. That way, new hires can quickly find answers to any questions. 

Your resources might include helpful shortcuts, like text message templates (at OpenPhone, we call these “snippets”) and customer service scripts. With templates and scripts, you can onboard new hires faster and ensure consistency. 

Use QA scorecards

A scorecard is used to measure quality assurance. It should be straightforward so you can review customer service interactions quickly.

On your QA scorecard, you can use a mix of Yes/No ratings for criteria with clear-cut objectives, like verifying the customer’s identity. For anything more subjective, like tone and empathy, you can use a five-point scale.

Here’s an example of a QA scorecard: 

(You can download a copy of the scorecard here.)

Decide on a sample set and review the cadence

It’s likely not possible for you (or team leaders) to review every interaction. You have to select a representative sample of calls and emails that highlight customer interactions and potential areas for improvement.

You can automatically categorize customer conversations using call tags. This helps you quickly identify trends or interactions that need review. For example, calls tagged “angry customer” or “confused customer” might be good to review. This call intelligence feature saves time by creating a sample set to work from. You can also use call views to filter by team member or date to find additional calls for your sample.  

You’ll also need to decide on a review frequency, such as weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly evaluations. The right cadence depends on your bandwidth, the volume your customer service reps are handling, and how quickly you want to address issues.

Some managers conduct reviews by recording calls and listening to them later. Or, they might listen to live calls using call shadowing. However, these are time-consuming methods.

A better alternative is reviewing interactions in OpenPhone with call transcripts and AI summaries. You don’t have to listen to an entire call to know what the customer service rep covered during the conversation. 

If you opt to listen to calls in real time, you can check out our suggestions for using a call monitoring form.

Monitor your metrics

Alongside your QA reviews, you might track metrics like customer satisfaction score (CSAT), Net Promoter Score® (NPS), first contact resolution, and other KPIs. As you improve overall support quality, you should see positive changes in these benchmarks. 

Iterate and improve

No matter your cadence, you’ll want to create a simple feedback loop to let your team know the results of your review. You might follow up with customer service coaching and hold monthly meetings to review common mistakes and team performance. If common mistakes keep happening, it may suggest a gap in your existing training or documentation.

You should also tweak your snippets, templates, or call scripts based on what you find during your QA review. You may need to adjust your scorecards based on trends or emerging customer feedback. If you see comments or reviews on social media sites, for example, you might identify that you need to address a particular issue that wasn’t obvious from your review. This type of customer feedback gives you a more holistic picture of customer expectations.

Make customer service QA simple for your small team with OpenPhone

Quality assurance shouldn’t feel like another burden. Your goal should be to spend less time training and correcting mistakes because you’ve given your team the resources to provide a great customer experience. QA is simply a double-check that those resources are effective.

OpenPhone makes customer service quality assurance easier through call transcripts, AI call summaries, and AI call tagging. You can get through your QA reviews faster because you’re not digging through call logs and listening to endless customer service call recordings. (Plus, call snippets save your team time and provide customers with consistent responses.)

We know how important it is for small businesses to provide a fantastic customer service experience. 

OpenPhone makes it easy to get started with QA by signing up for a free trial. 

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