How does quality assurance improve customer satisfaction?

Few customer service teams have a Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) of 100%, so most are on the perennial path of continuous improvement to meet customer expectations. While there is no magic formula, an airtight quality assurance program will improve customer satisfaction.

If some of your customers are suffering from a bad case of the Mick Jaggers (they can’t get no satisfaction), you need to roll your stones back a few paces to find out where things started going downhill.

Quality assurance helps you take a proactive approach.

How to improve customer satisfaction with quality assurance

Customer satisfaction is an ever-moving target. Expectations consistently rise and evolve, which means there is no quick-fix method. It takes consistency to keep your CSAT high.

Staying consistent with QA

Quality assurance reviews are the best indicators of areas where you can improve. When you set up your quality assurance program, customer service reviews need to be at the core of your efforts. Dig into your interactions to understand not just how agents are interacting, but to understand what customers are saying.

While some QA programs require choosing support interactions at random, it is not the most efficient customer service review strategy.

Be more specific about which conversations you review to find your Achilles’ heels.

Zendesk QA AI and data intelligence features pluck out areas of weakness for you:

• Sentiment filter
  Using NLP (Natural Language Processing), AI can detect customer sentiment. To examine customer dissatisfaction, use a smart filter to find all of the ‘negative sentiment’ conversations.
• Outlier filter
  Customers can get frustrated when things get complicated. Use this filter to find the more complex back-and-forth conversations—ones in which you’ll find the most potential for learning and coaching opportunities.
• Churn risk
  Highlighting conversations where a customer expresses potential attrition risk includes instances where they indicate an intention to stop being a customer or mention moving to a competitive alternative.

Taking control of your support quality

Within a customer service team, there are limits on how in control you are of customer satisfaction.

Controllable factors include team performance and support processes. When conducting quality reviews, it helps to want to identify variables which you can change: agent knowledge or tone, for example.

Customer dissatisfaction, however, can apply to factors outside the agent’s sphere of influence, like poor product performance or limited support channels. Maybe there are recurring issues with the product itself. Maybe they wanted to speak to you on the phone when you only offer live chat or email.

Your CSAT will not differentiate between these variables—that’s up to you to investigate.

Do not ignore what may appear to be out of your control. Customer satisfaction should be a company-wide goal—if there are recurring uncontrollables, this is an opportunity for the support team to escalate the issue to decision-makers and/or other teams who can make wider changes.

Train your team to always ask the questions that get to the bottom of customer problems. Listening is a key tenet of excellent customer service, but your support reps may need to proactively probe for information.

Focusing on team performance

Have you already introduced a QA program to your team? Without an effective coaching plan, your Customer Satisfaction Score will be dragged down by inconsistencies in team performance. In other words, your CSAT will only be as good as your lowest-performing team member.

Performance consistency requires a methodical approach to identifying agent weaknesses and feeding that into a coaching plan that brings everyone up to par. Likewise, it works the other way around: use your top-performing agents as benchmarks of quality success.

All about that IQS

Internal Quality Score (IQS) is the key metric for customer service quality assurance, calculated through internal reviews.

The conversation reviewer (whether a manager, peer, or specialist) understands support goals and is thus qualified to rate support reps based on predefined rating categories.

IQS has a knock-on effect on customer satisfaction. Customers cannot see that the cause of an unsatisfactory outcome was a lack of agent knowledge. Customers cannot tell you they may have given a 100% CSAT score had the support rep gone the extra mile. Your internal reviewers, however, can.

Therefore, understanding how agents measure up to internal standards gives you a more direct path to improving customer satisfaction.

If your IQS is high yet CSAT is low
This indicates that the factors at play are out of control of the support team, and should be escalated to relevant departments.

If your IQS and CSAT are low
Take control of performance with a data-driven coaching plan, fed by QA review data.

A coach’s toolkit

You need to provide regular feedback to your support reps based on their performance. Giving them feedback without constructive advice, however, is as useful as a chocolate fireguard.

Use Zendesk QA to manage how you coach and make sure you are giving agents the time and tools they need to improve:

• Pins for coaching
  Pin specific conversations to an agent or reviewer’s folder. So, when feedback sessions come around, you have examples at your fingertips.
• Quizzes
  Scientifically proven to help humans learn AND you can make them fun. Design custom quizzes based on which skills they need to brush up on, e.g., Onboarding quiz, Product knowledge quiz, etc.
• Coaching sessions
  Everything in one place: your sessions dashboard tracks talking points and action items. It also gives you an overview of the agent’s key metrics, so you can track their progress.

Quality assurance and customer satisfaction are intertwined

It’s not just about meeting customer expectations; it’s about exceeding them. Solidifying a quality program helps you approach this methodically and proactively so the path to an excellent CSAT is a more reliable one.

Refining your support quality necessitates continuous improvement since customer expectations are a moving target. AI-powered QA helps you unearth insights that identify weaknesses to help you bring every agent to their potential.