An introduction to quality assurance for your support team

Quality assurance (QA) can be a hugely impactful process for every support team. But a successful quality assurance program doesn’t just depend on finding the right process for your team or defining the right support quality standards—it involves introducing it to your team in the right way.

In this guide:

• What is quality assurance for support teams?
• How to introduce quality assurance to your support team
• Make QA work for your customer support team

What is quality assurance for support teams?

Quality assurance for support teams is the process of monitoring and evaluating interactions between support reps and customers to ensure they meet predefined standards and, ultimately, improve customer satisfaction and agent performance.

It’s like having a coach for your customer service team, observing their performance and providing feedback.

The QA program has some key cornerstones:

• Reviewing interactions systematically. Whether they’re calls, chats, emails, or even social media interactions, QA involves listening to recordings or reading written communication to evaluate product knowledge, communication skills, adherence to protocols, and problem-solving effectiveness. Doing QA systematically involves reviewing the right conversations and designing a custom scorecard to check your specific customer service quality standards. You can also use specialized AI to automatically review 100 percent of your customer interactions.
• Providing feedback to support reps about potential areas of improvement. These reviews are used to identify areas where agents excel or need support, which is essential for individual feedback and can have a massive impact on identifying trends across your whole team.
• Tracking progress over time. QA programs typically involve a few key support metrics that you can monitor and improve over time, such as Internal Quality Score (IQS) or Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT). The best way to ensure that the quality assurance program is successful at having the impact you want it to have is to continuously keep track of these.

How to introduce quality assurance to your support team

Quality assurance is an integral part of providing support for many companies—for good reason.

It offers a ton of benefits:

• Improved customer satisfaction. By ensuring consistent, high-quality support, QA leads to happier customers who are more likely to stay loyal to your brand.
• Empowered agents. With clear feedback, targeted training, and customer service coaching, agents feel more confident and equipped to handle challenging situations effectively.
• Data-driven decision-making. QA data provides valuable insights to help you train agents, as well as inform training programs, product improvements, and staffing decisions.
• Increased efficiency. A well-functioning QA program can identify and address knowledge gaps or process bottlenecks, leading to faster resolutions.
• Ingrained feedback culture. QA processes bake feedback into your everyday interactions at work.

If you’ve never had a QA program before, an introduction to quality assurance can cause uncertainty and fear:

• Some of your team members might feel uncomfortable because their work will get scrutinized.

• They might feel like QA restricts their decision-making abilities and stifles their approach to handling situations.

• Or they might be worried that a heavy focus on QA could prioritize adherence to quality metrics and protocols over building genuine rapport and understanding customer needs.

Those are all very real concerns, and that’s why how you introduce customer service quality assurance has such a massive impact on how successful your QA program ultimately will be. You could design two programs in exactly the same way, review the same number of interactions the same way, and use the same QA scorecard—but change the internal communication slightly, and you might face a lot of resistance.

In short, the way you introduce quality assurance can make all the difference in how well-received it is by your customer service team.

Define goals for your QA program

Goals are always the best way to set direction.

Not only are they important when you’re designing your QA program from scratch, but they also make a huge difference in communicating it to your customer service team—especially when you relate those customer service goals to business outcomes.

For example, say you want to raise your Customer Satisfaction Scores to above 90 percent. QA can play an extensive role in that by helping you tackle CSAT from multiple angles:

• By improving the quality of the responses you send to customers.

• By identifying gaps in your support processes that lead to decreased satisfaction.

• By pinpointing issues in your product that the customer service team typically tries to compensate for by offering workarounds.

The broader context of what you want to achieve with QA will help your team orient themselves towards that customer service goal.

Get buy-in in advance

Change is hard.

Implementing QA doesn’t have to be a major change—it depends on your program and how extensively you want to invest in it. More often than not, however, it will feel like a significant change for your team.

A QA program helps you identify and standardize the aspects of your support experience that are already working well. That can be a very motivating message for your team, if they’re involved, know what to expect, and believe they can contribute to your customer service goals.

Getting their buy-in means involving them at every step of the process.

The moment you start thinking it might be the right time for an introduction to quality assurance, you can already (informally) discuss it with your team and see what they think. Run workshops about the different ways you could set up a QA program and see what preferences there are across the team.

Agree on a scorecard together

One of the foundational parts of any QA program is the scorecard that you’ll be using to review conversations.

Ensure that every member of your team is afforded the opportunity to contribute their perspective on what constitutes a stellar response. Create an environment conducive to open dialogue, facilitating discussions where team members can collectively craft a Quality Assurance (QA) scorecard. Encourage collaboration during these sessions, examine challenging scenarios and exchange insights on potential improvements for example responses.

This is especially important if you are implementing a peer review system, where agents review each other’s cases. Investing time into getting everyone on the same page for the scorecard is paramount.

Create training and growth opportunities

When done well, a QA program can create value for your team on all fronts:

• For the business, by improving customer satisfaction, and retention, or capitalizing on opportunities to engage your customers better.
• For your customer service team, by establishing a culture of feedback exchange and open communication and giving you data to create better internal processes.
• And for every individual, by identifying areas of improvement.

When this is new, agents typically have to change their mindset when they approach customer interactions. Rather than focusing on solving the customer’s problem, they need to solve it while looking for ways to provide additional value. They need a support-driven growth mindset.

This skill engages your agents, making them more successful not only in their current roles but also throughout their careers.

These are the types of opportunities that should feature heavily in your introduction to quality assurance as well. Your team should always understand the collective goal.

Regularly ask for feedback

Feedback is a two-way street, both when you’re introducing your quality assurance process and on an ongoing basis.

Direct, actionable, and constructive feedback to your team will positively impact their engagement and sense of confidence at work. Asking for and acting on their feedback will make them feel heard and appreciated while ensuring that you improve the QA program over time too.

Recommendations for gathering team feedback:

• Run regular calibration sessions to make sure the scorecard still works.

• Send out a survey to get their first insights about how valuable and useful the feedback they received from their first reviews was.

• Ask them to rate different parts of the QA review process to evaluate what is working, and what is not.

Make QA work for your customer support team

Implementing a quality assurance program is more than just a process—it’s a journey that involves your entire support team. By defining clear goals, getting early buy-in, co-creating a meaningful scorecard, providing growth opportunities, and fostering an ongoing feedback loop, you’re setting your team up for success.

First impressions are the most lasting. Take the time to introduce quality assurance in the best possible way for your team and you’ll reap the benefits for many years to come.