Quality monitoring: Crucial best practices

Think of quality monitoring as the referee in the game of customer service.

Just like a referee keeps a sports game fair, in check, and flowing smoothly, quality monitoring oversees customer service interactions to ensure every play is up to par, all players (your agents) are performing at their best, and the team (the business) retains its fans (your customers) by minimizing fouls (churn).

Learn more about quality assurance monitoring and its impact on your business, support team, and customers in our guide.

More in this guide:

• Why quality assurance monitoring matters
• 4 quality monitoring best practices
• Key QA monitoring dimensions for customer service
• Frequently asked questions
• Prioritize customer service quality monitoring with Zendesk

Why quality assurance monitoring matters

Quality monitoring is critical for improving the customer experience (CX) and optimizing agent productivity. By prioritizing quality management and standardizing practices, companies can experience these QA monitoring advantages.

Reduces agent turnover

Regular monitoring of customer service metrics fosters a transparent team culture. This transparency allows team leads to pinpoint personalized coaching opportunities, enabling management to invest in tailored training programs that focus on individual agent growth. Such targeted coaching not only enhances morale but also fosters loyalty, effectively reducing employee turnover over time.

Increases customer satisfaction

Quality monitoring enhances customer satisfaction (CSAT) by honing in on agent performance, customer feedback, and sentiment analysis. It equips teams with comprehensive insights and performance metrics, while quality assurance tools can detect shifts in customer sentiment, empowering agents to tailor and improve their interactions

Furthermore, these tools automate the distribution of CSAT and NPS surveys, accelerating the feedback loop and positively influencing customer engagement metrics over time.

Accelerates onboarding

Based on the knowledge and training gaps identified by quality monitoring, managers can streamline holistic training and employee onboarding. Employees trained to use new and improved interaction tactics and customer service skills are better prepared to solve problems and meet customer demands from the start.

By identifying areas for improvement in the onboarding process, businesses can create uniform training standards. In turn, these can help new employees understand product features and grasp customer service phrases, expediting the learning process.

Refines products and services

Regular quality monitoring and consistent customer feedback yield critical insights into distinct customer pain points. These insights enable teams to pinpoint areas of their products or services that require enhancements. For instance, if quality monitoring reveals a recurring trend of complaints about a product defect, this valuable data can be relayed to the product team for prompt action.

Enhances compliance

Quality monitoring tracks customer-employee interactions and provides insights into how agents stick to specific scripts, procedures, and internal guidelines. Customer service reps are responsible for more than just answering questions and solving problems, and QM pinpoints internal compliance issues and weak process adherence that could negatively impact service interactions.

4 quality monitoring best practices

The importance of customer perceptions and expectations never wanes. Companies that wish to meet and exceed customer needs must ensure they provide top-notch customer service interactions. Consider these four best practices before your organization implements a quality monitoring program.

1. Leverage AI to automate quality assurance

Automated quality assurance tools, like Zendesk QA, can enable organizations to evaluate 100 percent of your customer interactions, whether they’re between AI agents or human customer service reps, speeding up the QA and quality control processes. AI-powered automation also helps to ensure consistent analysis, highlights problematic exchanges, and reduces bias and human error.

Automated quality assurance doesn’t remove the need for manual QA altogether, but it can empower businesses to identify churn risks and recurring issues in service interactions.

2. Highlight performance trends and insights

Rather than just reviewing data gathered by your QA tools, it’s crucial to delve deeper and analyze how your metrics correlate with service quality. Tools like Zendesk QA equip teams with the ability to spot inconsistencies and identify performance trends that directly influence the quality of service, enabling more strategic improvements.

3. Provide transparent and actionable feedback

Teams perform best when there is a continuous flow of feedback. Managers should use quality monitoring to provide feedback to underperforming agents, celebrate those excelling, and create a routine for transparent feedback loops. Direct feedback from managers to employees can boost morale and encourage ongoing accountability from all parties.

4. Prioritize targeted coaching

Targeted coaching zeroes in on precise areas requiring enhancement, offering a specialized rather than a general approach to development. By analyzing customer interactions, managers can pinpoint knowledge gaps and provide agents with actionable insights to uphold and elevate support standards.

Additionally, investing in training programs and QA monitoring software allows teams to track the effectiveness of training, identify persistent challenges, discover new training needs, and reduce the frequency of escalations.

Key QA monitoring dimensions for customer service

These seven key QA monitoring dimensions help companies gauge the success of customer-agent exchanges:

1. Solution: How correct and thorough a service interaction is
2. Grammar: The accuracy of an agent’s spelling, punctuation, and word choice
3. Tone: The quality of and feelings expressed by an agent’s customer service voice
4. Empathy: How interactions support continuous customer relations
5. Personalization: How agents can tailor interactions to each customer’s unique needs
6. Following internal processes: How interactions adhere to internal quality standards
7. Going the extra mile: The additional services or information an agent offers outside of a problem’s direct solution

Frequently asked questions

Prioritize customer service QA monitoring with Zendesk

Quality monitoring is crucial for improving employee productivity, increasing customer satisfaction, and refining support interactions. Zendesk QA reviews every single conversation to give you instant insight into your support performance via AI to save you time and reduce operational costs. Thanks to systematic feedback, you’re equipped to give specific performance guidance to your team. Ticket insights link to your CSAT scores, so you have an even better picture of team performance.

Learn more about how Zendesk QA helps you create a more consistent experience, which builds loyalty—and long-term revenue.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score, and NPS are trademarks of NICE Satmetrix, Inc., Bain & Company, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.