Quality Assurance: 5 Reasons to Ditch Spreadsheets
Are you already doing quality assurance (QA) checks on your support interactions? We hope so! QA is an incredibly valuable practice for support teams—if you’re not already doing it, you should be. It’s crucial for:
Establishing internal and customer-facing best practices
Onboarding new team members
Reviewing conversations objectively, rather than basing performance on gut feelings.
Leveraging all types of conversations as learning opportunities, not just the “good” ones.
Improving feedback and coaching by deep diving into comments left by reviewers
If you already do quality assurance, does your current process consist of wrangling a spreadsheet?
Whilst it may work for you for now, it’s not scalable.
Eventually, the process will break - either you grow too quickly or it becomes too time-consuming - and you’ll be searching for a more effective system. Sure, spreadsheets are free and quality assurance tools may add an extra line to your budget. But there are untold benefits of using a QA solution over spreadsheets for your organization, and for customer experience:
Spreadsheets aren’t built for QA
They aren’t scalable
They offer limited value
You miss out on working with an experienced partner
Using historical data to drive development is a challenge
1) Don’t fit a square peg in a round hole
Given the rigid nature of spreadsheets, functionality is limited. They aren't designed to carry out quality assurance.
Reviewers will only be able to answer the questions included in your current scorecard. Making changes will be difficult, nigh on impossible. You also won’t be able to compare your data over time if/when you change your questions or scoring system. Why limit yourself in one of the most important aspects of business: developing people and tracking their progress over time?
You can’t fit a square peg in a round hole.
With a QA solution, you can have a wider scope of each interaction by building smarter scorecards and progress-tracking systems. What if you can’t move quickly, or you need to shift your strategy? It’s worth considering that QA solutions allow you to make these changes with ease.
A dedicated solution like Miuros Review allows you to be agile with your strategy and make quick changes on the go. There’s no reason to stick with a strategy that isn’t working—don’t let the tools you’re using to measure success give you a reason to get left behind.
2) Create a scalable process
Using a spreadsheet can be good for smaller teams with lower volumes, but as you and your customer base grow, it starts to become too bulky to use effectively.
Consider the following situations:
When reviewing interactions, does your team need to search to find the interactions that they should be reviewing?
How do you control access to your QA spreadsheet? Does someone manually manage permissions?
How long does it take to get into a position where you’re ready to derive meaningful conclusions from your data? And is your data set big enough to draw these conclusions?
How easy is it to visualize trends over time?
How do the interactions to be reviewed get into the spreadsheet? Is there someone copying and pasting them, or do you have automation (e.g. Zapier) that needs to be upkept?
Think about how many hours of work all of those issues add up to. The amount of time that goes into solving those issues alone is more expensive than any QA tool.
Being able to scale processes does wonders for your team’s efficiency. Avoiding spreadsheets that require constant maintenance work can be avoided by quality assurance software. This way, your time is spent on improving internal processes, the reviews themselves and providing great feedback.
According to Forrester, 69% of U.S. consumers shop more with retailers that offer consistent customer service both online and offline.
If there’s any inconsistency in your processes, you don’t need to manually revamp your entire QA spreadsheet and process to address it—in a few clicks, your changes will automatically be reflected in ongoing reviews and reporting.
If you want to have continued success with your QA strategy, using a scalable solution is the only way to go.
3) Bring the value back to QA
You have to assign reviews to reviewers. You may also have to keep reminding people to conduct their reviews, to alert them when their reviews are expiring or let agents know that their interactions have been graded.
It slows down the feedback to the agents, which isn’t ideal - they want feedback quickly, whilst they remember the interactions they had.
With software, you can assign the number of tickets for review and when they go out. You can schedule them to be delivered at a time that works best for them. Additionally, notifications will take care of any of manual 'reminding' that they have reviews to conduct.
As we already said, a QA solution will allow you to take the pain out of the reporting too. Finding those actionable insights and room for improvement becomes easier too.
In short, it’s going to save you a lot of time. But the only thing more valuable than the time you save is what you do with it.
Quality assurance is about building better customer experiences through improving agent performance, feedback, and coaching techniques.
You create more time for:
1-1s (or making them longer to provide more value to each agent)
Calibration: deep dives into the comments left by reviewers
Developing new strategies on how to make customers happier based on data.
And that’s what it’s all about.
4) Work with an experienced partner
When you use a tailored solution, it lightens the workload and makes the complicated simple.
But it’s more than that: a partner is responsible for maintaining your system and has the resources to fix your issues quickly.
Similarly, companies that design solutions like this benefit from the perspective of multiple customers in different industries of different sizes. At Miuros, for example, we’re happy to share our customers’ best practices with you so you can be as successful. When you invest in a solution, you’re also investing in a partner - and all expertise that comes with it.
Our Customer Success team will eliminate any need for you to research setting up a system, and is there to listen to your unique requirements. Why let your QA strategy exist in the silo of a spreadsheet when you could have 20 years of customer service expertise to support you?
5) Chase perfection through constant improvement
With outdated technology, it becomes impossible to track trends over time. If you have separate spreadsheets from month to month, from year to year - different sheets for each team, each reviewer - it’s going to be a nightmare to discover meaningful trends.
Then there’s the real question - why are they evolving?
Without being able to click into a given data point and see the reasons behind the numbers - you’re going to be either wasting a lot of time, or flying partially blind. Neither is desirable.
Software makes it easy where the problems lie over time, and where the key opportunities for growth are.
Take, for example, TransferWise, who work with Miuros to perfect their QA process. With support teams in 5 countries, and with no unified QA solution in place (at the time), it was extremely difficult to ensure that every customer was receiving the same level of care.
Fast forward a couple of months and they were able to have a holistic view of all their operations, but then drill down to find exactly how they could improve.
When all your data is centralized, comparing your data over time is never a problem.
Invest in your team’s growth
A quality assurance solution might be an extra line on your budget compared to a spreadsheet, but:
it’s cheaper than losing customers
it takes all of the responsibility of maintaining a healthy QA process out of your hands
it automates the admin behind the review process
And it makes your process inherently more scalable as your team grows.
Invest in the success of your team, and you’ll be investing directly into building better customer experiences too. Find out how to get started here!
