How to Build an Amazing Customer Service QA Scorecard
It goes by many names: Quality Monitoring, Quality Scoring or Quality Assurance; but it's all the same - highly important - thing. QA is the best way to ensure that you deliver a consistent Customer Experience to your valuable customers.
The question on everyone's lips is 'how can I improve Customer Satisfaction?'. Whether it's through the actual metric (CSAT) or any other metric that you measure to measure the quality of your team's calls or conversations with customers, the simplest answer is as follows:
✅ Build a Quality Scorecard
✅ Use it to review the interactions of your team
✅ Track the results and cross this data with your core metrics to improve customer service quality
What is a Quality Scorecard?
Very simply, a scorecard is a kind of checklist that a team lead, QA manager (or sometimes an agent) uses to measure the effectiveness of a response to a customer. When you compile the results of many scorecards, you can then measure customer service quality, agent performance and many more important quality standards.
The quality criteria written on these cards are right at the heart of the QA process and should reflect always reflect the company's values or answer to specific goals or metrics.
Why you need a Quality Assurance Scorecard
You can send out Customer Satisfaction surveys until the cows come home but, chances are, you'll never fully understand what it is that the customer wants - and people won't always speak up when they've received bad service. In fact, one survey revealed that 52% of customers left without giving the company any warning or a chance to redeem themselves.
Customer Service teams need scorecards to measure what they deem to be important in a customer interaction. These internal guidelines measure agent performance, the effectiveness of existing documentation and lots more which, when you collate the data, translates into key insights to help you improve customer service as a whole.
Finally, teams need these scorecards because it helps them review interactions consistently and objectively. When agents know what reviewers are looking for - and reviewers score based on clear criteria - the process is much fairer.
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How to build a Quality Scorecard
You can use a spreadsheet if you're a small team, however, it can get messy, fast! We recommend that you use a dedicated QA solution to run your Quality Assurance program. The main reason why a QA solution is better is that takes the emphasis away from the scoring, and focuses crucial element: what you do with the results to improve Customer Experience.
Scoring Criteria
No matter where you build your Quality Assurance scorecard, it needs to be built with clear objectives in mind. The best cards are ones that mirror departmental or business goals.
If you work in Financial services or FinTech, one of your business goals might be to tighten security. You would need to make sure that customer service are doing their security checks before disclosing sensitive information.
Similarly, if you work in e-commerce, perhaps your cheerful and outgoing company tone of voice a key business differentiator. You may want to insist that it is checked in your service center scorecard.
Channels
You might want to use a different quality monitoring scorecard for every channel you work on. This will help you in 2 ways:
1. Assess criteria specific to the channel: If you are dealing with requests through phone and chat, you might still want to assess the greeting on the phone. It is likely to be much more important that on chat where it's likely to be a standard template or canned response. On the phone, you might want to consider tone much more closely.
2. Comparing performance data: This way, you can assess the effectiveness of both your channels in parallel. For example, you can see if your CSAT (Customer Satisfaction), NPS (Net Promoter Score) or CES (Customer Effort Score) is higher on chat than on phone and then dig into why, so you focus on the areas that are causing your customers pain. That said, with a dedicated QA solution you can just use the same scorecard and filter your data by channel, which would solve this problem!
What is a Good-Sized Quality Scorecard?
Now you can't measure absolutely everything in one scorecard, so you need to focus on what are the most important areas for your analysis (have a look at our complete list of scoring criteria here).
Reviewing tickets can be a very time-consuming process and too long a scorecard will result in wasted resources. Like most things customer service-related, you need to strike a balance. A perfect scorecard has enough questions in there so that you can assess numerous criteria that will provide meaningful results, but not so many that you confuse agents and reduce reviewer inefficiency.
We usually recommend customer service teams write 6-9 questions in each quality scorecard.
How to Score Your Criteria
Next comes the actual scoring. Depending on the question, you will have to choose the appropriate responses. Modern customer service teams use a quality scorecard with Yes/No questions, 1-5 scales and sometimes written answers such as 'Poor', 'Average', 'Good' and 'Excellent' - each with an associated value.
Additionally, not all topics and questions are created equal - some of your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) will be more important than others, and this should be reflected in your scoring process. Giving weight to your rating scale is a whole topic within itself!
Find out how to value and weight your grading rubric here.
Cut to the Chase!
- Scorecards maintain internal quality standards to improve Customer Experience.
- Align quality monitoring with business goals.
- Keep scorecards simple to help agents focus on what's most important - and minimize the time a manager has to spend reviewing each interaction.
- Don't weight all your questions the same - some quality criteria are more important that others.
Want all of our Quality Assurance tips? Get the full Customer Service QA guide!
