The Past, Present, and Future of Quality Assurance

You’ve heard it on the phone a million times before - “This call may be recorded for quality assurance and training purposes.”

For a long time, quality assurance in customer support meant replaying randomly selected tapes of customer conversations. After all, most support interactions were done over the phone.

In the background, QA specialists manually graded tickets in Excel spreadsheets that would spit out a quantitative assessment of the agent’s performance at the end. Teams were often focused on catching mistakes that agents were making and ensuring they adhered to a script, rather than coaching them to interact fluently with customers.

But teams realized it wasn’t enough to just catch mistakes.

As Maya Angelou once said: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” 

Consumers started taking note of how interacting with a brand made them feel, and began to make purchasing decisions based on those feelings.

And CX leaders embraced that shift. 

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The Present State of Customer Support Quality Assurance

Today, customers demand more out of CX teams than ever before. 

They expect to be able to reach out however they want, whenever they want, and on channels they want to use (like social media, live chat, phone, or email). 

CX leaders need to ensure their agents use a voice/tone that’s consistent with their brand, know how to offer support across said channels, and have the product knowledge to solve customer issues using multiple systems (knowledge bases, CRMs, and support platforms – often at the same time 🥵) -- all in the name of delivering effortless experiences for the customer.

But teams are starting to see that these effortless experiences are tough to measure and understand. 

Traditional industry metrics often focus on measuring either customer happiness (like CSAT) or agent productivity (like Average Handle Time or First Call Resolution). While these are solid directional indicators, they don’t tell teams what’s going wrong for customers or how to make improvements to internal processes. 

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The Future Of Quality is looking bright ✨

In order to improve customer experience quality, CX leaders need to go beyond traditional metrics to holistically understand support team processes, cross-functional operations, and where the gaps for improvement are. 

At The Future of Quality, our upcoming mini-conference, we’ll introduce a brand new way of thinking about quality and insights. We’ll be joined by customer-focused brands like Away, Mailchimp, Classpass, and Tails.com to discuss their strategies for going beyond the tip of the quality iceberg. 

The live event is on October 28th at 12pm ET - join us! ✨