Building a Better Quality Assurance Program

Quality Assurance, or Quality Management, has its own unique flavor in service businesses like contact centers, customer support, financial back office operations, or insurance claims management, compared to how it works in manufacturing or software development companies.

To help your operation create a top-notch quality assurance program, it's helpful to get a good grasp of what QA needs and to have the right tools to make your program work smoothly. Whether you're starting a new quality assurance program from scratch or tweaking an existing one, taking a moment to go over some basic tips and advice can be really beneficial before you finalize your plan.

Basic Needs of a Quality Assurance Program

So, what should a quality assurance program include to help your team consistently achieve its quality and customer experience goals?  From our experience, here are some of the key essentials for an effective quality assurance system:

1:  Established Quality Assurance Process Documents

Regardless of industry, thorough documentation is vital for success. By implementing clear rules alongside comprehensive QA software tools, you eliminate the inconsistency that arises when team members create their own isolated metrics and goals. This unified approach ensures your QA system delivers reliable, high-quality results every time.

So, it’s important to create (and make available) a set of QA process documents for employees and leadership alike to reference. Some key sections to include in your quality assurance documents include:

• What your quality goals are and how they impact your customer experience
• Specific quality controls used in your operation and how
• Definitions of each QA metrics used to measure progress so there's alignment on what needs to be done
• Roles and responsibilities for each business process
• Step-by-step instructions for assessing customer interactions or process adherence

Once created, these documents should be referenced in employee training and coaching sessions to help ensure that everyone in your operation is familiar with their contents and the requirements they establish.

2:  A Connection Between Quality and Training

Alignment between Quality Assurance and  your Training team is a necessity for ensuring that everyone knows what is expected of them from a performance metrics standpoint - and why.  Whether the training occurs during employee orientation, at specified times throughout the year, or in the form of one-on-one coaching sessions on an “as needed” basis (or some combination of all three), it can be invaluable for keeping your entire team on the same page when it comes to QA goals.  (Pro tip:  If you haven't done it already, we recommend creating a formal feedback loop between Ops, Quality, L&D and HR with regularly scheduled sessions and rotating ownership of the group.)  

An important note:  It's just not realistic to expect that your training content will cover everything that your team needs to know to meet expectations.  That said, some sort of ongoing review of training content and quality metrics is critical (something that feedback loop group can do) to identify any areas where  staff are struggling so training content can be refreshed to address problem areas.

3. Quality Assurance Tools to Track Results and Improve Coaching

To enact a quality assurance program, it’s important to have a means of tracking your QA metrics, imparting important information to employees, and helping your team who would benefit from a little extra support. This is where having a platform of QA tools that include solutions for talent management, performance monitoring, employee communication, and dynamic coaching can prove invaluable.

You've probably come across plenty of tools and companies promoting systems that use AI to record and "score" every customer interaction.  These automated tools can be really helpful. But it's important to have an open discussion about them to make sure you have the right workflows in place to handle all the data you'll get.  And don't forget, there will always be a need for some "manual" QA, whether it's for calibration, compliance, or managing exceptions.

Tips for Improving QA

To maximize quality in your call center, it’s important to follow some QA best practices that can help you gather more accurate and reliable insights, help employees achieve peak performance, and ensure the consistent application of quality standards.

Here are a few tips that you can follow to start improving your quality assurance processes as soon as possible:

• Collect “360 Degree” Feedback. Gathering feedback about employee performance and attitudes from their coworkers, leaders, and customers is important. However, this feedback should be corroborated by multiple sources whenever possible to minimize the risk of bias impacting an employee’s assessment. For example, if you ask 20 people about an employee’s performance and attitude, and 19 out of those 20 people agree on their performance, then you can isolate the dissenting opinion as either an anomaly or a potential case of personal bias. If employees earn consistent praise from multiple sources from peers, leaders, and/or customers, you’ll know that you can use that employee as an example of good behaviors to practice.

• Periodically Reassess Your QA Process. It is normal for your organization’s priorities and needs to change over time. So, it’s important to periodically review your quality processes and identify if there are any changes that need to be made. For example, if your call center employees are consistently meeting a goal that you’ve made the centerpiece for your coaching/training sessions, then you might want to change focus to a new issue based on any weaknesses you’ve identified. It can also help to look at the quality metrics you’re tracking to see if they’re actually providing useful insights. If not, then it might be time to switch to new metrics and possibly even reassess what your goals are and what they mean for your business strategy.

• Analyze Correlations Between Process Goals and Results. What actions, when taken consistently, drive metrics like customer satisfaction, deals closed, and other major business goals? Part of an effective QA process is diving into your data to analyze processes and how they relate to your results. For example, do contact center employees who spend more time on the phone with customers in your organization close more deals than ones who spend less time with each call? If so, is the difference statistically significant enough to indicate a strong correlation? In such cases, it may be worth modifying priorities or process goals to see if they have an impact on results.

• Maintain Documents from Every Evaluation and Coaching Session. When evaluating and coaching employees, it’s vital to keep an accurate record of each interaction for future reference. This is useful for tracking the trajectory of an employee’s performance and response to their coaching and evaluation sessions. For example, does the employee make a sincere effort to improve on items brought up during a performance evaluation? Or, do they remain unresponsive when performance and quality issues are brought to their attention?  Employees that consistently work towards improving their performance following coaching are much less likely to engage in voluntary turnover than their less responsive peers.

Elevate Your Quality Game with C2Perform

Need help enabling a stronger QA process in your organization? Get a comprehensive employee engagement and performance improvement platform that combines talent management, employee communications, coaching, knowledge management, and employee engagement in a single resource that drives continuous improvement.

C²Perform helps you connect with your team, drive quality, and make your organization a bit better every day. Schedule a demo now to get some hands-on time with the most complete employee engagement platform on the market!