When 75% of customers report that they’re willing to spend more with businesses that offer a good customer experience, many contact center operators might respond with surprise. 3 out of every 4 consumers is a huge proportion, after all.
However, as consumers, we’ve all encountered the full range of customer service experiences, from seamless resolutions to frustrating encounters. If you think about your own negative experiences—the frustration and even annoyance they fuel—then it should come as no surprise that negative interactions have such an outsized impact on purchase decisions and overall customer loyalty.
So, let’s put our contact center decision-maker hats back on and ask the most important underlying question here: How can my contact center consistently deliver customer experience excellence?
Any effective answer has to begin with contact center quality management (QM). To consistently meet and exceed customer expectations, organizations must diligently evaluate, measure, and analyze the quality of customer interactions—and that’s where QA scorecards come in.
By utilizing a call center QA scorecard, built from a well-structured QA scorecard template, you can assess agent performance, identify areas for improvement, and ultimately enhance customer satisfaction. That’s why we’ve developed this guide with examples and 7 actionable tips to create a quality assurance scorecard that ensure agents are meeting company standards and customer expectations across every touchpoint and channel.
What is a QA scorecard?
A call center QA scorecard, also known as a customer service scorecard, quality monitoring scorecard, or similar, is a critical tool used to evaluate and measure the performance of call center agents. Scorecards are foundational to contact center quality management efforts, providing a structured framework for assessing the quality of customer interactions, ensuring adherence to company standards, and ultimately enhancing the customer experience. Essentially, a QA scorecard template outlines specific criteria and metrics, such as call handling, communication skills, product knowledge, and adherence to procedures, which are used to score agent performance.
Why you need a QA Scorecard
Beyond simply tracking customer satisfaction, a well-implemented QA scorecard is the cornerstone of a proactive customer experience strategy. While CSAT surveys offer a valuable snapshot of overall sentiment, a QA scorecard delves into the specifics of each interaction, providing actionable insights that drive continuous improvement.
Here’s how a QA scorecard empowers your contact center:
- Pinpoint Performance Gaps: Unlike broad surveys, a QA scorecard allows you to identify specific areas where agents excel or fall short. This granular data enables targeted coaching and training, addressing individual needs and boosting overall team performance.
- Drive Consistent Quality: By establishing clear, measurable criteria, a QA scorecard ensures that every interaction aligns with your brand’s standards. This consistency fosters trust and reinforces positive customer perceptions.
- Optimize Training and Development: The data derived from QA scorecards serves as a blueprint for effective training programs. Identify recurring challenges and tailor training to address those specific areas, maximizing the impact of your development efforts.
- Measure and Improve Key Metrics: A QA scorecard allows you to track critical performance indicators, such as first-call resolution, average handle time, and adherence to compliance requirements. This data-driven approach enables you to make informed decisions and optimize your contact center operations.
- Enhance Agent Empowerment: Providing agents with clear, objective feedback through a QA scorecard fosters a culture of continuous improvement. When agents understand their strengths and weaknesses, they are empowered to take ownership of their performance and drive positive outcomes.
- Increase Customer Lifetime Value (LTV): By consistently delivering exceptional customer experiences, you cultivate customer loyalty and increase LTV. A QA scorecard is a powerful tool for ensuring that every interaction contributes to building strong, lasting customer relationships.
In essence, a well-crafted QA scorecard transforms your contact center from a reactive service to a proactive driver of customer loyalty and business growth. It’s not just about measuring quality; it’s about building a culture of excellence.
Let’s start by establishing what accountability is not: accountability is not fear. Accountability is not a reprimand. Accountability is not something that occurs once a project has been completed.
How to Build an Effective Call Center QA Scorecard: 7 Actionable Tips
Creating a QA scorecard that drives real improvement requires careful consideration of several key factors. Here are 7 essential tips to guide you in developing a powerful QA scorecard for your call center.
1. Create questions that cover all parts of the customer interaction
Make sure your QA scorecard evaluates every part of the agent and customer interaction that is important for your business. Structure your scorecard in 3-4 sections with 2-5 questions per section. Each section should evaluate a specific area within the interaction like process adherence, product competence, empathy, tone and sentiment, grammar and spelling, and issue resolution. Score and weigh each section and its questions differently depending on your company and support team needs (more on that below).
If you’re evaluating multiple channels and support teams, create different scorecards for each, since customer interactions will vary across channels.
QA Scorecard Example: For a phone-based interaction, you may have a section dedicated to call opening, a section dedicated to issue resolution, and a section dedicated to call closing.
2. Evaluate from both agent and customer perspectives
When designing a call center QA scorecard, it’s important to create a final product that evaluates the customer service interaction from two different angles: the point of view of your customer and your business.
From your customers’ perspective, you may want incorporate questions that help evaluate key factors such as:
- Understanding and Articulation: Did the agent accurately grasp and express the customer’s issue?
- Empathy and Responsiveness: Did the agent address the customer’s questions with empathy and provide helpful answers?
- Issue Resolution: Was the agent able to effectively resolve the customer’s problem during the interaction?
Meanwhile, from your business’s standpoint, you want to be able to understand how well the agent performed against factors like:
- Process Adherence: Did the agent follow the established procedures and workflows?
- Information Gathering: Did the agent collect the necessary information before attempting to resolve the issue?
- Compliance: Did the agent adhere to all relevant compliance protocols and regulations?
- Brand Communication: Did the agent’s communication align with the brand’s voice and guidelines?
3. Use strategic scoring and weighting
Not all aspects of customer interaction hold equal importance. Your QA scorecard should reflect this through a strategic scoring and weighting system. Following these guidelines should help:
- Prioritize KPIs: Assign higher weights to KPIs that are critical to your business goals, such as first-call resolution or compliance adherence. This ensures that these areas receive greater attention in both evaluation and agent coaching.
- Diverse Grading Scales: Utilize a variety of grading scales to accurately capture performance nuances. Sliding scales allow for nuanced evaluations, while binary (yes/no) questions offer clear-cut assessments.
- Scenario-Specific Scorecards: Recognize that different interactions may require different evaluation criteria. Create specialized scorecards tailored to specific scenarios or customer segments. This ensures that agents are evaluated based on the context of the interaction.
4. Empower agents with targeted feedback
Remember, the ultimate goal of call center QA scorecards is to help agents improve. To achieve this, your scorecard must facilitate the delivery of clear, actionable feedback:
- Dedicated Feedback Space: Incorporate dedicated sections within the scorecard for graders to provide detailed comments, specific examples, and constructive suggestions.
- Focus on Improvement: Frame feedback in a way that encourages growth and development. Highlight both strengths and areas for improvement, providing concrete steps agents can take to enhance their performance.
- Ongoing Coaching: Use the QA scorecard as a foundation for ongoing coaching conversations. Regularly review scorecards with agents, discuss their progress, and provide personalized guidance.
5. Iterate and improve scorecards as often as needed
When it comes to your QA scorecards, it’s imperative that you consistently reevaluate whether you’re asking the right questions. To do that, look at how people are being scored: Are agents consistently failing a question? If so, why? Is it the question, or is it an area that needs more training? If a question isn’t providing an accurate measure of quality, change it.
6. Don’t use QA scorecards in a vacuum
There are many elements to the customer experience—CSAT, ticket solved, and average handle time—that influence quality but might not be included on your scorecard. Since QA scorecards can only cover so much ground, using QA scorecard data in addition to other performance metrics is critical to helping you and your agents understand how they’re doing across the board.
7. Leverage Quality Management technology to unlock efficiency
Scoring and grading customer service interactions can be a lengthy and cumbersome process. With so many tickets and agents to grade, relying on manual QM processes with spreadsheets, Google forms, or even paper forms can overwhelm your initiatives, result in poor coverage, and hamper your ability to improve experiences. To optimize your quality assurance efforts, embrace the power of technology with:
- Automated QA Platforms: Invest in a quality management platform that automates key tasks such as scoring, feedback delivery, and report generation. This frees up valuable time for your team to focus on coaching and agent development.
- Real-time Data and Insights: Leverage platforms that provide real-time data and interaction analytics. This allows you to identify trends, track progress, and make data-driven decisions to optimize your contact center operations.
- Enhanced Collaboration: Choose a platform that fosters collaboration between agents, evaluators, and managers. This ensures that everyone is aligned on quality standards and working together to achieve common goals.
QA scorecard example: Template for inbound customer service interactions
Section 1: Process Adherence
- Did the agent greet the customer with a friendly tone? (y/n)
- Did the agent read any disclosures or necessary regulatory scripts to the customer? (y/n)
- Did the agent gather relevant information from the customer? (y/n)
Section 2: Communication
- Was communication clear throughout the call? (y/n)
- Did the agent use correct grammar? (y/n)
- Did the agent keep customer abreast of actions throughout the interaction? (y/n)
- Did the agent actively listen to and display empathy for the customer? (y/n)
Section 3: Issue Resolution
- For the complexity of the customer’s issue, how quickly did the agent resolve the issue? (1-5)
- Did the agent establish clear next steps? (y/n)
- Did the agent resolve the customer’s issue? (y/n)
- Did the agent escalate the issue where necessary? (y/n)
Using Calabrio for Elevated Quality Management
QA scorecards are a valuable tool to evaluate and improve customer experiences—but they’re only one piece of the complete quality management puzzle.
Automated quality management solutions like those from Calabrio can help streamline contact center QA processes, evaluate 100% of customer interactions, and deliver consistent, unbiased scoring. With Calabrio ONE, you can transform your quality management program with:
- Automated Quality Scoring: Calabrio ONE automates the scoring process, eliminating manual effort and ensuring consistency. Its AI-powered engine can analyze interactions across voice and digital channels and automatically assign scores based on predefined criteria.
- Advanced Analytics and Reporting: Gain deep insights into agent performance and quality trends with Calabrio ONE’s robust analytics and reporting capabilities. Identify areas of strength and weakness, track progress over time, and make data-driven decisions to improve your QA program.
- Targeted Agent Coaching: Calabrio ONE facilitates targeted coaching by providing agents and supervisors with personalized feedback and actionable insights. This fosters a culture of continuous improvement and helps agents develop their skills more effectively.
- Streamlined Workflow Management: Calabrio ONE streamlines the entire QA workflow, from scheduling evaluations to delivering feedback and tracking agent progress. This helps ensures that your entire program is efficient, organized, and scalable.
- Omnichannel Support: Calabrio ONE supports quality monitoring and evaluation across all communication channels, providing a holistic view of customer interactions and agent performance.
By leveraging Calabrio ONE’s advanced conversation intelligence software, you can build a more comprehensive, effective, and data-driven quality assurance program that empowers your agents, enhances customer satisfaction, and drives business success.
Book a demo today to learn more about how Calabrio ONE can help your empower your contact center to deliver winning customer experiences.
