So You Need a Quality Application? Consider These 7 Things

This article was originally published on the FCR blog on May 24, 2019. Click here to read the original.

Let’s get real for a minute. How are you currently tracking quality for your customer service team? At the enterprise level there are some incredible tools out there using machine learning to grade calls for you. But if you’re a small to medium operation, or even a new startup, this technology can be cost prohibitive. Before I go any further, for those of you using Google forms, or spreadsheets, or even pen and paper, you’re perfectly normal. I hope that’s a freeing thought for folks out there who might feel like they’re doing quality wrong in their contact center because they’ve not yet gone high tech.

The good news is that the quality application market for the small to medium sized customer service operation has been heating up of late, due in large part to the increasing popularity of platforms like Zendesk, Freshworks, and Salesforce. My goal in this article is to share with you some of the quality applications on the market, but first, let’s look at the benefits of upgrading from your spreadsheets and formulas to something a bit more sophisticated.

1. Build forms and maintain historical data with zero effort

If I’m manually building a quality form I much prefer a form builder similar to Google Forms versus entering data directly into spreadsheets or using pen and paper. Where a quality tool wins every time is its ability to easily create a form, quickly change as needed, and add new forms while retaining version history and keeping all of your historical quality data.

2. No formulas required

Are you a customer service manager who also happens to be an Excel whiz? Well for every one of you there are about a hundred who aren’t. To be honest, I’m not sure the ability to use the COUNTIF function in Excel is a prereq for being a great people manager. With a quality tool, there’s no need for formulas to calculate scores when filling out forms. The app does all of that for you. Imagine increasing your talent pool for quality contact center managers by hundreds!

3. Skip report gathering and move straight to report analysis

A robust quality tool already has built in reporting so there’s no need for more formulas or spreadsheets to get to a point where you can analyze your data. Some metrics that we regularly look at include:

• Overall quality averages as well as individual agent performance.
• A comparison of our scores against other key metrics like handle times and customer satisfaction.
• Quantity of quality monitors completed against our goal for a time period.
• Performance on individual objectives on the form to provide targeted coaching and training for the areas where teams and individual agents struggle most.

4. Permissions and access

Like many pieces of software in your contact center, agents should have entirely different access than managers and supervisors. A quality tool allows you to set up permissions specific to the roles of each employee. Your frontline agents will love seeing where their individual quality stands and don’t need access to many of the other features within the app.

5. Calibrate with all scorers

Quality calibration is a process by which all reviewers ensure alignment on the way they grade customer interactions. It’s foundational to a consistent experience for customers. With a quality tool, an interaction can be placed in the calibration queue, everyone reviews those prior to a calibration meeting, and then the team can come together and discuss the areas where their scoring differed. It’s an efficient way to calibrate multiple customer interactions in a timely manner.

6. Integrate with your helpdesk

The integration with popular ticketing systems can be a big time saver, serving up the interactions the team should review next. They simply log in to the quality tool and there are interactions selected based on preset criteria ready to be graded. While most platforms take into account security restrictions, if concerns still exist, most applications can operate without pulling the interactions directly into their platform.

7. Integration with single sign on

It’s one thing to manage a handful of agents and their logins for a particular quality tool, but at some point, you’re going to want to integrate this with your system that manages usernames and passwords. Furthermore, if you’re in a rapidly evolving environment, keeping track of who’s active and who isn’t and assigning them to the appropriate places can be a daunting challenge. This integration will help keep your quality system current.

Systems to consider

I hope that’s a compelling enough argument for moving your quality assurance efforts out of spreadsheets and using a quality application. Here are five platforms we’ve seen in use with great success with some noteworthy features.

• Evaluagent-I just recently learned of Evaluagent and have been impressed. Among their many features is a robust coaching module where supervisors can set and track goals for their agents.
• MaestroQA- Check out their “Smart Attributes” feature that can identify tickets with certain keywords, personally identifiable information (PII), and macro misusage. MaestroQA also boasts a broad range of integrations.
• Playvox- This platform is packed with features for quality assurance and also has options for a learning management system (LMS) as well as metrics dashboards with gamification capabilities.
• Qualitista- In addition to the standard features, Qualitista makes a simple, peer reviewed quality program possible. They also have the ability to require supervisor review and approval before tickets are sent to customers. This is a great feature when onboarding and training new contact center agents.
• Scorebuddy- With a feature set that stands toe to toe with the others on this list, Scorebuddy has the ability to adapt to a variety of use cases, and with single sign on can easily scale with your operation.

To conclude, I haven’t talked about price but in general these tools range somewhere between $10 and $40 per user per month depending on features. Do you use any of these quality systems currently or perhaps another one altogether? Please share in a comment below and tell us what some of your favorite features are.