Mastering QA: Crafting the Perfect Contact Center Quality Assurance Forms

00:00Hi guys, Tom Laird here. You've heard me breakdown contact center advice from a, a weekly podcast with a focus on all things call center, we'll cover it all from call center, hiring culture, technology and education. We're here, here This is an evolving industry with and ambitious people like this a call center geek the call center contact center podcast we try to give you a a. and talk about things that are, I don't say to fully take away Q We've, we've been able to We've seen so many different to develop kind the best form for most organizations. Now, QA forms are very kind of proprietary to individual customer, customer segment, what channel you're in. There's, a lot of different things when it comes to voice, the email chats helped us tickets, right? QA. All that compared to voice call. So I think really this is really this is more focusing Develop a new QA form for for, for a customer.

04:48in that. So, the first thing is, is what is the goal of what you want the end outcome to be. This doesn't be powerful with, you, know, using auto and still you could use this kind of human kind

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05:45But, you have a QA agent that's doing. I don't know, let's just say 50 forms a week, right? And so again, that's, and let's say you have a staff of three, right, that's 600 pieces of data segments that you could be getting insights and asking questions about what's happening on calls as well. So you can almost use your humans as an analytic tool. Once you get to a certain amount, it becomes statistically valid depending on the time period and I believe you're going to do. So I.

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06:56a lot a a lot of the questions are kind of redundant asking the same as a, to add their two cents to the form. And it's kind of like an monstrosity for men. So I think it is good, a a, a lot of this isn't rocket science, but I think that there are some insights maybe that are like oh that makes sense, hopefully that gets you to kind of think that way. So number one is kind of the opening I'm going to help you. I'm going to help. [QA coverage remark omitted] I think that those are really important. So your tone, making sure that they're ready for the call, and then any type of verification that you need for that customer, right?

08:39Whether that is, you have to verify their name, A But we'd normally, I think are to hear that, right? Or do they actually take the time to like, listen to the customer., and legitimately. I know this is not an AI episode, but I think that's one of the main misconceptions or in one of the things we've had to work on the most. When they show genuine empathy, they're good at connecting with other human. And secondly, the scoring from a QA standpoint, it stands right out, right? The key person can, really tell out, right? Because the QA person can really tell that empathy. I struggle, right, on a lot of your QA forms, we're scoring what the agent said, not how they said it. And I think that's a huge drawback, because it's just been kind of lazy for everybody. And it's easy. So again, we will score and we see this scored with when we, on we're calibrating and we're listening to how humans have scored this, if an agent and I know you guys have, I've heard me say this, but I'm really sorry to hear that, right?

10:37Gives that fake empathy. They're just checking the box. for anywhere in the in the transcript where the customer a pain point, they had some type of stress level that went up. They had an issue with a product. They had to say something that either raised the sentiment of the interaction, made the customer laugh, made the outcome of that small 10 second interaction after the agent talked, did it make the call a little bit better? And humans can pick that up. Empathy, and I think true empathy are really important. call control is another question that I would always ask that I think is very important. You know, the best contact center agents are taking you down a journey, right? Where, you know, the customer, the customer may always to kind of go right or left, right? But that agent knows where that customer needs that customer needs to be at the end- and can control that.

12:24Right. Right. Right. Right.

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13:28is follow your kind of dead air policies. I have seen for the most part on hold procedures that- it's between between one minute and two minutes, right? With halfway through

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13:58making sure that we're not having five to 10 minutes. And if Be sure to subscribe to our channel for more And again, that can get really good customer service agents are- are good at it. The really bad ones make it seem fake.

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15:06it's an. I think that's important. And then, you know, some people love this, some people hate this, but I think for most cross-sell, upsell, a customer's calling in to sign up for a subscription, having that asumptive language, I think it's proven. I mean, I've seen it in every single program we've ever done. The agents who are using a sumptive language in their sales process, right, they have a much higher conversion percentage. So, You know, it's like a customer saying, yeah, you know, so how much is this again? [pricing remark omitted] So, you know, let's get you signed up here. Do you have any kids or would you like the family plan? Or, you know what, I did hear that you said that earlier, earlier, that you do live alone. [pricing remark omitted] I have your name as, and you kind of go into it. Right? So, and the, and- we can argue about that.

16:35That's kind of a good thing from a, from a sales aspect. And the third, the third kind of sales is kind of, you know, did, did, did they, did they rebuttal, right, using benefits, right we don't want to ever, again, this is this goes into more sales-y stuff but you know a couple months in. So the customer is going to come back and be like, dude, like, dude, like these sales, but they, they were on our books for two months. Um, so I think, you know, we, we're making sure that we're talking positive about the product and the retention, right? For a cancel call, right? I think, you know, that, those, that kind of plays into, to that as well. Did. Did they actually try to retain the, the customer, did they try to sell it off benefits, blah, blah, blah. So all those things that from a sales aspect that are important to you, I think can go in there if, you know, if a tech support, you know, were you able to show understanding of the issue? Were you able to verbalize the problem? Were you able to give a quick summary back to the customer so that they can say because a lot of times and I've learned this in tech support, the customer doesn't really understand what's happening. It doesn't have maybe the, the lingo to read to understand it. So it's up to the customer service agent then to kind of speak did you transfer when you were supposed to?

18:33Did you give the proper information for this situation? Those are the proprietary things to your business that I think need to be part of that, kind of, um, section, um, and then the fourth is, is the closing, right? And there can be a couple of They want to make sure that the agent transfer inappropriately to another department. So we may have that in. in. I think offering a I think that, you know, again, for those you might not like, but I think, you know, overall that that's that's the best way to kind if it last thing. So normally that's I get the question a lot on waiting questions and waiting sections. And I kind of go back and forth on I think overall, you're fine. If you're on a five point scale, I don't think you have to make it complicated. Right? Everybody wants to make it more complicated than it is you know one out of zero or five it's a binary question it's a binary question you can really benchmark I think a lot better that way way sections and you weigh questions as more important and and there and and I there there some really good use cases for that especially in a financial services Thank you very much.

21:39different scores based on different sections of waiting.Bso I'm just a big zero out of I'm just a big, and they get a, you know, a, a call or, or that section, then gets a full zero, which then It's not just that they got a 78 on it, but it was a 30, right? And I think, again, it just kind of raises the eyebrows really fast so that we can can go correct issues. So yeah, that's kind of my take, guys. Again I don that's real rocket science, I know I've done this before, there's a couple of other podcasts that I have out there that were done a couple of years ago on kind to have everybody,. To have everybody use an auto QA or use our auto QA a, but you don't have to, right? There's no and that you can't set up a form that I just talked about myself on a Google sheet or even a Google form and ask questions as you kind of go through that form It doesn't have to be crazy.

23:28Again, there's better ways, right?. Especially when you put smaller contacts on your 10 seats, your 20 seats, maybe you don't. Anything set up. You could do this today, right? And kind of set up what you think is important and then start tweaking from there. And it also gives you then a way to train and educate agents, right? Because now you're having them. Do specific things when. When you do that, it can be very hard agents can go off the, off the, maybe that's good for certain, for certain instances. But I think

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24:23of score. It gets to the point of compliance and get to the point of agent for development. I I So again if there's no questions I know this was early a something you're interested in. Also, as you guys know, Expivia, we're a to see outsourcer here in the States, too, that we'd love to talk