6 Best Practices for a Quality Assurance Program

No matter what industry you work for, you need a Quality Assurance program. I understand the need to measure compliance, especially in regulated industries, but that is not an excuse to not measure what really matters.

All too often quality assurance programs start out with great intentions but quickly fold in to measuring conformance.

• Did the agent follow the steps one, two and three when processing an order?
• Did the agent use the correct module to initiate a payment?
• Did the agent convey protected information without confirming the person’s identity?

Are these all valid. Do they matter? Yes. Will they aid a positive experience? Possibly. Do they effect customer engagement? Probably not. 

I’m not proposing to simply throw this type of focus out in your quality assurance programs, especially if you work in a regulated industry. However, if your intent is to only measure conformance, you’ve got it wrong.  

Conformance should be measured and confirmed when training agents. If they don’t get the “How and Why” for the process and procedures to do their work well, maybe you’ve got the wrong person on the frontline.

Here are six best practices to consider when setting up or revamping your Quality Assurance Program.

1. Align your front-line training to focus on “How” the work (orders, returns, appointments and payments). Providing the “Why” is like the old saying, “Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; teach a person to fish and you feed them for a lifetime.” The why is the fuel that enables your frontline to understand the importance behind the “How” and build their competency towards being self-sufficient long-term.
2. Define your customer experience. This starts with what is the experience you want your customers to have when they interact with your frontline. Listen to what your frontline is telling you regarding their interactions: what do customers like, what they loathe. Use customer feedback if available; focus on unstructured data. There is a lot of gold in going through survey text responses.
3. Build your interaction process to deliver your services to create customer delight from your defined customer experience. This should be how you choose to serve your customers through a consistent service or support interaction. This is the glue that cements the “How” and the “Why” for your frontline.
4. Break out your interaction process in digestible steps. This is the framework for your Quality Assurance Measurement. If using a scored approach, weight your scores on what matters most in your expected customer experience. Infuse the scoring with any compliance requirements, but it should not be the predominant scores. For example: An interaction usually consists of four parts: Opening, Discovery, Resolution and Closing. Determine which is the most important to a highly satisfying experience and weight that score appropriately. Repeat the process for each step.
5. Once you have the QA form in place, pilot the QA form using a soft coaching approach. Calls are run through the quality assurance process, but the frontline is not scored (only coached), so you can work out what is working vs. what is not before you have a general release.
6. Be sure to calibrate. Calibration works best with getting all participants to consensus; not compromise. Compromise is when someone wins, someone else loses. Consensus is where you can all agree on the outcome. It takes longer, but well worth the time investment.

Developing a solid quality assurance program takes time, effort and a bit of fine tuning to get it right. Once you do, it creates team and organization alignment around what matters most to delivering consistent experiences that will delight your customers.