Recipe for a Great QA Scorecard (A La Scorebuddy)

Ingredients

• A contact center full of Engaged Agents
  
• Empowered Team Leaders
  
• People-focused Coaches
  
• Highly Skilled Quality Analysts
  
• A Reliable & Flexible Quality Assurance Platform
  
• Multiple Quality Monitoring Forms
  
• An ‘Improve Performance’ Culture
  
• A clear set of objectives and goals
  

Method

1. Detail the objectives you want to achieve through your QA Program, these will be used for evaluating the QA program so be specific.
   
2. Pick 5 customer service interactions. Get all stakeholders (listed above) to listen to and monitor each interaction using existing QA audit forms quality scorecards.
   
3. Collect the scores and analyze differences in stakeholder scores.
   
4. Get each individual to give feedback and suggestions, positive and negative, on the scoring process.
   
5. Put all ideas, suggestions and feedback on your chopping board, include organizational goals here too.
   
6. Prioritize suggestions into their level of impact and rank each section according to the importance to the customer, now draft a QA form.
   
7. Divide the questions into sections, weight each question, vary the answers for each question; some will be Yes/No/N/A while others will be rate from a scale of 1-5 (see sample scorecard below).
   
8. Condense the scorecard to ensure there aren’t unnecessary questions or repetition. Having approx. 25 questions per audit form.
   
9. Show the scorecard to the stakeholders and gather feedback from everyone, this will boost their “buy-in” into the new QA Program since they helped design it. It also promotes a sense of collective responsibility for its success.
   
10. Make any fitting changes and clearly identify why particular suggestions were used and why others weren’t. This shows the transparency in the process and gains trust of stakeholders. The design process should reflect goals and objectives.
    
11. Test the scorecard; Tasting/testing is crucial, while it may be brilliantly constructed it just might not work. Some key ingredients may have gotten lost during preparation and testing is likely to find the missing spices.
    
12. When you are happy with your final version deploy the scorecard ensure everybody understands what they are being scored on. If necessary remind agents of the process that was involved.
    
13. Evaluate the performance of your new scorecard or scorecards to assess whether objectives were met; like any good meal discussing the detail is important too. Ensure everyone’s opinion is heard, a restaurant would never profit if the only people who liked the menu were the kitchen staff!
    

Here are some QA Scorecards I made earlier.

Social Customer Service via Twitter

This scorecard is very short and suited for interactions on Twitter, which aren’t that detailed due to the character limit.

It includes “fail-all” red flags, non-applicable answers and productivity questions such as FCR. The number of outcomes (scale) varies depending on the question as do the score values and labels.

The second scorecard is longer and more detailed and shows a sample employee being scored, highlighting applied weightings and “fail section” (in yellow), comments and accumulated score.

More Resources

• Webinar: The 4 Game Changers of Customer Service
  
• Whitepaper: Overcoming Productivity & Efficiency Challenges in the Multichannel Contact Center
  
• Research: The Multichannel Agent: A 2014 Contact Center Roadmap Research Report and Best Practices Guide
  
• Training: ICMI OnDemand All-Access Training Pass