How to Calculate CX Quality Assurance Scores

These days, the quality of your customer experience can act as a major competitive advantage - one that will attract new customers, retain existing ones, and generate additional revenue in one fell swoop.

One of the single most important metrics that business leaders need to be paying attention to is the customer experience quality assurance score, otherwise known as the CX QA score for short.

Monitoring this metric isn't necessarily difficult, but it does require you to keep a number of important things in mind along the way.

What is a Customer Service Scorecard?

A customer service scorecard is exactly what it sounds like - think of it like a "report card" for your support agents. Customer service scorecards are used to grade individual customer support interactions for adherence to company policies and brand guidelines. When you grade a ticket using your scorecard, the resulting “grade” received is the QA score. 

Grading lots of customer support interactions helps shed light on the quality of the overall customer experience. You can identify agents who are performing to the best of their abilities, spot areas for agent coaching and training, and see where support processes can be smoothed out.

If these insights are acted upon, QA scores should generally tick upwards over time - confirming that everything is headed in the right direction.

Why You Need a Scorecard

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First and foremost, a QA scorecard is critical because it lays the foundation for establishing an objective, systematic way to understand and gather large sets of data about customer interactions. 

But beyond that, the most important reason why you need a scorecard has to do with the negative impact that poor customer service can have on your business.

Generally speaking, the types of people who leave online reviews are not those who have simply had their expectations met. They either had an exceptional experience or a very negative one - there really isn't much middle ground. While good reviews can help boost your brand awareness, the negative ones have the opposite effect.

If someone has a good customer experience, they're not only likely to return - they're also likely to spend more money than average over time. If someone has a negative experience, they're probably not coming back - and they're typically ones who will go out of their way to leave bad reviews and inform friends and family members as well.

Therefore, it's always in your best interest to offer the best customer experience that you can. The best way to do that is to sample a random set of customer interactions to grade with your scorecard - that way, you're avoiding any polarizing reviews, and understanding what most customers experience.

Calculate QA Scores By Using a Scorecard

1. First, Create a Scorecard

One of the most important things to understand about this process is that your scorecard will ultimately vary depending on your specific organization. Different things are important to different businesses, so there really is no "one size fits all" approach to what you're doing.

Having said that, there are a number of important factors you'll want to consider. Things like:

• Criteria or categories: What, exactly, is important to your organization? Are you trying to reduce the volume of calls? Are you trying to generate more revenue? Are you trying to improve customer retention? You need to answer questions like these before your scorecard is created.
• A list of questions: These will be built around the criteria outlined above. They should be drafted to verify if agents are meeting your quality requirements moving forward.
• A scoring process: This is used to assign points to agents for each question from the scorecard. This can be a helpful tool to identify those agents that are performing as expected and those who may need a bit of additional care or training. Certain teams may assign different weights to certain questions (for example, some companies have an auto-fail section of their scorecard).

Scorecards often have a mix of different question types - "Yes/No" questions can make grading straightforward and eliminate ambiguity. However, sometimes scorecards have scales or written answer components. Whatever your business values - it should be reflected in your scorecard.

2. Agents Perform Customer Support with the Customer

This is the most straightforward part of the process. Agents receive calls, chats, and emails and perform their normal duties, answering questions and addressing concerns to the best of their ability. 

3. Grade the Agent's Performance based on the Scorecard and Rubric

This part of the process involves the actual scoring - meaning that you're diving deep into what is working and, more importantly, what isn't. A dedicated team of either QA specialists or experienced customer support managers and agents will grade conversations and offer reviews and feedback as necessary.

Graders will use the scorecard outlined above to calculate the QA score for that particular interaction.

All throughout this part of the process, remember that not all topics and questions are created in quite the same way. Some of your key performance indicators (KPIs) will be more important than others depending on your unique business goal.

As a result, questions should reflect the priorities of your customer experience. Of course, placing emphasis on certain parts of your grading scale and giving the proper weight to it is a topic in and of itself. Part of this work involves getting into the minds of your customers and trying to figure out what they value most. 

Improve CX With a Customer Service Scorecard Software

In the end, performing quality assurance on support interactions is one of the single most essential ways to improve the customer experience that you're offering - improving your brand's reputation, helping increase customer loyalty, and increasing your revenues all at the exact same time.

Luckily, MaestroQA's software can help make this as easy as possible - all to give you the complete picture you need to make the most informed decisions possible moving forward.

If you'd like to find out more information about how a QA score is calculated, or if you just have any additional questions you'd like to go over with someone in a bit more detail, feel free to reach out.