Building a New Call Center Quality Assurance Scorecard

Building out a QA program—and the first scorecard that comes along with it—can be a daunting process. And with good reason - your scorecard is the backbone of your QA program! 😅

While it seems a bit scary, getting your first scorecard done (and done right!) means you’re able to generate key business insights about your call center’s performance and level up your team’s performance...but it can be tough to know where to start. 

If this sounds familiar to you, you’ve come to the right place.

We’ve boiled the scorecard building process down into five simple steps: identifying your values, creating and refining your questions, organizing questions into a framework, picking your QA scorecard tool, and launching (and testing!) your scorecard. 

Below, we’ll dive in deep to each step and talk actionable strategies for getting your first scorecard off the ground 🛫

Step 1: Identify the Values that Drive Your Customer Interactions

Before we get into building a scorecard, you have to answer two key questions: 

1. What makes your customer experiences stand out from the pack? Or—if you’re a new support team—what do you want to be the thing that makes your experiences stand out?
2. What metrics are you tracking (or: what experiences will you start tracking) to make sure your customer experiences are amazing?
   

The answers to 1 and 2 should be tied together. For example, if you want your team to become well-known for always providing a speedy response, then you should track and create goals around AHT.

By answering these questions, you’ve identified the values that drive your customer interactions and your operational goals. We like writing them out in a checklist like this: 

Your values can include things like “effortless customer experiences”, a movement popularized by experts from customer loyalty at Gartner.

Your operational goals should be attainable targets like achieving an 80+% retention rate, which ClassPass managed to achieve with the help of their QA program, or reducing average handle time to under 10 minutes—a goal which the CX team at monday.com built a scorecard to help their team attain. Operational goals may also be process-oriented or compliance-related - which makes for really simple questions that simply have to be in your rubric (see step 2).

Either way - your team can now start the scorecard building process with your goals in mind!

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Step 2: Create and Refine Your QA Scorecard Questions

Next step: draft questions that help you and your team address the values and operational goals outlined in step 1. 

Most of the time, you’ll be able to create questions that sit across the intersection of a value and an operational goal. For example, “Customer Delight” and “89% CSAT” are a CX value and an operational goal, respectively, but might give rise to a single question like “did the agent’s chosen resolution delight the customer?” 

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Step 3: Organize Your Questions into Your Scorecard Framework.

As you develop questions to include in your QA scorecard, you’ll inevitably notice that some questions share common characteristics—and that’s a good thing! Most questions fall into one of these four categories:

• Communication
• Customer Connection
• Compliance
• Correct Content
  

These 4Cs are one example of a framework on which to organize your scorecard. 

The main point here is this: grouping similar questions into categories helps you to grade more efficiently—if you need to refer back to the actual ticket, you’ll be grouping these queries together heuristically, saving you time and effort.

We include other frameworks in our Ultimate Guide to CX QA Scorecards—such as our SIP framework: soft skills, issue resolution (also known as first call resolution or FCR), and procedure. The SIP framework allows your graders to grade quicker, increasing the quality of your QA data. Download your copy here!

Step 4: Pick a QA Scorecard Tool

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Spreadsheets are often the starting point for smaller teams or teams building out their first QA program. While they work in the short term, they don’t scale with teams as they grow. Just imagine grading and compiling QA scores for hundreds of agents in Google Sheets or Excel! 🤯🤯🤯

The other alternative—QA software. QA software often features automations that speed up the grading process (sometimes by up to 10x or more, as Pipedrive has discovered), reporting functionality that allows managers a birds-eye view of their team’s performance, as well as Screen Capture functionality that helps remote teams receive the coaching they need to succeed in a WFH environment.

Step 5: Test Your Scorecard

You’re almost ready to roll out your new QA scorecard!

Whether it’s your first QA scorecard or your twentieth, properly testing your scorecard out in the “real world” is a key step to ensure a successful rollout. Through user acceptance testing, and by involving stakeholders in your testing phase, you build up trust and gain buy-in from the people who will use and benefit from these scorecards the most.

Using a combination of A/B testing and User Acceptance Testing, you can earn the buy-in of your stakeholders and the wider CX team. We cover the basics of call center quality assurance scorecard testing here.

With these five simple steps in hand, you’re now ready to launch your brand new QA scorecard! Just remember—CX goals and objectives constantly change and evolve along with your company. You’ll find yourself wanting a QA scorecard update soon—so keep your copy of our Ultimate Guide to CX QA Scorecards handy for that.