How to Refresh Your Call Center Quality Monitoring Scorecard

In our blog post “How to Update Your QA Scorecard”, we talked about how teams should strive to refresh their scorecards every 6 months or so—and the beginning (or end!) of the year is a perfect time for that. 

Doing a QA scorecard review now allows teams to start the year with fresh data and fresh perspectives as you head into the new year. Reviewing your scorecards now also allows you to bring in QA scorecard best practices that you might have otherwise struggled to find a time to implement.

To that end, we took a leaf out from our own (e)book to bring you a handy five-step checklist that you can use to review and update your QA scorecards for the new year. We’ll dig into the nitty-gritty on each step, including actionable ways to implement, perspectives to consider, and more!

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Step 1: Get Insights from CX Stakeholders

Your first step should be to round up everyone who will be impacted by any updates to your scorecard and engage them in a dialogue on what information your team needs to glean from your scorecards. The ultimate goal here: set goals for what you want to accomplish with the refresh, and get everyone aligned on the data points needed from the get-go.

This meeting could include CX leadership, QA graders, and agents, but might also include data analysts and other CX Operations team members you might have. Every team is different! 

While it seems simple, this step is the most critical to the scorecard refresh process (don’t skip it!). Aligning early on about the type of information you want to gain not only ensures alignment throughout the entire refresh process, but it also impacts how you should approach steps 2-5 below. 

For example: if your goal is to make your scorecard easier to use, then steps 2-5 will look different from a team whose goal is to infuse brand values into their scorecard. Your scorecard may just need to be reorganized, whereas the other team needs to draft new questions entirely.

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Step 2: Look for Ways to Simplify Your QA Scorecard

One easy win that most teams can appreciate—an improvement in grading efficiency. A scorecard that gets you both the data you need and is fast/easy to grade on will lead to more grading, a bigger data/sample set, and more strategic insights for your team to action on or areas that require further coaching.

To simplify your scorecard, consider eliminating questions that have not resulted in any actionable insights or improvements in your agents’ delivery of the intended customer experience.

Remember, grading is a numbers game! A 10 second saving per ticket graded quickly adds up to hours saved grading over time, allowing your graders to spend more time coaching tenured agents or onboarding new ones.

For other tips on improving your scorecard's grading efficiency, download the Ultimate Guide to CX QA Scorecards now!

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Step 3: Re-examine Company Values and Policies

While you’re updating your scorecard, you need to make sure  they’re aligned with your company values and brand identity. 

If these values have changed since the last time you updated your scorecard, this is a good chance to get the CX team aligned with your brand—just like the MeUndies CX team did. They set out to refresh their scorecard with the goal of keeping all their customer interactions on-brand, and achieved it through analyzing team-level data that pointed out areas for improvement.

Remember to rope in the branding/marketing team for help.

Step 4: Ensure that Your Scorecard and QA Data is Easy to Interpret

CES, NPS, CSAT, AHT, and QA—the world of CX is pretty much a can of alphabet soup. While you’re updating your scorecards, consider (and ask your agents!) this: are the outputs of your QA scorecard easy to understand?

If not, consider including rubrics and guides to help agents interpret their QA results, or train managers and agents to be able to identify areas of improvement, and compare their performance on a month-to-month basis.

Doing this will help increase engagement with your QA program and its results, ensuring that the data and insights generated are actually internalized and put into practice by the team.

Step 5: A/B Test Your Scorecards

While you have the marketing team on Zoom to ask about brand values and the like, ask for a quick primer on A/B tests—and apply them to supercharge ⚡️your QA scorecard update process.

It’s pretty simple—change one thing at a time in your scorecards, and apply that change to half the tickets you’re grading. Grade the other half on the old scorecard—that’s your control group.

If the change is to remove a question that hasn’t been performing so well for your graders, compare both test groups and see if there has been any improvement. This can come in the form of the time taken to grade the tickets, or the average performance of agents and customer satisfaction scores across both groups.

For everything else you need to know about building scorecards + grading processes, get your copy of the Ultimate Guide to CX QA Scorecards today!