Five Questions to Jumpstart your QA Scorecard Research Process

We love sharing insights and information that we’ve learned from our customers, but we also think it’s valuable to occasionally take a step back, and set up a blog post that helps customers find answers from within themselves 🧘 Namaste 🙏

Below, we dive into five common questions that we see on customer scorecards, explain the why behind them, and talk about things that should be taken into consideration when adding them into your QA scorecard. 

Let’s jump in 👇

Did the agent have good grammar and tone of voice?

Let’s start with an easy one. Good grammar, a friendly tone of voice (or one that matches your brand values and experience) are essential aspects of any customer-facing team.

If you include a similar question in your scorecard, check that it reflects the omnichannel nature of support today – tone of voice and good grammar is a must, regardless of whether your agents were providing support over email/chat/call.

Did the agent identify the root cause and tag the ticket correctly?

This question checks two things:

• Does the agent understand your tagging system/are they using it effectively?
  

• Does the agent understand your product well enough to discern the root cause behind the interaction, and then can they build the appropriate solution?
  

If an agent doesn’t understand root cause well, they might not come up with the best solution – and we all know that it’s better to treat illnesses than symptoms.

The tagging question will really depend on your business. Some of our customers rely on tagging for critical information about the interaction that’s pulled into reporting that executives see

Before you copy a question like this, ask yourself: 

👉 Does this make sense for your organization? 

👉 Does this add value to your QA process? 

Did the agent understand the question behind the question effectively?

This question goes another level deeper than understanding/identifying the root cause. It’s about reading between the lines of a customer’s request to figure out why they’re asking what they are. 

This is critical when it comes to QA-ing for products of a technical nature, but is also a way to check if the agent showed empathy in their interactions with the client. If a MaestroQA customer is asking for help using reporting, the question behind the question might involve getting context into what they need to build a report for – without this information, the agent might not do the best job solving their issue. 

Customers often struggle to describe their pain/issues to the agent – and that's not their fault! They might be missing important context. Your CX team live and breathe your product, and should be able to suss out what your client is trying to communicate even when they can’t find the right words to. 

Use this question to encourage agents to be more vigilant in digging up the real issues your customers are facing.

Did the agent select and appropriately modify the right macro?

Macros exist to help agents to be more efficient when it comes to answering tickets. Instead of typing out replies to every question, agents can now answer frequently asked questions with a click of a button.

The problem with using pre-programmed macros to answer humans is just that – you're dealing with humans! Macros can’t fully capture the wide variety and the uniqueness of your human interactions. Using the wrong macro could lead to an awkward answer from the customer's perspective, but it could also mean more work for the agent – trying to customize a macro about billing issues to answer a question about shipping might be more trouble than it's worth, and agents should know that!

So if you’re using macros, care must be taken to select the right one for the task, and modified to give the right resolution for the customer.

Did the agent choose the appropriate resolution to the customer issue?

This question is helpful when QA-ing newbie agents to seasoned pros. Macros, LMSes, and guidebooks are helpful when onboarding a new team member, but being able to read the nuances of every case and select the right form of resolution is a skill that comes with experience, and can always be honed over time.

Including this in your quality assurance scorecard will help you keep a lookout for agents who are still building up to that level of awesome. It also gets at the heart of the interaction – did the agent do the right thing – while also taking into account that there are differences between what will make the customer happy, and what actually follows internal protocol.