Quality Management and Customer Service Training Programs

Not to beat a dead horse (if you read other articles on our blog, you’ll notice that I am beating the dead horse…) but consistency in customer support is mission critical. If a customer reaches out to you on email, chat, phone, SMS (and what have you), they need to have a consistent experience no matter the platform, and no matter which office or internal team they’re routed to.  

If you’re in customer service training, you are familiar with how challenging this can be. It’s your job to make sure that every rep can represent your brand well, can speak to any issue a customer might face, and can deliver support to a certain standard. 

You probably have an onboarding program, some kind of 1:1 process, and you probably create additional trainings as new features or products are rolled out. 

The challenge then, is knowing what to train on, how agents are performing with new information, and how well they’re being onboarded. To address this, many of our customers rely on a similar loop between quality monitoring and training.  

They use their QA process to assess how well agents have been onboarded, and improve aspects of their onboarding process when they can tell that many agents are struggling in the same areas. Additionally, QA surfaces issues that require “uptraining,” ongoing training, or addressing in 1:1s, and allows managers to see how the agent is doing with the new info. 

Here are the stories of four companies who work this way: 

Hootsuite: Maintaining Quality Of Customer Support In The Face Of Hyper-Growth  

Hootsuite went through a phase of rapid growth in which they expanded globally, adding people and time zones to their support team as quickly as they could to keep up with customer demand. 

The training and QA specialists were tasked with making sure that no matter what time a customer called in, which office they were routed to, or which channel they reached out on, the support would be both consistent and excellent. 

Through their rigorous quality assurance process, they systematically identified areas of strengths and weaknesses between offices, and built processes (better onboarding, intermittent training, and regular syncs) to align their teams.  

FabFitFun: Using QA Metrics to train and manage a support team

FabFitFun’s support team also grew rapidly, and is also a distributed team. Their QA program is heavily metrics focused, and QA leads are meeting regularly with agents to talk about how they can improve. 

One way that this works is that QA leads are incentivized based on the performance of agents on their team in terms of CSAT and QA score.

In this case, much of the training happens through regular check ins with agents on their performance. 

When agents are struggling, they have more regular check ins with their QA leads, and might be given additional training. 

Harry’s and FuboTV: The Art of Training Customer Support Agents 

Many customers of ours use QA to figure out what agents need to be trained on, and then measure how well training is sticking in the day-to-day operations of the support team. 

Harry’s and FuboTV are no exception. 

In this panel discussion, they talk about: 

• Support team structure 
• How to train and onboard new support agents 
• Measuring the success of customer service training programs 
• Using the quality management program to train on both hard skills and soft skills 
• The tools that they use for ongoing training 
• Times when quality assurance has surfaced organization-wide policy changes 
• Whether or not individual agents’ quality scores should be addressed with the entire support team 
• The impact of a rigorous quality-training feedback loop on brand
  

Watch the video, and see how quality management impacts the customer service training plan