MaestroQA: Aceable Improves SES by 14% and Grades 147%

Aceable is an online learning company that provides convenient and delightful licensing courses for driver’s education and real estate. Founded in 2013, Aceable has empowered more than 20 million students.

To ensure consistent experiences for over 1 million students per year, Aceable’s team of 70+ agents provide support via voice, email, chat, and SMS text.

Challenge: Reducing student effort by surfacing richer insights through QA

Aceable’s previous approach to QA involved lots of time and effort clicking through tickets and entering data. “Managers had to manually review tickets via Google Forms, which was clunky,” said Madeleine McCaleb, Customer Experience Education Program Manager at Aceable. “We really didn’t have a quality program at all.”

Lack of QA insights made it difficult for managers to provide meaningful feedback to agents during 1x1 coaching sessions and left a blind spot when it came to understanding student’s experiences. And, since all of Aceable’s ticket review data was maintained in Google Sheets, agents had minimal visibility into their true performance and growth. “There wasn’t much agent ownership because we couldn’t give them access to the spreadsheet containing everyone else’s data,” McCaleb said. 

Needing a more scalable way to collect, track, and leverage QA data, Aceable’s CX team began considering enhancements to their QA systems and processes. “We needed a tool that could simplify reporting, maximize the number of people who could score, and allow agents to engage with their feedback,” McCaleb said.

Solution: Implementing a scalable QA program with MaestroQA 

After evaluating multiple solutions, Aceable’s CX team decided to implement MaestroQA. 

Easily customizable QA scorecards, intuitive ticket automations, and pre-built reports were just a few of the reasons why Aceable’s CX team chose MaestroQA. “Now we’re able to provide impactful readouts every quarter, and that’s something we weren’t able to do before,” McCaleb said. 

During the onboarding process, MaestroQA’s Customer Success team worked hand in hand with Lexi Farris, Customer Experience Trainer at Aceable, to implement the best rubric in order to hit their customer support goals.

“The support of the MaestroQA Success team really helped us to take our vision of what a quality assurance program should look like—and should deliver—and bring it into reality,” said Farris. “This allowed a truly intuitive and seamless onboarding experience for our agents.”

MaestroQA also made it easy to rapidly onboard and train more graders, allowing Aceable to scale their grading operation—without adding to headcount. There were other grader-focused features that also resulted in more efficient grading workflows. “Planning strategic automation was so easy in MaestroQA,” Farris said. “This saved us hours of finding the right tickets to grade, and we could invest that time instead on calibration sessions to get our graders on the same standard.”

MaestroQA’s Coaching Experience provided an interactive way for agents and managers to monitor and track performance. Quality-related KPIs, trendlines, and visualizations offered additional context during 1x1 coaching sessions. Managers also began using MaestroQA to capture their notes, leading to fewer data silos and greater efficiency. “Everyone has one place to see everything about an agent’s performance,” McCaleb said. 

The Appeals Workflow in MaestroQA gave agents a reliable and professional way to appeal their grades, especially as Aceable onboarded more graders and refined their rubric.

Result: Grading 147% more tickets, boosting Student Effort Score by 14%, and increasing internal accountability

Implementing a scalable QA program with the help of MaestroQA enables Aceable’s graders to review significantly more tickets than before—1,112 tickets in Q2 2021 vs. 450 before, a 147% increase.

Graded ticket volume isn’t the only thing that’s on the rise. Student Effort Score (SES), one of Aceable’s most important CX metrics, improved 14% for one of their lowest performing channels during the first full quarter of using MaestroQA. “QA helped us recognize that we needed to slow down and connect with our students to make it as easy as possible for them,” McCaleb said. “We could see where we needed to focus and quickly created training and coaching around that.” Doubling down on empathy led to a more consistent—and easier!—experience for students.

Empowering agents with actionable QA insights made it easier to identify improvement opportunities and led to more agents taking ownership of their performance. For example, one agent who previously resisted Aceable’s new QA program, experienced a 17% lift in her QA score and a 19% improvement in SES. “Even if people don’t like change, MaestroQA still provides them more data to understand their performance and receive better coaching from managers,” McCaleb said.

Enhanced QA also led to a greater sense of accountability and collaboration between Aceable’s teams. “Agents are more accountable to owning their performance, and we’re more accountable for creating targeted training and coaching,” McCaleb said. “We’re also more accountable to leaders because we can report on performance and understand correlations between general SES and QA.”

Build a Better QA Program with MaestroQA

Looking to move beyond QA spreadsheets and accelerate your organization’s CX goals?

MaestroQA provides a scalable solution for collecting, managing, and sharing your QA data. Enable productive conversations between managers and agents, identify opportunities for improvement, and streamline inefficient processes with MaestroQA.

Request a demo today.