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FabFitFun is a quarterly subscription for women who want to focus on growth and discovery through self care. They’ve historically done a great job using metrics to manage their (90% outsourced) team. 

They recently noticed however, that QA and CSAT scores weren’t lining up, so they redid their rubric to focus on the customer experience, resulting in a 6% increase in CSAT. Here’s their story: 

Challenge: What was happening with QA and CSAT scores?

We have a lot of outsourced reps, and we weren’t seeing a correlation between CSAT and QA scores – their CSAT could be amazing, but their QA score could be bad, and vice versa. When this happens, you know something is up. In our case, our QA score wasn’t checking the right thing (which is making the customer happy), so we needed to shift around what we were looking at. 

We were looking too strictly at areas that weren’t moving the needle in terms of the customer experience –we were QAing primarily against internal rules, regulation, and processes. 

Consequence: Agents not empowered to impact CSAT

The consequence here is that we were pushing agents, and constantly reinforcing against, things that weren’t impacting CSAT! We were incentivizing them to focus on strict rule following, which ultimately wasn’t moving the needle on how we were making our customers feel. 

Reps were a bit scared to go the extra mile for customers because they were worried it might negatively impact their QA score. So if a customer needed help with something that was slightly outside of the rules, but would have been a good exception to the rule for the customer, the customer wasn’t getting that good experience. 

Customers ultimately weren’t getting the right outcomes, because our reps felt like their hands were tied, and they felt like they had to follow the rules too much (because of the very process oriented way that we were QAing. 

In this time, our CSAT was lower than we wanted it to be. 

Solution: Change rubric to focus on CSAT 

The rubric was very process and rule oriented, but it wasn’t mapping back to impact CSAT, so we changed our rubric to focus entirely on the things that really impact customer experience. 

We’re now asking things like, “Did the rep do everything they could to make the customer experience as frictionless as it could be?” This includes looking at past interactions, account notes, background information related to their issue, etc. 

We also ask now: “Did we do everything that could to take care of the member?” This includes using all avenues, bringing in Team Leads, etc. And we’re asking if any mistakes were made that impacted the member experience. 

We still have a “tools” section that covers internal processes. So we’re still tracking whether or not the right internal protocols are followed, and we still coach on this stuff. But this doesn’t impact the QA score of the rep – the only thing that is impacted is whether or not they did the right thing for the customer. 

And fabulously, tools scores haven’t dropped since we implemented this change – reps still really care about doing the right thing, and they know why we’re coaching on this still. 

Impact: Metrics work together, 6% CSAT increase 

Since we changed our rubric to be more focused on customer experience (and less on process) we’ve seen CSAT go up 6%, and it’s stayed up. ‍

We also have a positive correlation between CSAT and QA now, and reps feel more empowered to do what they think is right to take care of our members. They feel confident getting creative and finding the right solution for people, instead of feeling stuck behind rules. They’re chatting with teammates about complicated cases, taking ownership over their solutions, and members are getting custom solutions when they call in. 

And reps are happier too. Before I think they might have felt like they wanted to help a member on a call, but couldn’t because they were restricted by our QA rubric. Where now they feel like they have the power to do their jobs, which is to make our members happy.