Etsy, a global online marketplace known for its unique products, has grown into one of the world’s most recognizable eCommerce brands, with over 60 million active buyers and 3 million active sellers. To support its community, Etsy’s customer experience (CX) team, consisting of more than 500 agents, provides assistance via phone, email, and live chat. Faced with the challenge of delivering consistent, high-quality support across diverse interactions, Etsy turned to QA and agent certification to elevate performance and customer satisfaction.

Challenge: Elevating Customer Satisfaction Through Improved Training and QA Insights

Etsy’s initial approach to CX relied heavily on efficiency, using email scripts and templates to streamline communications. However, this “one size fits all” method didn’t suit the diverse needs of Etsy’s buyers and sellers, leading to inconsistent interactions and declining customer satisfaction (CSAT).

The CX team soon realized that this method was hurting the customer experience and that a new approach was necessary. The solution? A dual-track initiative focused on tightening up their QA program and implementing a formal training system for new agents.

Despite early improvements, Etsy’s metrics weren’t fully reliable. Many agents who handled more difficult inquiries had low CSAT scores, which didn’t always reflect their overall performance. While a new two-week training program showed potential, the team needed a way to correlate training efforts with real CX improvements.

“We realized that just more training and QA wouldn’t solve our problem,” said Natasha Lende, Training & Support Content Manager at Etsy. “QA on its own doesn’t drive behavior change—it’s just information delivery.”

Solution: Leveraging QA for Coaching and Agent Certification

To address these challenges, Etsy’s CX team discovered that supervisor coaching was the key factor in improving agent performance. Coaching, unlike traditional training, could be tailored to each agent’s needs and provide more personalized guidance.

With this in mind, Etsy turned to MaestroQA to gather data-driven insights that would form the basis of agent coaching conversations. QA insights were highly effective, uncovering coaching opportunities nearly 98% of the time. By analyzing performance issues at the individual agent level, Etsy’s team could address specific CX skills and behaviors that needed improvement.

Etsy also implemented a certification program to assess agent readiness before they handled live tickets. By integrating Lessonly with Zendesk and MaestroQA, Etsy created an automated workflow that ensured agents were properly prepared before joining the live support queue. New agents completed a combination of online lessons and practice tickets over a four- to six-week period, during which they learned Etsy’s products, policies, and QA rubrics.

This extended learning period gave agents time to develop their skills in a low-pressure environment, increasing their confidence and performance when they began working with real customers.

Results: Increased Agent Performance and Lower Multi-Group Solve Rate

Etsy’s approach to combining QA-driven coaching with agent certification led to substantial improvements in agent performance and efficiency:

• 66% Lower Multi-Group Solve Rate: Among certified agents, the multi-group solve rate dropped by 66%. This means fewer agents were needed to resolve tickets, which led to faster resolution times and reduced operational overhead. The lower the multi-group solve rate, the fewer touches a ticket requires before being fully resolved, similar to improving First Contact Resolution rates.
• 14% Higher QA Scores: Certified agents performed significantly better in QA assessments, scoring an average of 14% higher than uncertified agents. Certified agents scored a perfect 100%, compared to uncertified agents’ 87.5%.
• Decreased Customer Effort Score (CES): Etsy’s Customer Effort Score (CES), a key indicator of customer satisfaction, improved by one full percentage point across all support channels following the implementation of these programs.

Etsy’s management recognized the value of these changes, noting that the new certification and coaching processes not only improved agent performance but also contributed to cost savings for the company.

“Our QA and CES scores make it clear that the process works and saves the company money,” said Lende. “Management is fully on board because it solves multiple problems at once.”

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