Stitch Fix Builds Better Calibration Workflows with MaestroQA

Stitch Fix, an eCommerce personal styling service, has transformed the way people shop for clothing by offering curated fashion choices tailored to each customer’s style and budget. With over 3.1 million active users, Stitch Fix’s CX team handles more than 65,000 support tickets each week across various channels, including email, phone, chat, and social media. To keep up with this scale, Stitch Fix turned to MaestroQA to improve its agent performance evaluation process through a standardized and scalable calibration workflow.

Challenge: Subjective Insights Impacting Agent Performance

With a CX team of over 200 support agents, Stitch Fix faced the challenge of balancing the complexity of helping clients develop their personal style with the need to objectively evaluate agent performance. Empowering agents to make personalized judgment calls for each customer made it difficult to ensure consistency in QA grading.

Stitch Fix aimed to create a holistic experience for customers while ensuring that agents adhered to company values. However, the lack of consistency in their calibration sessions created issues for both agents and team leads:

• Inconsistent Grading: Team leads and agents were calibrating separately, leading to discrepancies in how performance was evaluated across teams.
• Subjectivity in QA Rubrics: Agents were being graded based on rubrics that often felt subjective, causing frustration and confusion. Agents struggled with maintaining alignment between their actions and the company’s expectations, especially when customer satisfaction conflicted with internal policies.

Stitch Fix needed a solution that would create a more objective, consistent approach to calibration, helping both agents and team leads align on performance standards.

Solution: A Scalable Calibration Process with MaestroQA

To address these issues, Stitch Fix implemented a standardized department-wide calibration workflow using MaestroQA, introducing a “ticket of the week” program. This program gave everyone in the CX department—from agents to team leads—the opportunity to align on best practices by grading and discussing the same ticket.

The process involved several key steps:

• Ticket Selection: The quality team selected a relevant ticket each week, chosen based on recent process updates or trends identified during quality audits. This ticket was then shared across the entire department for grading.
• Cross-Functional Calibration: A quality council, consisting of representatives from quality, operations, and other departments, calibrated the ticket and developed an answer key to ensure consistency.
• Streamlined Meetings: Using MaestroQA to grade the ticket allowed Stitch Fix to accelerate calibration sessions, keeping meetings to 30 minutes or less while still surfacing meaningful insights.
• Comprehensive Analysis: After grading, the quality team aggregated the feedback and compared it to the quality council’s answer key. Data was presented in charts and graphs, and a summary was distributed through a department-wide newsletter, ensuring transparency and alignment across the team.

Results: Elevating Agent Performance and Streamlining Workflows

Stitch Fix’s new calibration workflow has provided agents with the tools and confidence to solve customer problems in ways that align with company values. The regular review of tickets as a department has built the muscle needed to handle complex customer issues, allowing agents to focus on commitment rather than consensus.

One notable example involved a customer who requested a replacement scarf after it was damaged. Although 90% of the CX team believed the ticket was handled correctly, Stitch Fix’s quality team determined that the agent had missed key performance criteria, such as critical thinking and subject matter expertise. This moment was pivotal in helping the team understand the importance of avoiding blanket solutions and thinking critically about long-term customer relationships.

Additionally, the ticket of the week process has allowed team leads to refine their coaching practices. By reviewing tickets together, they were able to move away from teaching agents to mirror customer language literally, which led to improvements in how agents communicated with customers.

Impact: Standardization and Continuous Improvement

Stitch Fix’s implementation of a structured, transparent calibration process with MaestroQA has made a lasting impact on agent performance and customer satisfaction:

• Better Alignment: Agents now feel more confident in handling complex customer interactions, knowing they are being evaluated fairly and consistently.
• Enhanced Coaching: Team leads leverage the insights from calibration sessions to coach agents more effectively, focusing on critical thinking and long-term customer value.
• Continuous Learning: The “ticket of the week” program ensures that all team members, from agents to department leads, are aligned on best practices, driving continuous improvement in the support experience.

Stitch Fix’s partnership with MaestroQA has not only improved calibration workflows but also strengthened the overall customer experience by helping agents deliver solutions that reflect the company’s core values.

Build a Better Calibration Workflow with MaestroQA

Looking for a more scalable calibration workflow that surfaces meaningful insights to your agents and team leads?

MaestroQA streamlines every aspect of your quality process—from ticket grading to team calibrations—so you can focus on empowering agents and elevating customer satisfaction.

Request a demo of MaestroQA.