Customer satisfaction and customer service quality are not necessarily linked at all, and that’s a problem because plenty of customer service teams rely on CSAT and NPS surveys to judge their performances. Here’s how to build an effective system for measuring the quality of the service you are delivering to your customers.
Step 1: Define Customer Service Quality for Your Company
Measure quality directly by pulling together data from the following sources
- Your company and team values
- Customer service vision or philosophy
- Existing CSAT and NPS comments
- Reviews of your product or service
- Examples of excellent customer service your team has delivered in the past
Select a Quality Assurance Review Process
The right choice for you will depend on your team size, conversation volume, and resources.
- Four common options to consider: self-review, Slack channel, email review, e-mail review, and in-person review
Quality assurance specialist reviews
Specialists can get very good at reviewing and giving feedback
- Allows for a higher percentage of interactions to be reviewed
- Benefits: Specialists require a larger financial investment
- Downsides: You aren’t developing QA skills in the individuals on your support teams
Select a quality assurance tool
Key considerations when selecting the right QA tool for your team
- Does this tool support the style of reviews you want to do?
- Will it integrate with your help desk, and, if so, how good is that integration? How good is the customer service experience at the tool’s company?
Create a Customer Service Quality Rubric
A rubric is a list of criteria that you can measure a customer service answer against.
- Voice, tone, and brand
- Knowledge and accuracy
- Empathy and helpfulness
- Writing style
- Procedures and best practices
Share your rubric and discuss quality as a team
Have discussions with the team, listening to their perspectives, and coming to understand together what quality service looks like
Customer Service Quality Rubric & Scorecard
Grab a copy and use the example rubric in this spreadsheet to create (and score) your own customer service quality standard.
- Share your completed rubric with your team, and try applying it to some existing conversations together.
Pick which conversations you’ll review
Use random sampling or blindfold yourself and poke your cursor at a screen full of conversations
- New team members’ conversations or complaints and wins
- High-impact topics or conversations on key topics
- Highly complex conversations or those involving multiple people
Share feedback and take action
Use the review data to identify people or situations where quality could be improved, and share that feedback with the relevant people.
Set (and raise) your own bar for customer service quality
Don’t rely on customers telling you when you’ve done a good job
- Set your own quality standard
- Build tools and systems to measure against
- Chart a course of continual improvement
Leader reviews
Either team leaders review their direct reports’ work or a manager reviews work for the whole department
Peer-to-peer reviews
Each support person reviews the work of other support people on the team, scoring them against the agreed rubric
- Upsides: People learn directly from their peers by seeing different approaches and new information
- It promotes an open and collaborative culture
- Downsides: Some people may be harsher or inconsistent, requiring extra training
Self-reviews
Individuals select a handful of their own customer interactions and measure them against the agreed standard to identify areas that can be improved
