Training Quality Assurance (QA) specialists is a critical task for contact centers aiming to deliver exceptional customer service. A well-trained QA team ensures consistency, efficiency, and accuracy in evaluating agents’ performance, contributing to the overall success of the contact center. In this blog, we'll cover the best practices for training QA specialists, which will not only help maintain high service standards but also improve customer satisfaction.
Why Quality Assurance is Vital in Contact Centers
Quality Assurance specialists play a key role in assessing the performance of customer service representatives (CSRs). They monitor and evaluate interactions, provide constructive feedback, and ensure compliance with company standards. A robust QA program helps identify knowledge gaps, improve communication skills, and ensure that the overall customer experience remains top-notch.
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Steps to Effectively Train QA Specialists for Contact Centers
1. Define Clear Performance Criteria
The first step in training QA specialists is to establish clear performance metrics and objectives -- a Rubric. By providing clear and specific guidelines to use when assessing interactions, ensures a common understanding among all the stakeholders, including: Frontline Management, Training, and Agents.
2. Offer In-Depth Training on Customer Experience Standards
QA specialists should have a thorough understanding of the company’s standards for customer service. This is one of the reasons why QA teams are often staffed by experienced agents -- a great addition to the agent career path. While QA specialists can often empathize with the agent in difficult situations, it can also cloud their perspective. That's why it is important to constantly calibrate results (see below).
Worried about internal bias? You should be. Internal QA Teams typically evaluate interactions 5%-15% higher than unbiased independent third party QA Teams. If this concerns you, consider Outsourcing some or all of your QA.
3. Utilize Real-Life Scenarios for Training
To give QA specialists practical experience -- and before they begin conducting QA in a live environment -- use real-life call or chat scenarios during training sessions. These scenarios provide context and help new QA specialists understand how to evaluate different types of customer interactions. Reviewing these scenarios can also help them practice identifying mistakes, offering constructive feedback, and applying scorecard criteria.
4. Provide Comprehensive Knowledge on Call Center Tools
QA specialists must be proficient in the tools and technologies used in the contact center QA process. This may include the call/email/chat recording systems, customer relationship management (CRM) software, and QA tools. Training on these tools should be hands-on, allowing QA specialists to familiarize themselves with the platforms they’ll be using.
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5. Ensure Regular Calibration Sessions
Consistency is key when evaluating agent performance, and calibration sessions ensure all QA specialists are on the same page. In these sessions, multiple QA specialists can review the same customer interactions to compare evaluations and scoring. This process helps align everyone on what constitutes excellent, average, or poor performance. It's also good to involve frontline management in the process and to do it (at a minimum) monthly.
6. Promote Continuous Learning and Development
The contact center industry is fast-evolving, with new trends and customer expectations emerging regularly. To keep QA specialists up-to-date, encourage continuous learning through webinars, industry events, or refresher training sessions. This continuous improvement approach ensures that QA specialists stay ahead of industry changes and are always fine-tuning their evaluation skills.
7. Emphasize Soft Skills Training
While technical knowledge and evaluation processes are important, QA specialists should also be experts in soft skills, such as empathy and managing challenging customers. They must know how to deliver feedback in a way that encourages agents to improve without feeling discouraged. Training on conflict resolution and diplomacy can be beneficial for this role.
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8. Create a Mentorship or Shadowing Program
Pairing new QA specialists with experienced mentors can help them gain insights and hands-on knowledge in a supportive environment. Shadowing experienced team members allows new hires to see firsthand how evaluations are conducted, giving them a clear idea of expectations and best practices.
Measuring Success in QA Training
After the initial training, it’s important to regularly assess the performance of QA specialists. This can be done through:
Feedback from Team Leaders: Obtain feedback from team leaders and managers on how well the QA specialists are identifying areas of improvement for agents.
Agent Performance Improvement: The effectiveness of QA specialists can be measured by tracking the performance of agents who receive feedback. If agents are improving in line with the feedback, the QA training is effective.
Calibration Session Results: Ongoing calibration sessions will ensure that QA specialists are aligned on the criteria for evaluating agents, and they can also serve as a metric for evaluating the consistency of their work.
Check-the-Checker: As time goes on, consider implementing a 'Check-the-Checker' program, where one QA specialist evaluates a samples of another QA specialist's work on a regular basis. Consistency and accuracy across your QA team is vital to gaining frontline management/agent buy-in.
Conclusion
QA teams are often small and so they are heavily reliant on one another for training and ongoing support. That's why training quality assurance specialists in contact centers requires a well-rounded approach, combining technical skills, real-life scenarios, and soft skills. By investing in comprehensive training and continuous development upfront, you can ensure that your QA specialists not only maintain high standards for customer interactions but also contribute significantly to the overall efficiency and success of your contact center.
VEREQUEST's goal is to help organizations keep the promises they make to customers and employees alike. Our third-party, quality monitoring service pairs VereQuest’s highly-skilled Coaches with our proprietary quality monitoring technology VQ Online™ to capture the level of detail you need to understand the experiences customers have when interacting with your call center agents — across all of your channels (calls, email, chat, video, etc.). The result is specific, actionable coaching insight that lifts and sustains performance. VQ Online™ is also available in a hosted SaaS model for internal quality monitoring teams.
The VereQuest Check-Up™ e-learning program is customizable for service, sales, and chat/email agents and the Coaches who support them. SCORM-compliant modules enable you to host your learning on your own LMS (or ours). Importantly, you pay no individual learner fees.
Get in touch with us today for a no-obligation demonstration and test run of our highly rated quality monitoring and e-learning - info@verequest.com
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