Tips To Consider Before Outsourcing Quality Assurance to Call Centers

Are you aiming to achieve the highest C-SAT (Customer Satisfaction) among peers or consumers? Are you sure that all the calls or queries in the queue are answered with minimum average handling time (AHT)? Does your Net Promoter Score (NPS) fall behind that of competitors? 

To know that your call center is delivering the best service possible, metrics like customer satisfaction and customer experience comes into play. Here are the top metrics to consider using to measure your call center quality and performance: 

Customer Satisfaction

C-SAT scores are a way to measure customer’s responses towards the brand or the services. It is extremely important as it results in customer retention and increases the chances of your satisfied customers to recommend your company or services in their connections. Customer satisfaction is calculated by reaching out to the caller to solicit feedback about their interaction with an agent on a scale of 1 to 5, where getting 5 means the service was satisfactory.

First Call Resolution (FCR)

It is a great way to measure call center representative’s ability to solve problems and provide the answers to the customers in the first contact. The first contact resolution is measured by dividing the number of queries resolved within one call by the overall number of resolved queries.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

This metric is a way to gauge customer loyalty and build relationships with them and is calculated on a scale from 1 to 10, how likely a customer would recommend your product or services to a friend? Different scores will demonstrate the perspective of customers. For instance, those who give scores from 0-6 are detractors or those unhappy customers who did not like the brand. 7 to 8 score givers are passives or customers that are satisfied but not enthusiastic about word of mouth. And those who give scores from 9 to 10 are promoters who are more likely to help you expand the brand. 

Do you recall all these vital aspects mentioned above when you initiate a process for your brand? If not, then consider them as your priorities because this is what most impacts your brand, and these can only be achieved when you have Quality Assurance (QA) at your disposal.

What Is Quality Assurance?

Call center quality assurance is a process that ensures customer interactions are aligned with business goals. It aims to identify common customer issues, improve CX (customer experience), and help standardize communication processes. Quality assurance can help a company create services that meet the needs, expectations as well as requirements of customers. Furthermore, the standards and procedures defined by an effective quality assurance program can easily help prevent product or process defects before they arise. Also, there should be a close relationship with the operations team along with some independence to ensure that the quality assurance development work is accurate and not just to please the operations leader with high scores. All in all, a quality assurance system is meant to increase customers’ confidence and a company’s credibility while improving work processes and efficiency. 

Mostly, the call centers have their own quality assurance teams, or some outsource the duty. Both ways, the process should not be time-consuming and it should be easy to streamline by the QA team as well as easy to understand by the agents and clients.

Benefits of Outsourcing Quality Assurance

To outsource QA or not, this decision does not merely depend on cost-saving but there are several other factors that need to be considered. If you have a large product at hand and don’t want to mess around your day to day business operations then, outsourcing quality assurance can work out to be the more cost-effective option. 

Moreover, choosing the right QA partner can lead to several benefits and some of them are mentioned below. Take a look:

Fresh Perspective

There is always a need for outside experts to take a view of the product you build or the type of customer service you provide. However, the development team that is working or has worked on the product or answering queries is bound to oversee errors. To avoid those mistakes, outsourcing your QA brings in the objectivity much needed and expert insight for an unbiased evaluation of the project.

Increased Focus

You know when you have given some duty in responsible hands; you do not have to stress much about the work done. That same goes with outsourcing quality assurance like, while someone else takes care of maintaining the QA of your products and services, you can ensure that your teams can focus on building high-quality products and seamless customer service.

Time-Saving and Management

You can always free-up your team to initiate other important tasks while customer service outsourcing experts handle the quality assurance of your support team and existing project at hand that will add more value to the organization.

Automation in Quality Assurance

With everything coming under new technologies, quality assurance testing methods are also slowly getting automated. Companies now may not be able to attain automation tools completely but it makes sense to outsource QA to the third-party that will have a tab on the digital transformation.

 To get success in business, you need to act smartly. With every move, you need to know what to prioritize and build according to your focus. Another best practice in the call center operations is to ensure that both supervisors and quality assurance invest the absolute required time in each agent to be successful. There may be a shortage of time during in-house operations but not when your business will outsource quality assurance. Not only, it will help to attain efficiency but give assurance that performance expectations are aligned. When everything is streamlined and call monitoring feedback is provided to the supervisors, it helps ensure that everyone, including the support teams, is aware of what is working and what is not working. 

Here are some aspects and tips are given below to consider before outsourcing a QA service partner:

Identify your vendor

The most predominant factor in customer experience knows what drives your service providers. Like other industry players, a QA vendor or the customer service outsourcing company has to face and overcome different pressures like operational expenses, talent acquisition setbacks, and related issues with other assigned tasks. However, it is advisable to keep in mind that extensive demands for price cuts can lead to inadequate resource allocation for your project as a vendor may minimize the price by reducing their actual expenses and assigning the tasks to a newbie. For delivering high-quality customer service, an offshore QA team should fully understand your software or product, business goals, technical specifications, and user expectations.

Adaptability and Scalability

The customer service outsourcing team or your QA vendor should be sufficiently flexible to satisfy your particular internal procedures and principles. Their operational activity should be adaptable to address your present undertaking’s issues and to adjust with automated as well as manual endeavors as it is vital from a business point of view. Outsourcing QA vendors should have data strategies and norms to work well with your business growth.

Thought-leadership

A company’s leadership and reputation in the market should be checked and complete research should be conducted before offering the project to a company. Choosing an outsourcing QA partner with great values and good ethical conduct is important. They should display a responsible attitude and give you confidence that would advise on the right strategies and guide you through times of issues or failures.

QA Scorecard

A customer, when feeling satisfied with the service and customer experience, is one of the extremely important points, So, keep in mind that the call center team you outsource should create an action plan for customers who were not satisfied or with the service they received. Also, service or assisting script should not make the agents look like robots. It should be a complete communication process where customers will feel heard. Thus, it is essential to include all the good practices of customer service to fascinate the customer in your scorecard that takes into account the personalization of the service. 

The practices or information you include will be very useful for several actions such as awards, promotions, selection of teams for campaigns, testing scripts, starting new operations, finding assistants to help in training, etc. While creating a scorecard for your QA team, it’s important to know the overall purpose of the assessments like the past weaknesses of the team. A scorecard’s purpose is to help target the goals you’re trying to make. You can use the following list as a starting point to help create your call center scorecard.

Greeting:

Ø  Contact confirmation and account verification

Ø  Protocol compliance ad problem-solving capabilities

Ø  Call Handling etiquette and skills

Ø  Script Adherence

Ø  Ticket closures

Ø  Follow-up

Ending Remarks

Effective customer service only occurs if the operational set-up is seamless. With all points considered above, we hope this call quality assurance guide was useful for you to ponder over great customer service outsourcing strategies.

DepositPhotos – call center

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