It goes without saying that customer experience is crucial for revenue growth and profitability. In the past, CX was viewed as an operational expense rather than a revenue generator but more and more smart leaders are recognizing that customer experience is not an afterthought, but directly affects a company’s bottom line. Poor CX results in all sorts of negatives including:
- Increased marketing spend: retaining an existing customer costs almost five times less than acquiring a new one.
- Loss of sales: a poor or delayed response (or worse, none at all), and other lousy experiences can directly impact sales.
- Higher churn: particularly if you’re a SaaS business – customer experience is key to retaining customers, and creating advocates for your brand.
That’s why focusing on consistent CX quality that’s standardized across your whole team isn’t just optimal, it’s crucial.
The components of an effective quality assurance program
- Build a dedicated QA team
The role of a CX leader involves spinning multiple plates, so often there just aren’t enough hours in the day to focus on quality. That’s why it makes sense to have a dedicated CX QA team (if you don’t have one already) to keep customer quality consistent, and agents motivated and supported to perform at their best. This usually involves a QA manager and several QA evaluators or analysts, depending on the size and requirements of your team.
- Employ smart technology
Spreadsheets don’t cut it anymore. To save time and get the intelligent insights you need, a CX QA platform is the way to go. Aside from saving time, there are several other benefits to employing a dedicated QA platform. These include:
- Intelligent reporting
- Removal of bias in agent evaluations through calibration
- An oversight of all the important data you need to understand CX quality at a glance, for a full picture of the customer experience
- The data you need to identify patterns and spot trends
- The ability to motivate agents through gamification
- The removal of human error and oversight
- Offering personalized dashboards to agents, who then have full transparency into the CX evaluation process
- Make decisions based on fact, not opinion
Determine the metrics that matter most for your business (for example CSAT, churn rate, First Call Resolution (FCR) etc.) and employ these insights to identify gaps in your quality program to design solutions that will achieve a better result. Continuously re-evaluate how well your efforts are working, and whether you need to change tactics to improve further.
- Create an atmosphere of trust and transparency amongst your team
To keep quality consistent, you need to keep your agents on board. Create an atmosphere of openness, collaboration, and psychological safety where CX agents feel supported to make mistakes and ask for help when they need it. Make sure your QA managers schedule regular meetings with individual agents to share evaluation results and if necessary, offer tips and strategies that will help the agent improve.
Conclusion
To get the most from your customer experience strategy, employing a solid QA program is vital. By following these best practices to put quality at the heart of your CX approach, you can standardize quality and begin to reap the benefits of CX consistency and customer satisfaction.