That contact center executives are busy launching customer experience improvement initiatives left, right and center will hardly be news for anyone remotely associated with the industry. However very few executives recognize the important role their QA staff can play in the success of these initiatives.
Most of us would agree that the QA function has evolved quite a bit from the Productivity era to the current Quality 2.0 era of customer service. In addition to measuring legal and internal policy compliance, modern QA teams are tasked with measuring reps on key competencies, and identifying rep development opportunities. But, that’s not all. By virtue of being close to the voice of the customer, some QA functions are playing an active and important role in the new customer experience improvement initiatives undertaken at their organizations.
So, how are they doing this? While conducting member conversations for our QA Career Pathing Toolkit project we came across instances where organizations had incorporated customer experience and process improvement responsibilities within QA job roles to not only enrich traditional QA career paths but also improve the overall service quality. Some of the ways in which this is being done is:
- The QA staff observes and reports on process inefficiencies (i.e., coaching protocols and escalation-handling processes).
- They conduct basic analyses to understand customer experience trends as directed (e.g., touch-point analysis, customer pain-point analysis) and share their findings with managers and stakeholders.
- Senior QA staff partners with the analytics team to use QA and VOC data to develop an extensive understanding of the key customer experience drivers.
Further, many organizations evaluate their QA staff on the following competencies to ensure that the focus on customer experience improvement is not just a “good-to-have” but “must-have” for progression within the QA team:
- Initiative and ownership required to identify and raise process improvement opportunities.
- Strong problem-solving and analytical skills needed to identify trends and linkages between rep performance and key customer experience drivers.
Learn more about re-defining traditional QA career paths using our QA Career Pathing Toolkit. Does your QA team actively participate in customer experience improvement initiatives? Why/Why Not? We would love to hear your thoughts in the comments box.
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