Written by:
It’s often this aim that makes companies set up Quality Monitoring or Quality Assessment for their customer service teams.
Depending on company size, you might have a manager reading literally everything before it goes out to the customer. Or you might have sophisticated speech analytics that pre-select a number of sent messages for scoring by a quality team.
No matter the setup though, many companies struggle to determine the right criteria for assessing contact quality. As a result, some advisors feel ‘policed’ by the quality team — and complain that their actions are judged based on a random set of rules.
So here are 3 proven criteria that can be used in training, coaching and scoring — making Quality transparent and logical:
While perfection in Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar isn’t an end in itself, it supports your team’s image of competence and credibility. And according to the BBC, spelling mistakes cost the UK millions in lost sales.
But how best to measure it? We’ve seen many quality forms that fail anyone with more than three typos. That’s not fair to dyslexic people or those who write long letters — or anyone (like Sabine) who struggles with the ergonomics of most keyboards. What’s more, many team leaders and quality coaches tell us they don’t even feel equipped to judge SPAG properly.
That’s not surprising: There was a time when grammar lessons were unpopular with curriculum makers. Some people may not have enjoyed the lessons they had. Or they learned things that no longer fit with the language used in 21st-century newspapers, books and online.
With that in mind, it may seem counterintuitive for us to suggest we look to school essays for scoring SPAG. But today’s language teaching takes a scientific approach, and that’s an excellent starting point:
This makes SPAG much less scary — and brings it in line with current linguistics as taught at university and in school text books.
Whether someone’s able to get their ideas across is usually seen as a subjective judgement.
Yet we all do it: during the hiring process, when we vote in an election, or when we choose to read something. Scoring customer support writing isn’t about our personal feelings and ideas though, so QA needs to be based on proven ways to get your customers to do, think, feel or buy something.
Explain those criteria to your advisors and practise them in training — they’re all learnable:
Content should take centre stage. It’s the most important factor in customer happiness and sustainable business practice:
After all, it doesn’t matter how beautifully the letter is written if it’s full of “fake news”. And most of the service communication that’s gone viral had either amazing content (such as the Sainsbury’s Giraffe Bread example) or embarrassingly bad content (like this Ocean Marketing example from 2011.)