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Building a Quality Assurance program: key components and benefits of successful implementation

A well-structured quality assurance program is more than a checklist – it’s a strategic approach that ensures your products and services consistently meet (and exceed!) standards, helping to build trust and satisfaction among your customers.

This article explores the essential components you need in a quality assurance program, the benefits it’ll bring, and best practices for successful implementation. After all, investing in quality assurance should be top of your priority list if your goal is happy customers and high-performing agents.

So, let’s get into it.

What is a quality assurance program?

At its core, a Quality Assurance (QA) program within the contact center is a system and/or process that’s designed to ensure your products or services meet specified quality standards and industry regulations.

Its primary purpose is to improve customer service, as well as identifying trends and patterns in customer interactions that can help inform top-level decision-making. That could be within the contact center – such as where agents might require additional training – or at a wider business level.

Ultimately, quality assurance programs are essential for businesses to understand more about their service delivery, why customers love them (or not!), and complying with industry standards.

Core components of a quality assurance program

So you understand the purpose of a quality assurance program, but what does that actually look like?

Quality Standards and Objectives

If you don’t know what you’re aiming for, you won’t know what good looks like. You’ll need a set of standards to make your quality program measurable.

These standards should align organizational goals with industry benchmarks, not to mention any regulations your industry is subject to. Documenting standards helps ensure consistency and that everyone knows what to work towards, while setting specific objectives can help you demonstrate continuous improvement.

Policies and procedures

Documented policies and procedures help establish a foundation to work from. For example, how often should agents be evaluated? What is a ‘good’ score versus a bad one? What are the thresholds that dictate when agents may need extra training? Sharing this information ensures everyone knows what’s expected of them, and how they contribute to your overall quality goals.

Training and Development

Continuous training forms an essential part of a successful QA program. After all, regulations and customer expectations are always evolving – your agents and QA teams will need to evolve with them!

Regular training and coaching helps your agents maintain high performance, while updated standards will ensure your QA team are laser-focused on pulling out the right insights to inform coaching.

Monitoring and Evaluation:

For most contact centers, this is what will take up the bulk of a QA team’s time. Evaluations, scoring and feedback are the bread-and-butter of the QA analyst, as they assess interactions to identify and resolve issues.

Advanced tools and technologies like evaluagent help make this process less manual and more productive, ensuring your QA team’s output is always aligned with your overall quality – and business – goals.

How a quality assurance system is structured

These are the steps you’ll need to take to get your quality processes up and running.

Plan:

Defining your quality assurance plan will involve you setting quality benchmarks and developing guidelines for achieving them. You’ll need to map out the QA process and identify the quality metrics that mean success. Consider, for example:

Which quantitative metrics you’re interested in: CSAT, Average Handle Time, First-Contact Resolution?

Which qualitative metrics do you want to track?: Empathy? Vulnerability? Proactivity?

What do your scorecards need to cover?

How many customer interactions should be human-evaluated?

In short, if it needs a policy or procedure, it needs to be planned. All of this is essential work that creates a blueprint for all the QA activity that follows.

Do:

In this implementation phase, all your theory is put into practice. This is a great opportunity to stress-test your quality plan, since team members will be adhering to the guidelines laid out. A well-structured plan makes this stage more seamless – but don’t be surprised if you hit snags. There’s a lot that goes into making quality assurance a truly effective process, and you’ll nearly always be fine-tuning something along the way.

Check:

It’s time to QA your QA! You’ll want to check that the standards you’ve set are being followed. With sophisticated software, quality assurance can become that much easier at a top-level, so you can spot whether training or calibration sessions are needed to ensure interactions are being scored consistently. Platforms like evaluagentCX can also help you spot anomalies or patterns in the data, so you can explore in more depth.

Act:

The final phase focuses on continuous improvement. There’s little point in having a QA program at all if you’re not going to use it to drive positive change. With good data management, your quality assurance process should flag up any issues, then you’ll need to take steps to address them, and prevent them in the future.

From here, it’s a cycle. You should be reviewing and planning at regular intervals (quarterly, yearly) to ensure you’re always driving standards (remember those quality metrics?) up over time. What was good last year, might be your baseline standard moving forward!

What a quality assurance program achieves

When you implement quality standards, you can expect to see a variety of benefits, including…

Consistency in Quality: By identifying slips in standards as well as examples of excellent customer service, a QA program brings consistent quality across your customer interactions. Without monitoring, you can’t know what needs improving, or where your strengths are.

Compliance with industry standards: QA programs are a great last-line-of-defense for adhering to regulations. By flagging breaches and taking corrective action, you reduce legal risks, protect your organization and also reassure customers that they’re in good hands.

Increased efficiency: When QA teams know what to look for, thanks to your structured quality assurance plan, you optimize their time. That means they can spend more time on the interactions most likely to harvest the best insights – a big win for your contact center!

Customer Satisfaction and Trust: QAing customer interactions means you’ll have a good steer on what your customers love, and don’t love, about your organization. That gives you a great opportunity to improve perception with QA, and continue delighting customers in the future.

Challenges of implementing a quality assurance program

Naturally, implementing a QA program if you don’t currently have one requires a significant upfront investment in training, tools, and resources. You may need to make hires, buy software, and invest time in your team. Still, these initial costs often lead to long-term gains thanks to higher customer satisfaction.

You may also face resistance when introducing a formal QA program from employees accustomed to less formal quality practices. Overcoming this successfully will require clear communication and potentially a gradual integration of new processes.

Some agents can feel like QA is a bit ‘Big Brother’, or that they’re brought up only on their ‘bad calls’. You’ll want to have a transparent, positive culture in place to get the team on board, and again, relate all the activity back to your quality goals.

Finally, QA isn’t a ‘set it and forget it’ scenario. It requires continuous effort to stay effective in the face of shifting customer behavior and industry standards. This is an investment for the long haul!

Best practices for successful QA program implementation

For the most seamless implementation, you’ll need to follow these best practices:

Top-Down commitment: Leadership support is vital to the success of a QA program. When your leaders actively endorse quality initiatives, it fosters a culture where employees are more likely to see the value.

Clear communication: Make sure everyone understands their role in the contact center QA process. Provide documentation with accessible guidelines that team members can reference to empower them to stay consistent.

Continuous improvement: Quality assurance doesn’t stand still! Be sure to continually review and adapt to keep your QA program aligned with organizational objectives and industry advancements.

Why your contact center needs a quality assurance program

QA is revolutionizing contact centers! Today’s contact centers simply can’t afford to miss out on the insights and efficiencies gained from a structure QA program. From compliance breaches to training opportunities that will help agents shine, there’s a lot to keep on top of – and if you’re not measuring, you’re not improving.

Customer experiences have never been more multifaceted than now. A robust QA program is best supported by sophisticated quality assurance software like evaluagentCX – where all the best practices are baked in with meaningful features that help you drive performance.