4 Tips for Creating a Quality Scorecard

Brand loyalty as we once knew it is gone in this device-connected world we live in. Switching brands is as easy as going from one website to another. According to Price-Waterhouse Coopers 32% of customers stop doing business with a brand they love after only one bad experience. AFTER ONLY ONE BAD EXPERIENCE! Focusing on each experience is becoming so important.

One of the ways to ensure you are focusing on each customer experience is through a quality assurance program. This program begins with a Quality Assurance Scorecard. A Scorecard is a tool to measure and grade and agent’s interactions with a customer.

These scorecards are based on a company’s values and standards for agent-customer interactions and form the foundation of the Quality Assurance program. They serve as a framework for contact center agents to improve and provide a consistent customer experience that not only affects satisfaction, but loyalty also.

It is not easy to create a scorecard that uses defined metrics to capture human to human interactions, but it’s not impossible either. Here are 4 tips for creating your Scorecard.

Find Balance

When creating scorecard criteria, contact centers tend to place too much emphasis on policies and procedures rather than criteria that would make a considerable difference to the customer experience.

There is a definite need to ensure that the company’s values are preserved, and the company’s interest is protected.

I worked with a large hospitality client that needed to solve for two problems.

• Their credit card chargeback rate was increasing which would affect their ability to process credit cards.
• Too many clients were being booked at the wrong hotel. Could you imagine booking a hotel for your friend’s wedding and realizing, when you get there, you were at the wrong hotel?

To combat both of these, a verbatim confirmation was built in the CRM to be read before every booking was completed. Chargebacks labeled as fraud went down as there was now proof the consumer booked the hotel and less customers were booked at the wrong hotel.

The Scorecard is designed to help with the mentioned and other processes or procedures to take care of business needs, but this is not the sole purpose of a scorecard. You need to understand what the optimal customer experience is and design standards around that experience. The customer is not overly concerned about your internal processes. They want a delightful experience that results in their desired outcome. This comes down to the agent-customer interaction.

The scorecard must be balanced between the business needs and the customer experience. At the end of each interaction, you want to answer yes to the following two questions.

• Was the company’s value preserved and the company’s interest protected?
• Would this customer, regardless the outcome, be a return a client or refer their friends?

Make It Simple

Why is simplicity a necessity?

The Scoreacrd needs to focus on two groups; the evaluator and the agent being evaluated.

The evaluator is to be efficient and accurate in evaluating agent interactions using the scorecard. The more criteria there are the harder it is for the evaluator to fill out the scorecard in real time. Make it easy for the evaluator to grade by only having the necessary criteria in the scorecard.

The same goes for the agent being evaluated. The scorecard is to focus on those items that are going to create the optimal customer experience. Less items to focus on makes it easier for the agent to improve.

Clearly Define Scorecard Criteria

Have you ever heard someone say, change your tone? What does that mean? It means nothing unless you put some context around about what type of tone you want and what that sounds like through using your voice and what you are saying.

If you want to maximize the value that QA can bring to your business and customer, there needs to be a clearly defined scorecard criteria.

As you create the criteria, think about creating a document that explains and gives examples. It is better to have educated evaluators and agents than to have them guessing what you want. A sample is below.

In order for the evaluator, manager, and agent to be successful the scorecard criteria need to be clearly defined. Being specific here will reduce effort in clarification later, and ensures feedback you provide to agents is useful, precise, and actionable.

Be Willing to Change

Your scorecard does not need to be perfect on the first try. Once you feel it is perfect, don’t be afraid to change. As technology, the market, and your customers change, your scorecard may need to adjust to meet those changes.

Do not be afraid to change and test different scoring criteria.

A customer was trying to change from a weighted scoring method to a selective scoring method. The selective scoring method focuses on every criterion being of equal weight, but awards points based upon how well they satisfy that criterion. Think of it as a good, better, best model.

The premise of this change was that everything on the scorecard contributed to the ideal customer experience. Instead of focusing on what someone felt what most important, the agent should focus on all items.

The outcome of the test was to see an increase in CSAT with no decrease or an increase in conversion rate and quality score. If CSAT improved and conversion rate and quality scores improved, it was a win. Happier clients will always come back. If CSAT stayed the same and quality score and conversion rate increased, we were more profitable. In both these scenarios, the desired outcome would be achieved.

Considerable time was spent testing with a set number of teams until the quality scorecard generated the business outcomes. Then it was rolled out across the organization.

Find the Right Tools

The QA Scorecard will determine the direction of your QA program. Follow these 4 steps above to ensure that your program is set up for success, but also choose a solution that will allow you to:

• Create customized scorecards based upon your business and customer needs
• Create consistency across all customer interactions with standard scorecard criteria
• Perform quality audits on an individual or company level
• Shows trends and analytics for training results, coaching topics, and quality

FiveLumens is an example of a learning management platform that meets all of the criteria above and more. It is a Performance Enhancement Platform focusing on training, coaching, and quality for contact centers. Get a free trial and see how it will improve your results.