May 29, 2024 • 25 mins
What if you could transform your call center’s efficiency and agent performance overnight? This episode guarantees you’ll walk away with actionable insights on crafting the ultimate QA forms for both voice and chat channels.
We’ll guide you on defining the crucial goals for your QA forms, such as enhancing agent performance, ensuring compliance, and extracting valuable customer interaction insights. With the collective wisdom from examining hundreds of QA forms, we’ll provide practical tips to structure your forms for maximum impact.
Whether you’re running a large or small contact center, these insights will significantly enhance your training and performance evaluation processes. Don't miss these transformative strategies to elevate your call center operations and deliver exceptional customer experiences!
Tom Laird’s 100% USA-based, AI-powered contact center. As the only outsourcing partner on the NICE CXone Customer Executive Council, Expivia is redefining what it means to be a CX tech partner. Learn more at expiviausa.com.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is advice from a call center geek a weekly
podcast with a focus on allthings call center.
We'll cover it all, from callcenter operations, hiring,
culture, technology andeducation.
We're here to give youactionable items to improve the
quality of yours and yourcustomer's experience.
This is an evolving industrywith creative minds and
ambitious people like this guy.
(00:21):
Not only is his passion callcenter operations, but he's our
host.
He's the CEO of ExpediaInteraction Marketing Group and
the call center geek himself,tom Laird.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Welcome back everybody to another episode of
Advice from a Call Center Geek,the Call Center, contact Center
podcast, where we try to giveyou some actionable insights
into your overall operation, tryto give you some actionable
takeaways to make sure that yourcustomer experience just just
improves.
Um, this is a podcast episodethat I've been wanting to do for
a little bit now.
(00:56):
Since we've been starting upauto, it's been, uh, I think,
frustrating for all of us.
That frustrating is not theright, but just I think all of
us are going through AI overload, right?
I mean, I post a ton of stuffon AI.
Everything you see on LinkedInand the CX space is all about AI
.
So every couple episodes I'mtrying to kind of get back to my
(01:17):
roots and talk about thingsthat are.
You know, maybe they're AIrelated, but they're not solely
just talking about you know thedifferent aspects of AI and
large language models andchatbots and all that stuff.
So, as most of you guys know,we have a startup called AutoQA
(01:38):
which, funny, is an AI infusedwith large language models kind
of startup that we've been ableto fully automate contact center
scoring.
I don't say fully take away QA,because there's a huge process
with QA, but the actual scoringof calls.
You know we've been able tofully automate and so I don't
(02:01):
really want to talk about thattoday, as I've spoken about that
a ton, but I want to talk toyou guys about building out the
best QA form.
So, even if you're not ready toautomate your scoring, but you
want to kind of maybe revamp theQA form that you have or take
another look at, is what we'remeasuring?
Is it making sense?
(02:22):
Is what we're measuring?
Is it making sense?
And I have my team and I we'vejust seen so many different.
Well, I've seen so many QAforms, you know, over the years
from different clients for ourBPO here at Xpevia.
But you know, over the last youknow, three months, we've seen
a ton of different forms from aton of different companies, some
(02:42):
really good, some, eh, somethat don't have any, that we've
had to start from scratch.
So I wanted to talk you throughkind of the process that I
think is we've been utilizing todevelop kind of the best form
for most organizations.
Now, qa forms are very kind ofproprietary to each individual
(03:06):
customer, customer segment, whatchannel you're in.
There's a lot of differentthings when it comes to voice
email, chats, help desk tickets,right, qa and all that compared
to maybe just the voice call.
So I think, really, this is forfocusing on voice, focusing
more on chat, right.
These are the kind of the twoprobably main core channels that
(03:27):
we've seen.
I mean, I think that's prettyobvious, but what does it take?
What do you need to do?
What are the sections that youhave?
What should be the actualquestions that you should ask?
And I think that there's a lotthat goes into this.
And again, from looking athundreds and hundreds of QA
forms through the years, andliterally probably another
hundred in the last month or two, this is kind of what the team
(03:51):
and I when, if we have todevelop a new QA form for for a
customer, this is kind of whatwe would recommend.
So if you're kind of lookingagain to to revamp your QA form,
I think this will be a coolepisode for you.
Again, I'm live on X Twitter.
I'm live on LinkedIn If youguys have any questions as we're
going through.
This is kind of breakfast withTom, as I'm recording this at
like 845 or 855 here in themorning on the East Coast Just
(04:14):
had some time, so I thought thiswould be good to kind of talk
through, all right, so let'skind of get into this.
So the first thing is what isthe goal of what you want the
end outcome to be?
And this doesn't have to be asingular goal and, to be honest,
it probably shouldn't be butwhat do you want to focus on?
Do you want to focus on youragent performance?
(04:34):
Do you want to focus oncompliance issues?
Do you want to get insightsfrom your calls?
These are all things that havekind of opened up our mind a lot
to what you can get from a QAform that maybe we don't think
about.
And I think compliance andagent performance kind of go
hand in hand.
But the one thing that I'vereally found to be powerful with
(04:57):
you know, using auto and stillyou could use this with your,
your, you know, kind of humanscoring team is why are we not
asking insights, even if it'swith a human on the form to
start to collect data?
And I get, some of us havethese high-end analytics tools
that supposedly are doing thatfor us.
(05:17):
But still, wouldn't it be coolif, even if you're doing let's
say you do, you have a QA agentthat's doing, say I don't know,
let's just say, 50 forms a week,right, and so again, that's 200
.
And let's say you have a staffof three, right, that's 600
pieces of data segments that youcould be getting insights and
(05:40):
asking questions about what'shappening on calls as well.
So you could almost use yourhumans right as an analytic tool
and once you get to a certainamount, it becomes statistically
valid, right, depending on thetime period and how many of
these you're going to do.
So I want to talk more aboutthat later on, but I think that
that's something that's reallyopened my mind and changed about
(06:02):
what a QA form can be and whatit should be.
And even if it's just a small,you know, kind of throwaway
section that you have at the end, I think can add a ton of value
and we never really think aboutit.
But as we go to actuallylooking at agent behaviors
(06:23):
here's kind of the core sectionsI'm a huge believer that less
is more.
Most when I see huge QA forms,a lot of the questions are kind
of redundant right.
They're asking the same thingin different angles and it can
be kind of confusing, I think,for AI when we're doing it.
It can be confusing with ahuman to kind of really get to
the core, and a lot of timesthis happens because a lot of
(06:46):
people have an insight into theQA form, whether that's
different people in yourorganization or more.
What normally happens is, assomebody takes over QA or takes
as a call center manager, theyadd their two cents to the form
and it's kind of like an IVR,right, you get this kind of this
monstrosity form in.
So I think it is good everyonce in a while, every couple of
(07:07):
years, to kind of like almostrip it down to its core and
start to build the backup.
And when you do that, I thinkthat this is kind of how it
should look, right, we're alwaysgoing to have and again, a lot
of this isn't rocket science, so, but I think that there are
some insights maybe that arelike oh, that makes sense, right
, hopefully that gets you tokind of think that way.
So number one is kind of theopening and the verification.
(07:28):
All right.
So normally that's two to threequestions, and I think your
opening should be basically wasthe?
You know, was the agent readyfor the call?
Right, the customer's notsaying hello, hi, hello, right,
we're not doing that.
Was their tone where you needit to be.
It's not like thank you forcalling XYZ, how can I help you?
(07:49):
My name's Tom, where you needit to be.
It's not like, thank you forcalling XYZ, how can I help you,
my name's Tom, right?
Obviously, we want their tone tobe just I'm not saying we got
to be, you know, gung ho everysingle call, but it's got to be
like this customer does soundimportant to us.
I think that those are reallyimportant, right.
So your tone right at thebeginning, making sure that
they're ready for the call, andthen any type of verification
that you need for that customer,right?
(08:10):
Whether that is you have toverify their name, a member ID,
a date of birth, those kind ofthings.
If you have to read back, ifyou want the information read
back to the customer, all ofthat stuff will kind of play
into two or three questions.
I think is really all you needthere to really kind of get
through verifying the customerand then making sure that we're
(08:32):
starting the call off on aproper tone.
I think that's a reallyimportant thing to score.
And then the next thing thatwe'd normally I think we'd look
at is kind of having anetiquette, a phone etiquette
kind of section, and with theseI kind of have five main
questions that we like to askthat I think cover the vast
(08:54):
majority of you know what, what,what a customer kind of would
want and kind of just thebehavior of the agent.
So number one is you know, didthey show any type of empathy,
right?
Um, is it just a blanket?
I'm really sorry to hear thatright?
Or do they actually take thetime to like, listen to the
customer and and legitimatelyshow empathy again?
(09:16):
I know this is not an aiepisode, but I think that's one
of the main misconceptions orand one of the things we've had
to work on.
The most human beings arereally good when they show
genuine empathy.
They're good at connecting withanother human.
And secondly, the scoring from aqa standpoint it stands right
out right because the qa personcan really tell that empathy.
(09:39):
I struggle right on a lot ofyour qa forms.
We're scoring what the agentsaid, not how they said it, and
I think that's a huge drawbackbecause it's just been kind of
lazy for everybody and it's easy.
So again, we will score and wesee this scored with when we're
(09:59):
calibrating calls and we'relistening to how humans have
scored this.
If an agent does say and I knowyou guys have heard me say this
, but I'm really sorry to hearthat.
Right Gives that fake empathy.
They're just checking the boxand normally under a lot of QA
forms that that's fine.
I think you should go deeperthan that.
You know again that's you guyshave heard me talk about it on
(10:20):
our auto platform.
That's one of the my favoriteprops, right, because we're not
looking for keywords likeanalytics.
We are looking for anywhere inthe transcript where the
customer had a pain point.
They had some type of stresslevel that went up.
They had an issue with aproduct and did the agent
(10:42):
actually say something thateither raised the sentiment of
the interaction, interactionmade the customer laugh, made
the outcome of that small 10second interaction after the
agent talked, did it make thecall a little bit better?
And humans can pick that up,but I think it's really
difficult to do over time.
But that's something that AI ifyou prompt for it, it can do a
(11:06):
really good job with that too.
So empathy and I think, trueempathy are really important.
Call control is another questionthat I would always ask.
That, I think, is veryimportant.
You know the best contactcenter agents are taking you
down a journey right, where youknow the customer always has the
opportunity to kind of go rightor left right, but that agent
(11:29):
knows where that customer needsto be at the end and can control
that, and I think that that's areally important piece.
So, are they showing perfect,showing really good call control
, without kind of beingdemanding of, like you know, and
being assertive, but you know,the really good customer service
agents can do that.
The third is just kind of theblanket, you know.
Did they use proper verbiage,tone, professionalism, and this
(11:52):
is different for everybody,because I think this is a
culture question, right?
So if you're at a bank, youhave to be prim and proper,
right?
Yes, sir, no, sir, um, you knowthose kind of words.
But if you're working for,maybe, a skateboard shop, it's
what's up?
Man like oh dude, listen, right, did, did the, the agent match
the culture of not only theagent but your brand as well?
(12:14):
I think that that's reallyimportant.
The fourth question is did theyactively listen?
I think that this is reallyimportant for contact center
agents and it can be really hard, especially when you're taking
call after call, after callafter call, and maybe it's the
same exact issue that you'veheard like 13 times in a row,
but that customer doesn't knowthat.
So that's a really importantquestion, I think to ask.
(12:38):
Are they actively listening?
Are they kind of not talkingover the customer because
they're kind of getting bored?
Are they just jumping toconclusions?
Did the customer say somethingearlier and the agent just
totally forgot about it?
Right, and that's so annoyingto a customer.
So I think that that's a reallyimportant question.
And then the last thing withetiquette is is right, did they
follow the proper holdprocedures?
(12:59):
Is there?
Did they?
Did they follow your kind ofdead air policies for the most
part on hold procedures, thatit's between one minute and two
minutes, right, with halfwaythrough coming back to the, to
the customer and kind of givingthem a hey, I'm sorry, I'm just
going to be a couple moreminutes.
(13:19):
Is that okay?
That kind of thing.
So it's it's, you know, askingfor proper hold, if they can put
the customer on hold, which Ithink is still a cool, the right
thing to do, making sure thatwe're not, you know, having five
to 10 minutes, and if we dothat we've talked to the
customer a couple of timesthat's going to ruin the call
anyway, but I mean, again,trying to hold it to that minute
to two minutes and fit 30seconds through a minute through
(13:42):
making sure that we're gettingback to the customer and then
also just that there's not a lotof dead air.
Maybe Then also just thatthere's not a lot of dead air.
Maybe that's its own questiontoo.
A lot of times we see them justkind of jammed together, right.
But you know, if the agent isworking on a screen and there's
like that 30 seconds of all youhear is maybe typing or right,
and again that can be difficult.
(14:03):
Really good customer serviceagents are good at it.
The really bad ones make itseem fake, like how's your day
today, sir?
Like how's your day today, sir?
Like right, but still, I thinkthat's still better than than
having a having total dead air,all right.
So we kind of have an opening,we kind of have that etiquette
which is the core of kind of Ithink everybody's QA form, and
then kind of the third sectionis like, what is proprietary to
(14:26):
you, right, is this are thesesales calls or these retention
calls?
Are these tech support callswhere we got to find maybe a
root cause or or some type oftroubleshooting?
Or, you know, maybe it's aninsurance call, where we have to
follow certain SOPs and makesure that we're giving proper
information out right.
So again for for sales callsand this is this will be a
(14:46):
little bit more general becausethere's so much you you could do
here, but I think for the thecore questions, right, looking
for I I'm a huge on the salesaspect there's two things for me
that I think are vitallyimportant.
Number one is that we askproper kind of open-ended
probing questions, right to kindof get to the heart of, maybe,
what this customer wants, butwe're not asking yes or no's.
(15:08):
I think that's important.
And then, you know, some peoplelove this, some people hate this
, but I think for mostcross-sell upsell customers
calling in to you know, sign upfor a subscription, having that
assumptive language, I thinkit's proven.
I mean, I've seen it in everysingle program we've ever done.
(15:29):
The agents who are usingassumptive language in their
sales process right.
They have a much higherconversion percentage.
So you know, it's like acustomer saying yeah, you know.
So how much is this again?
Well, ma'am, this is it's$14.95 a month.
If you'd like to sign up for afamily plan, it's only $56 for
the year.
So you know, let's get yousigned up here.
(15:52):
Do you have any kids?
Or would you like the familyplan or?
Um, you know what?
I did hear that you said thatearlier that you do live alone.
So let's sign you up for this1495 plan.
I have your name as and youkind of go into it, right.
So, and again, people can, wecan argue about that.
I think that that's kind of agood thing, you know, from a
sales aspect.
And the third kind of sales iskind of, you know, did they
(16:15):
rebuttal right using benefits,right no-transcript?
So if there's like a 30-dayfree trial, right, you don't
want to rebuttal off of thatright.
Rebuttaling off of lowcommitment right normally leads
to higher drop-offs.
You know, as we go, you know, acouple months in, so the
(16:38):
customer is going to come backand be like dude, like that's
great, you got these sales, butthey were on our books for two
months, and so I think you knowrebuttaling with the benefits,
making sure that we're talkingpositive about the product, and
then if there's any retentionright for a cancel call right.
I think you know that kind ofplays into that as well.
Did they actually try to retainthe customer?
Did they try to sell it offbenefits, blah, blah, blah.
(17:01):
So all those things from asales aspect that are important
to you, I think can go in there.
If this is more of a techsupport, were you able to show
understanding of the issue?
Were you able to verbalize theproblem?
Were you able to give a quicksummary back to the customer so
that they can say Because a lotof times and I've learned this
(17:21):
in tech support the customerdoesn't really understand what's
happening and doesn't havemaybe the lingo to read to, to
understand it.
So it's up to the customerservice agent then to kind of
speak through what those thoseissues could be and then get a
kind of a verbalization I thinkthat's worse um to the customer
that yes, this is kind of thisis what's going on, and then you
(17:45):
know, did they give relevanttroubleshoot, like all those
kind of things fortroubleshooting?
And then again, for maybe, ifyou're an insurance company and
you have certain you know SOPsright, are you giving the proper
information Right?
I think that that's a reallyimportant, obviously really
important questions for foranything, but you're looking
more at those types of thingsDid you transfer when you were
supposed to?
Did you give the properinformation for this situation.
(18:07):
You know, those are kind of theproprietary things to your
business that I think need to bepart of kind of that third
section.
And then the fourth is theclosing right, and there can be
a couple things in the closingNumber one.
A lot of times we see customersthat are they want to make sure
(18:28):
that the agent did not transferinappropriately to another
department, so we may have thatin the closing.
I think offering additionalassistance is a cool, just a
cool, nice thing to do at theend.
Is there anything else that Ican help you with instead of
just ending the call?
I think that you know again,for those of you who don't like
longer handle times, you mightnot like that, but I think you
(18:50):
know overall that that's that'sthe best way to kind of end the
call and then you're having aproper closing.
You know, whatever that is foryou guys, if it's a branded
closing or if it's just hey,thank you, I'd like to speak to
you again.
Whatever that is, I think Ithink that's important.
I think that's important.
Your openings and your closingsare really important from a
(19:11):
branding standpoint, to makesure that it's almost like
you're going to get the samekind of experience every time
and I think those are prettyimportant things to make sure
that you're scripted to acertain extent with your agents.
And then here's the last thing.
(19:31):
So normally that's kind ofwhere we would end, right, I
think that having an analyticssection, a small section of
maybe three or four questionsright, did the customer cancel,
you know?
Was it too expensive?
You know, if you, if you have aretention line, if there is,
you know, maybe a marketingwants to get in, like, did they
say anything about the productdesign?
(19:51):
Did they say anything about a,you know, an advertisement we
had on Facebook?
Like whatever, like asking allthese things that we normally
ask agents through a dispositionor we just go talk to them
about in a in a focus group.
Start to ask those questionsright.
Analytics is really good at it.
Auto QA is amazing at it.
(20:11):
You're human being.
People can do that as well whenthey hear things right To just
yes or no, some certain thingsthat you can start to really
correlate questions.
I get the question a lot on, youknow, waiting questions and
waiting sections, and I kind ofgo back and forth on it.
(20:33):
I think overall you are fine ifyou are on a five point scale.
I don't think you have to makeit complicated, right.
Everybody wants to make it morecomplicated than I think it is.
You know, one out of a zero orfive it's a yes or no, it's a
binary question and you canreally benchmark, I think, a lot
better that way when you startto weigh sections and you weigh
(20:55):
questions as more important andagain there's some really good
use cases for that, especially,I think, in financial services,
from disclosures and those kindsof things.
I think that that's important.
But I think you can getconfused when you see different
scores based on differentsections of weighting, those
kinds of things.
I think that that's important,but I think you can, you can get
confused, you know, when yousee different scores based on
different sections of waiting.
So again I'm, I'm just a bigzero out of five, you know whole
(21:18):
way through kind of thing.
I think that you know that thatgives you kind of the easiest
way.
Now I would, instead of waiting,weighing calls and weighing
sections, I would prefer you todo auto fails.
So again, if a specificdisclosure wasn't read, and that
again that would be kind of inyour third sales kind of area
(21:44):
and they get a zero for the call, or that section then gets a
full zero, which then makes themthe highest they can get is a
50, which still is an auto fail,whatever that is.
I would prefer you prefer to dothat than to just kind of go
through and weigh every singlesection.
But auto fails, I think, areimportant, and the other thing
(22:04):
that auto fails do is they popup your QA and your supervisor
right away.
To that.
There was something thathappened on this call that
wasn't good.
Right, it's not just that theygot a 78 on it, but it was a 30.
Right, and I think, again, moreimportantly than that, it just
kind of raises the eyebrowsreally fast so that we can go
correct issues a little bitquicker.
So, yeah, that's kind of mytake, guys.
(22:26):
Again, I don't know if that'sreal rocket science.
I know I've done this before.
There's a couple other podcaststhat I have out there that were
done a couple years ago on kindof creating forms.
And you know, again, I wouldlove to have everybody use an
auto QA or use our auto QA, butyou don't have to, right,
(22:48):
there's there's no reason thatyou can't set up a form that I
just talked about on Excel, on aGoogle sheet or even a Google
form and ask questions as youkind of go through that form.
It doesn't have to be crazyAgain, there's better ways,
right, Especially in 2024.
But if you're a smaller contactcenter you're 10 seats, you're
20 seats maybe you don't haveanything set up.
You could do this today, right,and kind of set up what you
(23:10):
think is important and thenstart tweaking from there, and
it also gives you then a way totrain and educate agents right,
because now you're having themdo specific things.
When you don't have that, Ithink it can be very hard and
agents can go off the rails alittle bit.
Maybe that's good for certaininstances.
But I think, overall, from acall control standpoint, from a
(23:32):
call flow standpoint you know,again, call flow is kind of
another question that you couldask that kind of goes with call
control.
But those are kind of the, Iguess, the core things that we
have seen to have a really solidQA form right for your agents
that is not overbearing, that'snot going to frustrate them,
that's not going to have your QAteam take forever to kind of
(23:54):
score.
It gets to the point ofcompliance, it gets to the point
of agent performance and then,I think, start to think through
about kind of how you can getinsights from your QA team as
well.
I think that that's a reallyimportant piece that we don't
really think about.
So, again, if there's noquestions, I know this was early
on LinkedIn.
It's kind of breakfast with Tomhere at whatever 9.15.
(24:17):
Now this is a 25-minute episode.
So if there's no otherquestions, guys, I hope that
this gives you some value.
If there's any of you that haveany questions on QA, we'd love
to talk to you about a totallyfree, no cost whatsoever setup
for our AutoQA platform.
We set up your forms, we set upyour full QA stack.
Give you a full proof ofconcept for absolutely no cost.
(24:40):
Check us out at autoqacom ifthat's something you're
interested in.
Also, as you guys know, we haveExpedia.
We're a five 600 seatoutsourcer here in the States
too, that we'd love to talk toyou, talk to some of you guys
about as well.
But if there's no otherquestions, thanks, guys.
I hope this adds some value andI'll talk to you next week.
This is advice from a call center geek a weekly
podcast with a focus on allthings call center.
We'll cover it all, from callcenter operations, hiring,
culture, technology andeducation.
We're here to give youactionable items to improve the
quality of yours and yourcustomer's experience.
This is an evolving industrywith creative minds and
ambitious people like this guy.
(00:21):
Not only is his passion callcenter operations, but he's our
host.
He's the CEO of ExpediaInteraction Marketing Group and
the call center geek himself,tom Laird.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Welcome back everybody to another episode of
Advice from a Call Center Geek,the Call Center, contact Center
podcast, where we try to giveyou some actionable insights
into your overall operation, tryto give you some actionable
takeaways to make sure that yourcustomer experience just just
improves.
Um, this is a podcast episodethat I've been wanting to do for
a little bit now.
(00:56):
Since we've been starting upauto, it's been, uh, I think,
frustrating for all of us.
That frustrating is not theright, but just I think all of
us are going through AI overload, right?
I mean, I post a ton of stuffon AI.
Everything you see on LinkedInand the CX space is all about AI
.
So every couple episodes I'mtrying to kind of get back to my
(01:17):
roots and talk about thingsthat are.
You know, maybe they're AIrelated, but they're not solely
just talking about you know thedifferent aspects of AI and
large language models andchatbots and all that stuff.
So, as most of you guys know,we have a startup called AutoQA
(01:38):
which, funny, is an AI infusedwith large language models kind
of startup that we've been ableto fully automate contact center
scoring.
I don't say fully take away QA,because there's a huge process
with QA, but the actual scoringof calls.
You know we've been able tofully automate and so I don't
(02:01):
really want to talk about thattoday, as I've spoken about that
a ton, but I want to talk toyou guys about building out the
best QA form.
So, even if you're not ready toautomate your scoring, but you
want to kind of maybe revamp theQA form that you have or take
another look at, is what we'remeasuring?
Is it making sense?
(02:22):
Is what we're measuring?
Is it making sense?
And I have my team and I we'vejust seen so many different.
Well, I've seen so many QAforms, you know, over the years
from different clients for ourBPO here at Xpevia.
But you know, over the last youknow, three months, we've seen
a ton of different forms from aton of different companies, some
(02:42):
really good, some, eh, somethat don't have any, that we've
had to start from scratch.
So I wanted to talk you throughkind of the process that I
think is we've been utilizing todevelop kind of the best form
for most organizations.
Now, qa forms are very kind ofproprietary to each individual
(03:06):
customer, customer segment, whatchannel you're in.
There's a lot of differentthings when it comes to voice
email, chats, help desk tickets,right, qa and all that compared
to maybe just the voice call.
So I think, really, this is forfocusing on voice, focusing
more on chat, right.
These are the kind of the twoprobably main core channels that
(03:27):
we've seen.
I mean, I think that's prettyobvious, but what does it take?
What do you need to do?
What are the sections that youhave?
What should be the actualquestions that you should ask?
And I think that there's a lotthat goes into this.
And again, from looking athundreds and hundreds of QA
forms through the years, andliterally probably another
hundred in the last month or two, this is kind of what the team
(03:51):
and I when, if we have todevelop a new QA form for for a
customer, this is kind of whatwe would recommend.
So if you're kind of lookingagain to to revamp your QA form,
I think this will be a coolepisode for you.
Again, I'm live on X Twitter.
I'm live on LinkedIn If youguys have any questions as we're
going through.
This is kind of breakfast withTom, as I'm recording this at
like 845 or 855 here in themorning on the East Coast Just
(04:14):
had some time, so I thought thiswould be good to kind of talk
through, all right, so let'skind of get into this.
So the first thing is what isthe goal of what you want the
end outcome to be?
And this doesn't have to be asingular goal and, to be honest,
it probably shouldn't be butwhat do you want to focus on?
Do you want to focus on youragent performance?
(04:34):
Do you want to focus oncompliance issues?
Do you want to get insightsfrom your calls?
These are all things that havekind of opened up our mind a lot
to what you can get from a QAform that maybe we don't think
about.
And I think compliance andagent performance kind of go
hand in hand.
But the one thing that I'vereally found to be powerful with
(04:57):
you know, using auto and stillyou could use this with your,
your, you know, kind of humanscoring team is why are we not
asking insights, even if it'swith a human on the form to
start to collect data?
And I get, some of us havethese high-end analytics tools
that supposedly are doing thatfor us.
(05:17):
But still, wouldn't it be coolif, even if you're doing let's
say you do, you have a QA agentthat's doing, say I don't know,
let's just say, 50 forms a week,right, and so again, that's 200
.
And let's say you have a staffof three, right, that's 600
pieces of data segments that youcould be getting insights and
(05:40):
asking questions about what'shappening on calls as well.
So you could almost use yourhumans right as an analytic tool
and once you get to a certainamount, it becomes statistically
valid, right, depending on thetime period and how many of
these you're going to do.
So I want to talk more aboutthat later on, but I think that
that's something that's reallyopened my mind and changed about
(06:02):
what a QA form can be and whatit should be.
And even if it's just a small,you know, kind of throwaway
section that you have at the end, I think can add a ton of value
and we never really think aboutit.
But as we go to actuallylooking at agent behaviors
(06:23):
here's kind of the core sectionsI'm a huge believer that less
is more.
Most when I see huge QA forms,a lot of the questions are kind
of redundant right.
They're asking the same thingin different angles and it can
be kind of confusing, I think,for AI when we're doing it.
It can be confusing with ahuman to kind of really get to
the core, and a lot of timesthis happens because a lot of
(06:46):
people have an insight into theQA form, whether that's
different people in yourorganization or more.
What normally happens is, assomebody takes over QA or takes
as a call center manager, theyadd their two cents to the form
and it's kind of like an IVR,right, you get this kind of this
monstrosity form in.
So I think it is good everyonce in a while, every couple of
(07:07):
years, to kind of like almostrip it down to its core and
start to build the backup.
And when you do that, I thinkthat this is kind of how it
should look, right, we're alwaysgoing to have and again, a lot
of this isn't rocket science, so, but I think that there are
some insights maybe that arelike oh, that makes sense, right
, hopefully that gets you tokind of think that way.
So number one is kind of theopening and the verification.
(07:28):
All right.
So normally that's two to threequestions, and I think your
opening should be basically wasthe?
You know, was the agent readyfor the call?
Right, the customer's notsaying hello, hi, hello, right,
we're not doing that.
Was their tone where you needit to be.
It's not like thank you forcalling XYZ, how can I help you?
(07:49):
My name's Tom, where you needit to be.
It's not like, thank you forcalling XYZ, how can I help you,
my name's Tom, right?
Obviously, we want their tone tobe just I'm not saying we got
to be, you know, gung ho everysingle call, but it's got to be
like this customer does soundimportant to us.
I think that those are reallyimportant, right.
So your tone right at thebeginning, making sure that
they're ready for the call, andthen any type of verification
that you need for that customer,right?
(08:10):
Whether that is you have toverify their name, a member ID,
a date of birth, those kind ofthings.
If you have to read back, ifyou want the information read
back to the customer, all ofthat stuff will kind of play
into two or three questions.
I think is really all you needthere to really kind of get
through verifying the customerand then making sure that we're
(08:32):
starting the call off on aproper tone.
I think that's a reallyimportant thing to score.
And then the next thing thatwe'd normally I think we'd look
at is kind of having anetiquette, a phone etiquette
kind of section, and with theseI kind of have five main
questions that we like to askthat I think cover the vast
(08:54):
majority of you know what, what,what a customer kind of would
want and kind of just thebehavior of the agent.
So number one is you know, didthey show any type of empathy,
right?
Um, is it just a blanket?
I'm really sorry to hear thatright?
Or do they actually take thetime to like, listen to the
customer and and legitimatelyshow empathy again?
(09:16):
I know this is not an aiepisode, but I think that's one
of the main misconceptions orand one of the things we've had
to work on.
The most human beings arereally good when they show
genuine empathy.
They're good at connecting withanother human.
And secondly, the scoring from aqa standpoint it stands right
out right because the qa personcan really tell that empathy.
(09:39):
I struggle right on a lot ofyour qa forms.
We're scoring what the agentsaid, not how they said it, and
I think that's a huge drawbackbecause it's just been kind of
lazy for everybody and it's easy.
So again, we will score and wesee this scored with when we're
(09:59):
calibrating calls and we'relistening to how humans have
scored this.
If an agent does say and I knowyou guys have heard me say this
, but I'm really sorry to hearthat.
Right Gives that fake empathy.
They're just checking the boxand normally under a lot of QA
forms that that's fine.
I think you should go deeperthan that.
You know again that's you guyshave heard me talk about it on
(10:20):
our auto platform.
That's one of the my favoriteprops, right, because we're not
looking for keywords likeanalytics.
We are looking for anywhere inthe transcript where the
customer had a pain point.
They had some type of stresslevel that went up.
They had an issue with aproduct and did the agent
(10:42):
actually say something thateither raised the sentiment of
the interaction, interactionmade the customer laugh, made
the outcome of that small 10second interaction after the
agent talked, did it make thecall a little bit better?
And humans can pick that up,but I think it's really
difficult to do over time.
But that's something that AI ifyou prompt for it, it can do a
(11:06):
really good job with that too.
So empathy and I think, trueempathy are really important.
Call control is another questionthat I would always ask.
That, I think, is veryimportant.
You know the best contactcenter agents are taking you
down a journey right, where youknow the customer always has the
opportunity to kind of go rightor left right, but that agent
(11:29):
knows where that customer needsto be at the end and can control
that, and I think that that's areally important piece.
So, are they showing perfect,showing really good call control
, without kind of beingdemanding of, like you know, and
being assertive, but you know,the really good customer service
agents can do that.
The third is just kind of theblanket, you know.
Did they use proper verbiage,tone, professionalism, and this
(11:52):
is different for everybody,because I think this is a
culture question, right?
So if you're at a bank, youhave to be prim and proper,
right?
Yes, sir, no, sir, um, you knowthose kind of words.
But if you're working for,maybe, a skateboard shop, it's
what's up?
Man like oh dude, listen, right, did, did the, the agent match
the culture of not only theagent but your brand as well?
(12:14):
I think that that's reallyimportant.
The fourth question is did theyactively listen?
I think that this is reallyimportant for contact center
agents and it can be really hard, especially when you're taking
call after call, after callafter call, and maybe it's the
same exact issue that you'veheard like 13 times in a row,
but that customer doesn't knowthat.
So that's a really importantquestion, I think to ask.
(12:38):
Are they actively listening?
Are they kind of not talkingover the customer because
they're kind of getting bored?
Are they just jumping toconclusions?
Did the customer say somethingearlier and the agent just
totally forgot about it?
Right, and that's so annoyingto a customer.
So I think that that's a reallyimportant question.
And then the last thing withetiquette is is right, did they
follow the proper holdprocedures?
(12:59):
Is there?
Did they?
Did they follow your kind ofdead air policies for the most
part on hold procedures, thatit's between one minute and two
minutes, right, with halfwaythrough coming back to the, to
the customer and kind of givingthem a hey, I'm sorry, I'm just
going to be a couple moreminutes.
(13:19):
Is that okay?
That kind of thing.
So it's it's, you know, askingfor proper hold, if they can put
the customer on hold, which Ithink is still a cool, the right
thing to do, making sure thatwe're not, you know, having five
to 10 minutes, and if we dothat we've talked to the
customer a couple of timesthat's going to ruin the call
anyway, but I mean, again,trying to hold it to that minute
to two minutes and fit 30seconds through a minute through
(13:42):
making sure that we're gettingback to the customer and then
also just that there's not a lotof dead air.
Maybe Then also just thatthere's not a lot of dead air.
Maybe that's its own questiontoo.
A lot of times we see them justkind of jammed together, right.
But you know, if the agent isworking on a screen and there's
like that 30 seconds of all youhear is maybe typing or right,
and again that can be difficult.
(14:03):
Really good customer serviceagents are good at it.
The really bad ones make itseem fake, like how's your day
today, sir?
Like how's your day today, sir?
Like right, but still, I thinkthat's still better than than
having a having total dead air,all right.
So we kind of have an opening,we kind of have that etiquette
which is the core of kind of Ithink everybody's QA form, and
then kind of the third sectionis like, what is proprietary to
(14:26):
you, right, is this are thesesales calls or these retention
calls?
Are these tech support callswhere we got to find maybe a
root cause or or some type oftroubleshooting?
Or, you know, maybe it's aninsurance call, where we have to
follow certain SOPs and makesure that we're giving proper
information out right.
So again for for sales callsand this is this will be a
(14:46):
little bit more general becausethere's so much you you could do
here, but I think for the thecore questions, right, looking
for I I'm a huge on the salesaspect there's two things for me
that I think are vitallyimportant.
Number one is that we askproper kind of open-ended
probing questions, right to kindof get to the heart of, maybe,
what this customer wants, butwe're not asking yes or no's.
(15:08):
I think that's important.
And then, you know, some peoplelove this, some people hate this
, but I think for mostcross-sell upsell customers
calling in to you know, sign upfor a subscription, having that
assumptive language, I thinkit's proven.
I mean, I've seen it in everysingle program we've ever done.
(15:29):
The agents who are usingassumptive language in their
sales process right.
They have a much higherconversion percentage.
So you know, it's like acustomer saying yeah, you know.
So how much is this again?
Well, ma'am, this is it's$14.95 a month.
If you'd like to sign up for afamily plan, it's only $56 for
the year.
So you know, let's get yousigned up here.
(15:52):
Do you have any kids?
Or would you like the familyplan or?
Um, you know what?
I did hear that you said thatearlier that you do live alone.
So let's sign you up for this1495 plan.
I have your name as and youkind of go into it, right.
So, and again, people can, wecan argue about that.
I think that that's kind of agood thing, you know, from a
sales aspect.
And the third kind of sales iskind of, you know, did they
(16:15):
rebuttal right using benefits,right no-transcript?
So if there's like a 30-dayfree trial, right, you don't
want to rebuttal off of thatright.
Rebuttaling off of lowcommitment right normally leads
to higher drop-offs.
You know, as we go, you know, acouple months in, so the
(16:38):
customer is going to come backand be like dude, like that's
great, you got these sales, butthey were on our books for two
months, and so I think you knowrebuttaling with the benefits,
making sure that we're talkingpositive about the product, and
then if there's any retentionright for a cancel call right.
I think you know that kind ofplays into that as well.
Did they actually try to retainthe customer?
Did they try to sell it offbenefits, blah, blah, blah.
(17:01):
So all those things from asales aspect that are important
to you, I think can go in there.
If this is more of a techsupport, were you able to show
understanding of the issue?
Were you able to verbalize theproblem?
Were you able to give a quicksummary back to the customer so
that they can say Because a lotof times and I've learned this
(17:21):
in tech support the customerdoesn't really understand what's
happening and doesn't havemaybe the lingo to read to, to
understand it.
So it's up to the customerservice agent then to kind of
speak through what those thoseissues could be and then get a
kind of a verbalization I thinkthat's worse um to the customer
that yes, this is kind of thisis what's going on, and then you
(17:45):
know, did they give relevanttroubleshoot, like all those
kind of things fortroubleshooting?
And then again, for maybe, ifyou're an insurance company and
you have certain you know SOPsright, are you giving the proper
information Right?
I think that that's a reallyimportant, obviously really
important questions for foranything, but you're looking
more at those types of thingsDid you transfer when you were
supposed to?
Did you give the properinformation for this situation.
(18:07):
You know, those are kind of theproprietary things to your
business that I think need to bepart of kind of that third
section.
And then the fourth is theclosing right, and there can be
a couple things in the closingNumber one.
A lot of times we see customersthat are they want to make sure
(18:28):
that the agent did not transferinappropriately to another
department, so we may have thatin the closing.
I think offering additionalassistance is a cool, just a
cool, nice thing to do at theend.
Is there anything else that Ican help you with instead of
just ending the call?
I think that you know again,for those of you who don't like
longer handle times, you mightnot like that, but I think you
(18:50):
know overall that that's that'sthe best way to kind of end the
call and then you're having aproper closing.
You know, whatever that is foryou guys, if it's a branded
closing or if it's just hey,thank you, I'd like to speak to
you again.
Whatever that is, I think Ithink that's important.
I think that's important.
Your openings and your closingsare really important from a
(19:11):
branding standpoint, to makesure that it's almost like
you're going to get the samekind of experience every time
and I think those are prettyimportant things to make sure
that you're scripted to acertain extent with your agents.
And then here's the last thing.
(19:31):
So normally that's kind ofwhere we would end, right, I
think that having an analyticssection, a small section of
maybe three or four questionsright, did the customer cancel,
you know?
Was it too expensive?
You know, if you, if you have aretention line, if there is,
you know, maybe a marketingwants to get in, like, did they
say anything about the productdesign?
(19:51):
Did they say anything about a,you know, an advertisement we
had on Facebook?
Like whatever, like asking allthese things that we normally
ask agents through a dispositionor we just go talk to them
about in a in a focus group.
Start to ask those questionsright.
Analytics is really good at it.
Auto QA is amazing at it.
(20:11):
You're human being.
People can do that as well whenthey hear things right To just
yes or no, some certain thingsthat you can start to really
correlate questions.
I get the question a lot on, youknow, waiting questions and
waiting sections, and I kind ofgo back and forth on it.
(20:33):
I think overall you are fine ifyou are on a five point scale.
I don't think you have to makeit complicated, right.
Everybody wants to make it morecomplicated than I think it is.
You know, one out of a zero orfive it's a yes or no, it's a
binary question and you canreally benchmark, I think, a lot
better that way when you startto weigh sections and you weigh
(20:55):
questions as more important andagain there's some really good
use cases for that, especially,I think, in financial services,
from disclosures and those kindsof things.
I think that that's important.
But I think you can getconfused when you see different
scores based on differentsections of weighting, those
kinds of things.
I think that that's important,but I think you can, you can get
confused, you know, when yousee different scores based on
different sections of waiting.
So again I'm, I'm just a bigzero out of five, you know whole
(21:18):
way through kind of thing.
I think that you know that thatgives you kind of the easiest
way.
Now I would, instead of waiting,weighing calls and weighing
sections, I would prefer you todo auto fails.
So again, if a specificdisclosure wasn't read, and that
again that would be kind of inyour third sales kind of area
(21:44):
and they get a zero for the call, or that section then gets a
full zero, which then makes themthe highest they can get is a
50, which still is an auto fail,whatever that is.
I would prefer you prefer to dothat than to just kind of go
through and weigh every singlesection.
But auto fails, I think, areimportant, and the other thing
(22:04):
that auto fails do is they popup your QA and your supervisor
right away.
To that.
There was something thathappened on this call that
wasn't good.
Right, it's not just that theygot a 78 on it, but it was a 30.
Right, and I think, again, moreimportantly than that, it just
kind of raises the eyebrowsreally fast so that we can go
correct issues a little bitquicker.
So, yeah, that's kind of mytake, guys.
(22:26):
Again, I don't know if that'sreal rocket science.
I know I've done this before.
There's a couple other podcaststhat I have out there that were
done a couple years ago on kindof creating forms.
And you know, again, I wouldlove to have everybody use an
auto QA or use our auto QA, butyou don't have to, right,
(22:48):
there's there's no reason thatyou can't set up a form that I
just talked about on Excel, on aGoogle sheet or even a Google
form and ask questions as youkind of go through that form.
It doesn't have to be crazyAgain, there's better ways,
right, Especially in 2024.
But if you're a smaller contactcenter you're 10 seats, you're
20 seats maybe you don't haveanything set up.
You could do this today, right,and kind of set up what you
(23:10):
think is important and thenstart tweaking from there, and
it also gives you then a way totrain and educate agents right,
because now you're having themdo specific things.
When you don't have that, Ithink it can be very hard and
agents can go off the rails alittle bit.
Maybe that's good for certaininstances.
But I think, overall, from acall control standpoint, from a
(23:32):
call flow standpoint you know,again, call flow is kind of
another question that you couldask that kind of goes with call
control.
But those are kind of the, Iguess, the core things that we
have seen to have a really solidQA form right for your agents
that is not overbearing, that'snot going to frustrate them,
that's not going to have your QAteam take forever to kind of
(23:54):
score.
It gets to the point ofcompliance, it gets to the point
of agent performance and then,I think, start to think through
about kind of how you can getinsights from your QA team as
well.
I think that that's a reallyimportant piece that we don't
really think about.
So, again, if there's noquestions, I know this was early
on LinkedIn.
It's kind of breakfast with Tomhere at whatever 9.15.
(24:17):
Now this is a 25-minute episode.
So if there's no otherquestions, guys, I hope that
this gives you some value.
If there's any of you that haveany questions on QA, we'd love
to talk to you about a totallyfree, no cost whatsoever setup
for our AutoQA platform.
We set up your forms, we set upyour full QA stack.
Give you a full proof ofconcept for absolutely no cost.
(24:40):
Check us out at autoqacom ifthat's something you're
interested in.
Also, as you guys know, we haveExpedia.
We're a five 600 seatoutsourcer here in the States
too, that we'd love to talk toyou, talk to some of you guys
about as well.
But if there's no otherquestions, thanks, guys.
I hope this adds some value andI'll talk to you next week.
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