Best-in-class companies track quality assurance and customer satisfaction (CSAT). Both are fundamental building blocks of a call center. And both are essential to ensure high-quality experiences for customers and clients. Knowing which score needs improvement and when to make changes is critical to increasing customer loyalty. But how do you know which one needs to be improved? You must first understand what each term means and how they are different.

CSAT is short for customer satisfaction score. CSAT scores indicate how happy a consumer is with your overall customer experience. This is measured through direct customer feedback, usually in the form of a survey, often via a popup form, email, or SMS. However, because customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) indicate a customer‘s overall satisfaction with your company, they don’t always reflect the quality of service. It can refer to any one aspect of the customer experience.

One of Insite’s top consultants at Insite built contact centers from scratch and managed multiple sites for many years. She shared her insider advice to ensure a high CSAT score:

• Learning the skill of giving bad news will make you a successful agent with a high CSAT score.
• It’s all about doing what you assured the customer you were going to do.
• It’s about how you treat people. Empathy is important.
• Remember that a net promoter score (NPS) reflects on the company as a whole and is not a gauge of an individual agent’s quality of service.

Quality Assurance (QA) scores, displayed on a Quality Assurance form, are the best way to measure the actual quality of a call center agent’s performance. This review process ensures that agent interactions align with brand standards, internal procedures and rules, and more. With a large pool of customer interaction data, businesses can identify trends and pinpoint where to make precise improvements at individual and team levels. A QA form is vital for businesses that have gone beyond just measuring “customer service” to caring about the entire “customer experience.”

Whereas a CSAT score will let the customer express how they felt during the call, a Quality Assurance score relies on internal calibration and grading agents on their performance. Our consultant shared her knowledge on keeping Quality Management scores high:

1. Make sure all guidelines and processes are followed.
2. Find out what is important to the customer, especially when passing the baton from one agent to the next.
3. Customers already know what they want, so document what the customer needs.
4. Complete tasks and follow up promptly.
5. Create Value!

For CSAT and QA scores that are both high, the right tone of voice and empathetically acknowledging the customer’s problem are equally as important. The goal is to have the QA scores and CSAT scores closely correlate. Both scores should be at or above goal. Customer Satisfaction provides insight into the “VOICE” of the customer. CSAT provides you with valuable information that indicates the customer’s requirements. We often see feedback that the customer’s issue is not resolved or that they felt the agent did not care.

Interacting with the contact center allows us to realize what the customer requires. They need their issue resolved, and they desire to be treated as a person, not a transaction. A Quality Assurance form looks at the correct behaviors and actions to create a correlation between your CSAT Scores and your QA Scores. Then you can identify which attributes correlate with one another and strengthen the correlation.

Ensuring your QA form is aligned to the customer experience will provide the closest possible correlation between your Quality scores and your CSAT scores. Making sure your Quality Program correlates to the customer experience is the foundation for building and developing a solid quality program within your contact center.

What can Insite Consultants do for your contact center? Read more on our consulting services and how our consultants can transform your operations.

Have additional questions or need help with your Quality Assurance Form? Our team can help. As your contact center improvement partner, we implement solutions with you. We’ve been improving call centers since 2007 using a host of proprietary and customizable products and services.  Most engagements feature our 3x ROI guarantee*, which self-funds your partnership with us and makes the decision a no-brainer. Contact us for a complimentary outside perspective of your current situation.

*Insite provides a risk-free approach by guaranteeing either increased revenue and/or reduced operational cost equal to or greater than our fee. If not, you get a full refund. Complete confidence in our proprietary process and data analysis, in combination with our quick hits, long-term initiatives, and rapid results allows us to offer this money-back guarantee. Since our inception in 2007, we have never failed to self-fund all engagements. Certain products and services are excluded. Conditions apply. Contact us for details.