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Involving Agents in Quality Assurance

Agents are one of the possible sources of human feedback for customer conversations. The advantage of agents is they collectively handle 100% of conversations so if any issue arises. For this single reason encouraging agents to provide meaningful feedback helps improve operations.

Salted CX distinguishes these sources of human feedback:

  • Agents. Any feedback agents provide for their engagements. Although there is a strong incentive for agents to provide feedback strongly biased in their favor there are great ways to extract value as agents handle 100% of conversations that are not self-service only.
  • Customers. Customers provide feedback roughly for 10% to 20% of conversations. This sample is large enough to provide statistically significant feedback. Customer feedback is also essential to make sure your quality process is aligned with the customer's perception. Ideally, there should be a correlation between scores from agents, reviewers, and customers.
  • Team Leaders, Supervisors, and QA people. Other people in your contact center provide feedback that makes sure the agents maintain a certain level of quality and the processes and tools well support the agents to achieve their performance. In most environments, contact centers can provide these reviews for around 1% of conversations.

You can use the attribute Review ⏵ Review Type in reporting to distinguish between the source of the review.

Why Involve Agents​

Involving agents in your quality assurance process provides an additional source of human perspective and may help uncover or quantify more issues and opportunities.

The reasons to involve agents:

  • You align agents with the quality metrics you watch. When agents see their results and can respond to them they are reminded what quality metrics are watched, what behavior is encouraged, and what behavior is discouraged.
  • Human coverage for a high percentage of conversations. As agents handle 100% of conversations that are not self-service they are in the best position to capture anything worth noting. That is not the case for manual reviews with around 1% coverage or customer reviews with 10% to 20% coverage. Agents can raise issues they experience via a standardized tool and process.
  • A feedback loop that encourages fairness. AI-powered auto reviews and even manual reviews are not always accurate. The ability of agents to acknowledge or dispute them provides a feedback loop to both improve the AI and provide a validation feedback loop to reviewers.

There are also good reasons why not to involve agents in the quality assurance process, minimize the time they spend doing it, or pause the process in some cases.

Reasons not to involve agents in the quality process:

  • Agents spend time when involved in the quality process. Every second that the agent does not spend handling the customers does not directly contribute to performance. You may want to use only agent time when you have an extra capacity relative to the number of conversations.
  • Your quality assurance process is in an early phase. Make sure you have a well-defined what exactly you want from agents and be very specific about what you want from them before asking them to do additional work.
note

When asking agents to perform additional tasks and activities always make sure their performance is not negatively impacted. Test any changes on the subset of agents (one team) and compare their key performance metrics such as customer satisfaction, number of handled engagements, engagement time, etc. with their performance before introducing the changes.

How Agents Can Be Involved​

You have several options on how to involve agents in quality assurance. You need to manage the balance between agents’ depth of involvement and thus the time they spend with it with the value you extract by involving agents in the process.

Acknowledge and Dispute Reviews​

You can ask agents to acknowledge or dispute reviews on their engagements.

Acknowledging reviews by agents helps you:

  • Make sure that agents have a good understanding of expectations and they gradually build a better understanding of what you and your customers require from them.
  • Ensure that agents are aware of any feedback they receive in case you.

Comment on Customer Perspective​

You can ask agents to guess how would the customer rate them. For engagements that also have the customer score, you can then report on differences between the agent estimate and the actual customer score. Looking at these differences can help you find multiple potential issues such as agent empathy with the customers, different customer expectations from your agents’ or company expectations, etc.

The advantage of letting agents estimate customer satisfaction is that you will get an estimate of customer satisfaction for cases in which the customer has not responded to the survey. This helps you to increase the coverage. To ensure this estimate is accurate you have to ensure that the agents are aligned with the customer's perspective on the engagements that have an actual customer review.

Let Agents Mark Issues Out of their Control​

Many factors are out of agents’ control while still influencing customer satisfaction and agent performance. Agents have an incentive to identify those as resolving them can make their lives easier and have a positive influence on their overall performance.

Examples of issues you can ask agents to mark:

  • Issues with the business process or policy. Agents feel that their processes (including scripts)or policies hurt their performance or prevent them from resolving customer issues.
  • Issues with agent tools. Agents feel their agent desktop, other applications, and tools may prevent agents from resolving customer requests or slowing them down. Marking such cases may help to quantify these issues and help with their prioritization.
  • Issues with customers. While your goal is to serve your customers there might be cases when the customer behavior is not acceptable and you want to protect your business and agents from abuse. Agents can mark these instances so these issues are addressed later.

Let Agents Mark Issues In their Control​

It may sound counter-intuitive to ask agents to let their management know that they have done something wrong. With a proper incentive structure for that behavior, it is possible though.

Examples of issues you can ask agents to mark:

  • “I did not know what to do.” — Helpful for coaching or improving training materials.
  • “I did not understand what the customer wanted.” — Helpful for having a closer look at what customers want and an opportunity to reach back to the customer.
  • “I made a mistake.” — You encourage agents to be honest about cases when they feel they have not done a great job. One incentive that you can use is to guarantee that self-reported issues will not be held against them. For example, conversations that have a self-reported problem will not be included in quality scores.