UNLOCKING EXCELLENCE
You’ve heard the saying “quality over quantity”, but how do you put that into practice in the business world, where many KPIs are numbers-based?
Let’s look at how we ensure our teams are consistently excellent.
UNLOCKING EXCELLENCE
why Quality Control matters
Our RIFF engagement specialists reply to thousands of messages, calls, and emails on behalf of our clients every day.
In this fast-paced world, where every customer wants their questions answered right away, it can be easy to get caught up in the quantifiable metrics like number of cases handled per hour, the average response time, or how long it generally takes to resolve a case start to finish.
However, it’s just as important to look at the content of those responses. In the early days of social media customer care, speed was the key performance metric. In 2022, 77% of consumers expected a response from brands within 24 hours, with 13% wanting a reply in minutes, according to The Sprout Social Index™. However, the latest report shows that while consumers still value quick responses, they now prioritize quality service, with 70% expecting personalized replies to their needs.
Their latest Index report indicates that 76% of consumers equally value brands that respond quickly and those that prioritize customer support. Unfortunately, 62% of consumers believe businesses could improve personalized service, according to Zendesk CX Trends Research. With only 30% of brands using customer care tools to engage on social media, this dissatisfaction isn’t surprising. Consumers maintain high expectations, with 70% wanting service representatives to have full context of their inquiries. Meeting response time SLAs is futile if it doesn’t resolve issues or leaves a mediocre impression.
Regular quality control can ensure that your employees are doing their best and help expose any areas of weakness that could be resolved with e.g. a new training session for the team or some one-on-one feedback.
At RIFF, we understand the importance of quality management so well, that we have assembled a specialised team whose daily role is ensuring that all our teams are working to the highest standards.
What does the QUality team do?
Each client team at RIFF has one, or more, dedicated Quality Specialist.
One of their main roles is to monitor the quality of the performance of the team through quality scans. On a monthly basis, a set number of cases are scanned and scored for each team, using the Quality Team’s comprehensive method. These scores are then gathered and clarified in a monthly report, the findings of which are discussed with the management of each team to identify possible action points.
Besides that, the Quality Team are also responsible for developing trainings and work instructions for both client teams, and RIFF employees in general.
With the ever-increasing capabilities of AI, many companies are choosing to implement it to conduct automated quality monitoring. Whilst this can be highly effective, it may not be right for every business. Many customer support tools also offer AI functionalities to help agents respond more efficiently to messages. Due to this, at RIFF we feel it’s important to ensure that quality control is carried out by humans, especially with a quality grid as complex as ours. AI can be a useful tool in various situations, but it can’t accurately measure skills such as empathy, or thinking outside the box (yet). Some skills are still best assessed by a human, which is why we firmly believe in our philosophy, ‘Be Digital, Stay Human’.
Consistency and accuracy
With hundreds of messages being scored each month, and multiple specialists conducting the quality scans, it’s vital that everybody is on the same page regarding how and why they score messages in the way they do.
When setting up a process for quality control, one of the first tasks at hand is to create a method for measuring quality. Within RIFF, we’ve developed a comprehensive quality grid, consisting of the main components (or skills) we believe are crucial to monitor. It’s important for any quality grid to be accompanied by a thorough scoring system and guide, outlining specific dos and don’ts for each skill that help quality specialists decide the appropriate score. The more specific your scoring guide, the more accurate and valuable your data. This scoring system should also be evaluated and refined over time. Through trial and error, RIFF’s quality control method has been adjusted to what it is today’s, a finely tuned system.
To maintain this uniformity in the scoring system and the overall understanding in how they work, calibration sessions are held amongst the Quality Specialists and other scorers, such as Team Leads.
effective training
Another major function of the Quality Team is the development of training materials. One of the most important things any company can do to guarantee their employees work to a high standard is provide adequate and regular training.
At RIFF we use our own e-learning platform, that allows us to keep all training material in one location, and only offer the trainings relevant to each employee in their personal dashboard. E-learning allows us to incorporate a wide range of formats for the material and tests, making it more interactive and engaging for the agents. An additional benefit it provides is the possibility to train large groups of people remotely.
This tool also makes it easy to quickly produce compact e-learnings to target specific issues the quality team might discover during monitoring.
The team recently produced an extensive onboarding e-learning, which is being used to train all new hires at the company. This came about as a solution to feedback from newer agents on their experience of onboarding.
Whenever a client implements a new process, or launches a new product, ad hoc trainings can be made to inform agents of the changes. Our agents need to be kept up to date, so that they all have the necessary information to provide customers with top quality service.
GDPR & ISO compliance
Within RIFF, quality control isn’t just about measuring the quality of our services. It’s about upholding the standards we have set for ourselves as a company. That’s why another crucial task of RIFF’s Quality Team is safeguarding RIFFs ISO certification and GDPR compliance.
One way in which this is done is using the Privacy & Data Security training that all RIFF employees must complete to actively work. This training is completed by all new hires of the company during their onboarding, then refresher courses are sent to all employees every 6 months.
As well as actively identifying ways to improve within the other teams, the Quality Team is also constantly investigating opportunities for growth within their own roles, using feedback from colleagues and clients alike to advance their methods, and researching new techniques and tools externally.
If you have any questions about the function of our Quality Team or would like to see how RIFF could help you with your own operations, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
We would be happy to talk to you!
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