Want to improve your e-commerce metrics? Focus on your QA score
Why your QA score is critical to improving your e-commerce metrics
What is your QA score?
While quality assurance has always been a mainstay in business, tracking traditional QA in a spreadsheet-focused, 21st-century enterprise can be challenging.
The question is, how can you track, analyze, and improve your customer experience?
Traditionally, businesses gauge CX with things likecustomer satisfaction (CSAT) scores. The problem is, these can be skewed by external factors. They also tend to be simplistic, more often than not merely requesting a general opinion about a customer’s overall experience. This generates data that is non-specific and does not suggest specific areas of improvement…
Enter the QA score.
A quality assurance score is a metric that you can customize to the specificcustomer experiencethat your brand is attempting to offer. In addition to using basic CSAT information, a QA score can take into consideration critical elements like:
These additional factors make a QA score much more effective at capturing detailed, relevant interaction data.
By tailoring your QA scorecard to your brand, you can judge the quality of your agent’s interactions with your customers. This can provide specific areas of improvement and growth rather than generic feedback that does little more than reflect initial customer emotions.
The measured difference between CSAT and QA scores
Traditional customer service surveys have been the go-to option for CSAT as they are used as a proxy for quality. However, I’ve found that they can be a bit misleading. In fact, at times, they can even contradict the more accurate data offered by a QA score.
Quality assurance software platform MaestroQA recently conducted ananalysis of 265,000 customer support tickets. In the review, the company compared classic CSAT scores with more robust QA scores and discovered that even when only considering interactions with a 90% QA score or higher, nearly a third (31.8%) of the support tickets had negative CSAT scores.
In other words, even when customer service was stellar, more than three out of every 10 tickets looked like a failure from a CSAT perspective.
The critical nature of a QA score
Examples like the one I provided above help to highlight the weakness and overall shallow nature of a customer survey. On their own, these simplistic questionnaires tend to fall flat.
Rather thanprovide meaningful data, they cloud the problem with emotional responses. If a customer is upset after an interaction, it doesn’t matter how professional an agent was, or whether they followed their training and instructions from their team. The feedback will likely be negative. A case can be made for the opposite to be true, as well.
When you use a QA score, however, it can pinpoint precise areas of both strength and weakness. To reiterate, this is due to the fact that a QA scorecard can be:
Compared to a CSAT score, a QA score provides a robust, well-rounded set of data for understanding whether or not agents are performing to set company standards. It can be tailored to meet each company’s needs, and can provide critical feedback.
Using your QA score to perfect your business
The e-commerce industry comes with many metrics — data in the CX area, in particular, can feel overwhelming at times. If you’re looking for a way to cut through the clutter and pinpoint where you really need to grow, look no further than your QA score.
From personalization to specificity, a QA score provides a quality metric that can redefine both your e-commerce data analytics and, by extension, your customer experience as a whole.
Story byNathan Resnick
Nathan is a serial entrepreneur who currently serves as CEO of Sourcify, a marketplace of the world’s top manufacturers. Having brought doze(show all)Nathan is a serial entrepreneur who currently serves as CEO of Sourcify, a marketplace of the world’s top manufacturers. Having brought dozens of products to life, he knows the ins and outs of how to turn ideas into realities.
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