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At Parker Technology, we believe that a quality program is the key to providing excellent customer service—and you don’t need to have a lot to succeed. Good customer service and experiences are about quality, not quantity. No matter the size of your business, you can meet your customer’s needs and perform at a high level by ensuring your team focuses on the right priorities and goals.
How We “Do” Quality
To have it all, you simply need to focus on training and instilling good values in your employees while aligning your main priorities and needs with your operations. At Parker, we use a review system to ensure everyone is meeting standards and following through on the goals and priorities of the company. By focusing on the quality of service our employees provide, we can ensure that our customer’s needs are met.
For example, every call is scored according to twelve criteria, focusing on greeting, tone, resolution, efficiency, and adhering to our client business rules. We also have our customer service representatives review their own calls. We find that these self-reviews allow them to evaluate their performance, catch their mistakes, and self-correct before any issues even reach the manager level.
Our quality assurance program doesn’t end with our quality assurance team either. Scores from audits and reviews are shared with the customer service reps and leadership team weekly. This allows our supervisors to have a good sense of how calls with customers are going. They can then use this feedback to improve training and development and give praise for the good work that is being accomplished.
A quality program isn’t just about implementing good strategies and methodologies, but about giving praise where it is deserved as well. Showing that you appreciate your team and that their hard work isn’t going unnoticed will further encourage them to stay on top of their game.
Developing a Quality Program
Before diving into the specifics of how to align priorities and needs within the company, it’s helpful to consider how to develop a quality program from the start. These steps can help guide you as you start to think about implementing a successful program:
- Identify indicators of quality: Imagine what an ideal performance would be and then break it down into components. These are the criteria by which you will measure quality.
- Communicate expectations: Share these criteria and expectations with your team and ask for feedback. Use this feedback to fine-tune your expectations and be sure to explain why implementing this quality program is important.
- Implement self-reviews: When you allow your employees to self-critique, it will allow them to observe their own mistakes and self-correct before an issue escalates.
- Have leadership give reviews: Having your managers perform regular reviews will further guarantee mistakes are being caught and corrected. This ensures everyone is performing at their best and being held accountable.
- Use data to improve and give praise: Use any data and feedback collected from reviews and audits to improve areas that need work. It’s also important to use this information to praise your team to show appreciation for their performance.
To learn more about our quality program, subscribe to our blog for the second part of this series coming out later this week, or read the other QA posts on our blog.