You have a quality assurance (QA) process for your customer service team, but is it good enough?
Are you:
👉 Struggling to get an overview of agent performance and overall customer experience (CX) quality?
👉 Unable to identify your most common customer service contact drivers, despite sifting through tons of customer interactions?
👉 Not providing your customer service agents with the timely feedback they need to improve your customer experience (CX)?
👉 Struggling to scale your current QA process as your number of agents increases?
If so, you need a QA tool to help you simplify and scale your efforts.
This article lists some of the best QA tools you can use to:
⭐️ Gain extensive customer support insights while reducing manual work.
⭐️ Train your customer service team effectively by reviewing the right conversations.
⭐️ Provide your customers with a better experience by understanding where to improve.
Contents
Why You Need a Customer Service Quality Assurance Platform
Let’s explore how the right quality assurance software can help you overcome the challenges listed above:
❌ Only gaining a minimal understanding of agent performance and overall customer experience (CX) quality
A traditional approach to quality assurance involves a QA manager selecting interactions to review at random.
These typically represent around 2 to 3% of your total customer conversations. This means you only review a small fraction of customer interactions.
This approach takes a significant amount of time and doesn’t provide accurate or representative feedback to make meaningful improvements.
More modern QA tools automatically review the most relevant conversations and assess them consistently. Some even give you instant access to rich data that is drawn from every single customer interaction. This supports good CX decision-making.
❌ Sifting through tons of customer interactions but no clear understanding of why customers are contacting you
If you don’t analyze every conversation, there’s no way to really know why customers contact you. It means you don’t get all the data you need to improve your business or experience.
The traditional approach would involve manually reading, listening to, or transcribing every customer interaction. The problem, however, is that building a team large enough and with enough time to do this requires a massive investment.
Using the right QA platform—especially one that uses AI—means all your conversations are automatically analyzed for you, giving you the insight you need in a fraction of the time. This frees up your team to focus on resolving common support issues and training your agents.
❌ Not providing your customer service agents with the timely feedback they need to improve your customer experience (CX)
Classroom-based training is fine for initial agent onboarding and teaching them the theoretical aspects of customer service. However, it’s much harder to provide customer service reps with immediate feedback on how they apply what they’ve learned to real-life interactions.
As mentioned above, you’d need to look at every interaction to see whether they follow the steps they’ve been trained on.
The best QA platforms give agents instant feedback across all their interactions. This allows them to fix incorrect practices before they become bad habits.
For example, if an agent is taught a new way to handle refunds but has missed a step, the QA platform will alert them straight away. This makes it less likely they will skip it the next time.
In addition, this gives agent team leads and QA managers an accurate overview of program quality today, not weeks ago.
❌ Struggling to scale your current QA process
The combination of challenges listed above limits the effectiveness of manual QA tools and processes—and they become even less effective as your team grows. When additional agents are brought on, whether due to seasonality or organizational growth, it’s highly likely that the QA team would also need to grow to handle the additional work.
You could employ more QA analysts to deal with the increased workload. However, a smarter solution is to use a QA platform that reduces manual steps while providing greater coverage. This will enable your existing QA team to generate insights and implement changes across a growing customer service team.
The 6 Best Customer Support Quality Assurance Tools
Here are the best QA tools for you to look into in 2024. We describe each tool in more detail below.
*Since the Klaus acquisition by Zendesk, there has been mixed messaging around future integration support for other helpdesk platforms.
**Limited voice integrations for QA.
Loris
Most QA tools only draw data from a sample of customer interactions. Loris analyzes every interaction. This gives you rich data that you can use to:
- Improve your customer experience (CX).
- Provide your agents with targeted training.
- Improve your product or service based on direct input from customer conversations.
- Give your agents real-time assistance as they navigate interactions.
- Identify time-consuming or recurring customer service challenges.
Loris’s AI automatically analyzes customer conversations, so you don’t have to listen to any calls or review transcripts manually.
This makes it a great QA solution for contact centers that are scaling up their operations, or that want to significantly improve their customer support team’s performance.
➡️ Noteworthy features
- Out-of-the-box AI platform: With AI models trained on millions of customer service conversations, Loris analyzes every customer interaction rather than just a sample. This means you get rich data that you can use to monitor all CX interactions, pinpoint issues with agent performance, and continuously improve your customer experience.
- Conversation summarization and resolution: Loris provides a summary of every conversation to help your QA team quickly understand it. This summary includes a Resolution Indicator, which allows you to search for or prioritize unresolved conversations for QA review. This saves your team time and helps them focus on the interactions that matter most.
- Assessment and agent performance dashboards: With intuitive dashboards, you get a high-level overview of your QA operations and agent activities. You can also dive deep to analyze your data, from suggesting product improvements to flagging emerging issues.
- Consistent scoring: Interactions are automatically scored, creating consistency and helping you understand which conversations need additional review. This helps you measure and streamline agent performance and provide them with targeted training on specific conversations, not random samples.
✔️ Pros
- No more tedious tasks: Loris reduces the time-consuming tasks QA teams face. It gathers data to help you identify emerging issues and trends, and provides real-time insights to resolve customer complaints swiftly.
- Level up your entire business: Loris isn’t just about improving your customer support. Its data and analytics can be used to improve every aspect of your business—including products, processes, and policies.
MaestroQA
MaestroQA provides more structure to the traditional QA process, with digital scorecards and agent coaching capabilities.
This platform allows you to monitor your support team’s performance. You can view screen recordings of their interactions with each customer.
With MaestroQA, you can assign courses and develop training programs based on how agents deal with support tickets.
➡️ Noteworthy features
- Intuitive dashboards: Admins, managers, and agents have customized dashboards that they can access, showing data that matters most to their team’s performance.
- Screen recordings: With MaestroQA’s Screen Capture feature, you can monitor your agents’ interactions with customers.
✔️ Pros
- Highly customizable: MaestroQA provides extensive customization capabilities, allowing you to design every aspect of your QA process in what some might regard as exhaustive detail. This can add to the implementation time, but the trade-off is worth it for some organizations.
- Helpdesk integrations: MaestroQA can be integrated with other solutions, including popular helpdesk tools.
It’s worth noting that MaestroQA doesn’t provide as much AI insight and analysis as some other providers. It is typically used to replace mature and highly structured existing QA processes.
Klaus
Klaus is designed to help you track key performance indicators (KPIs) and benchmarks. This helps you ensure your support team performs well.
One of Klaus’s core concepts is that you can boost morale by providing your support team with actionable feedback and coaching based on data.
➡️ Noteworthy features
- Coaching around specific examples: Its Coaching Suite allows you to schedule one-on-one coaching sessions based on specific interactions and KPIs.
- Browser extension: This tool lets you securely review customer interactions regardless of the channel.
✔️ Pros
- Ease of use: Klaus is a plug-and-play solution that requires minimal onboarding and implementation.
Klaus provides a mix of capabilities and is best for smaller organizations that want an all-in-one QA tool and learning management solution (LMS). Its reporting and analytics capabilities are more limited, but its simplicity makes up for it.
Playvox
Playvox helps businesses manage their workforce to lower the cost of achieving customer satisfaction. It provides a workforce management (WFM) solution along with customer support.
It helps you be more precise with your staffing, improve the quality of your customer interactions, and automate coaching.
➡️ Noteworthy features
- Forecast staffing needs: Playvox helps teams predict staffing needs without sacrificing customer service. Its aim is to reduce staffing costs.
- Recruit better agents: The Playvox QM feature helps you understand what makes your agents great and how to find more staff like them.
✔️ Pros
- Simplified scoring: Playvox lets you ditch spreadsheets and manual procedures for more automated scoring and agent feedback.
Playvox is primarily a Workforce Management tool, and doesn’t have as robust an offering when it comes to AI, lacking pre-trained and customer-derived AI models.
Observe.ai
Observe.AI’s main goal is to help businesses increase revenue and eliminate compliance risks within support centers. It does this by using AI to identify specific, high-risk terms that agents should not say to avoid anything that may result in violations or fines.
➡️ Noteworthy Features
- Hone in on parts of a conversation: While Observe AI lets you track all conversations, it also lets you target particular parts of interactions where the agent could improve.
- All-in-one interface: The tool gathers call audio, transcripts, and QA evaluations in one simple interface.
✔️Pros
- Strong in compliance use cases: Observe AI’s keyword-based approach makes it easy to find specific keywords that the agent should and shouldn’t be using, such as disclosure statements.
- Coaching tips: Agents are provided with reasoning behind low scores to help them understand how to improve.
Level AI
By using natural language processing (NLP) trained on your customer interactions, Level AI takes a similar approach to Observe.ai. The software allows you to automate manual QA processes and workflows.
➡️ Noteworthy features
- Trainable AI: The platform’s AI technology can be trained based on your agent’s feedback.
- Omnichannel analytics: Level AI monitors and analyzes customer interactions across all channels.
- Build custom reports: Level AI allows contact center teams to build custom reports from other data sources, such as business intelligence (BI) tools.
✔️ Pros
- Access and use existing resources: Level AI integrates with data analytics and knowledge-based tools. It also supports various document formats.
Similar to Observe.ai, Level AI’s platform is trained on your customer conversations. It’s highly likely that this process would need a few months to get set up properly—and then may need to be maintained to preserve accuracy.
When Should You Invest in a Customer Service QA Platform?
If your QA process involves tedious manual tasks—or if you’re too busy to manage your support team—it’s time to consider a tool to help you automate it.
Investing in a conversational intelligence and customer service QA platform like Loris allows you to:
✅ Make data-driven decisions about your business and support processes.
✅ Spend less time listening to and transcribing customer interactions.
✅ Quickly gain actionable insights to effectively address issues.
✅ Identify trends to develop targeted training programs for your agents.
Wrapping Up on QA Tools for Exceptional Customer Service
A manual QA process is a great first step to help your support center measure quality, but it isn’t scalable for growing organizations. And some basic AI tools focus more on keyword matching than understanding the context behind each conversation.
With Loris, you don’t have to spend all your time reviewing call recordings and transcripts. We gather data from all your customer channels. This allows you to deliver better training to your agents and run a more efficient QA process – and use those insights to fix the entire customer experience, not just how agents handle it.
The Loris Platform is designed to provide AI-powered actionable insights that help you improve your product or service and customer support.
Request a consultation with one of our experts, and they’ll explain how Loris can help you boost satisfaction, retain your customers, and increase your revenue.
