Quality in Support

Teamwork makes the dream work. I recently spoke to a friend of mine; how well are students taught to work as a team these days? His opinion: academics are taught to focus on individual performance rather than real-life examples of how to work together. I can see his point: students must rely only on their ability to solve an exam independently rather than be able to source answers from a group. And when they do work in a group, often it’s the individual contribution that gets scored. This kind of undereducation leads to workers who struggle to see the bigger picture and are more likely to underperform.

If you’re looking to build out your customer support team and hone in on their overall quality, there are several skills that your agents need to have.

High-quality support does not look the same for every company, yet some common areas should typically score high when reviewing your support agents.

A never ending question for folks in the Customer Support world is: “How do we increase the quality of our replies?”. You want your customers to get the best possible service, and you want your agents to know how to provide that level of quality.

Before you can get to the ‘how’, however, you’ll need to look at your ‘what’. What exactly constitutes a quality reply?

Creating a quality assessment scorecard that suits your business is something not all Customer Support teams do. Some feel their team is too small, others do not see the value in assessing quality as a specific metric.

In my opinion, however, these scorecards are what make a support team reach new levels of high quality. If you want to change something for the better, you’ll want to measure it first.