7 Key Skills Your Contact Center QA Analyst Should Have

7 Key Skills Your Contact Center QA Analyst Should Have

You’ve hired quality assurance analysts to help your contact center agents improve their customer service. You’ve introduced them to the team, incorporated them into your everyday processes, and are eagerly awaiting the fruits of their labor. But while the foundation for success is laid, contact center key performance indicators need to be applied to your QA analysts too.

Involving everyone in your quality assurance program means evaluating the QA analysts themselves. While their role is to monitor agents’ work, a customer service quality analyst in your contact center isn’t going to be perfect, of course. They’ll make mistakes, have their own flaws, and need to grow with experience. That’s where your KPI metrics come into play.

What Is The Difference Between KPIs And Metrics?

While KPI metrics measure progress toward specific goals, regular metrics are measurements of overall business performance. Metrics can still provide valuable data about your business, such as website visitors, but unless it’s tied to a specific key business objective, it is considered a metric, not a KPI. 

How To Calculate KPI Metrics

A contact center key performance indicator (KPI) is a quantifiable measure of performance over time for a specific objective, such as Average Handling Time or Net Promoter Score. Your contact center KPIs should have a direct relation to the quality of your customer experience, whether that’s through the time they’re waiting on hold, the way your agents speak to them, or the number of calls they have to make before resolving their problem.

Hitting your KPIs can boost customer satisfaction, which increases retention and contact center ROI. 

9 Contact Center Metrics

1. Organizational Skills

Good quality analysts must be well organized. This is non-negotiable.

Why? Because their job revolves around tracking data, monitoring KPI metrics, identifying flaws, and helping to formulate strategies to overcome obstacles. This demands strong organizational skills to keep data ordered and structured, using the best QA software.

Any customer service quality analyst in your contact center who fails to stay organized and on top of their workload can cause confusion down the line. Agents, team leaders, and managers may struggle to help staff improve or to monitor development. As a result, the entire quality assurance program could lead to wasted time and resources, with no clear benefit for consumers.

Measure the analysts’ organizational skills by establishing goals within fixed timeframes. For example, ask them to create a comprehensive report on five agents within a week, using data pulled from multiple channels. This gives them an incentive to stay organized and provides clear criteria for judging the quality of the analyst’s work.

2. Ability To Communicate Clearly

QA analysts should have strong communication skills. They have to articulate the key points found in their contact center KPI metrics to staff at all levels, from the most inexperienced customer service agents to seasoned managers.

An ability to engage people is essential when delivering KPI metrics through feedback and coaching. Some employees can be sensitive about their weaknesses, and if the analyst cannot present criticism properly, they could alienate the agent — making it so much harder to motivate them.

Have managers or team leaders sit in when analysts discuss KPI metrics performance with agents and pay attention to the latter’s reactions. Do they appear relaxed? Are they connecting with the analyst? Are they taking the advice on board?

3. Eye For Detail

Studying page after page of KPI metrics data isn’t easy. QA analysts, though, must have an eye for detail so keen they can pick out key information from endless facts and figures.

Your analysts should be able to spot important patterns, trends, and discrepancies found in the KPI metrics. If not, they’ll miss crucial information that could severely affect the quality of customer experience your contact center provides.

Have members of the management team check in on QA analysts’ work using reliable QA software. The analyst should be able to talk them through their evaluations, their recommendations, and more.

4. Coaching Capabilities

While your customer service quality analysts are unlikely to undertake all coaching on their own, they still need to have strong coaching capabilities.

Coaching is vital to motivate and inspire employees at all levels, based on gathered data. Exploring their respective strengths and weaknesses should be in depth, with an emphasis on positivity.

The analyst should never dwell on the negatives so much they leave the employee unmotivated or actively disengaged.

Team leaders and managers should be present during coaching delivered in person. Check that their coaching aligns with management’s expectations and the agents’ specific needs.

Are they setting goals for staff to achieve? Are they driving growth?

5. Capacity To Empathize With Agents

Integrating customer service quality analysts into contact centers should be done carefully, with openness and honesty. Employees at all levels have to know why the QA program is taking place, what it involves, and how the analysts will interact with them.

Some agents may appear hesitant to get involved with the process, but analysts can help to build bridges by empathizing with them. QA analysts have to be receptive to agents’ concerns, recognize the difficulties of their work, and take their goals into consideration. 

Employee feedback will let you know how empathetic analysts are. Invite agents, team leaders, and managers to share their views on how well the analysts are integrating into the contact center. Use this to help the QA analysts forge stronger bonds with their colleagues.

6. Fast Learning/Adaptability

A QA analyst must be able to come into your contact center and start evaluating performance with minimal delay. They need some time to familiarize themselves with your company goals, working methods, and the agents’ behavior, but they should learn quickly.

Otherwise, they could slow the rate of improvement, letting mistakes and poor service go unchecked for longer than necessary. Consider testing candidates for the QA analyst role, exploring their capacity to absorb KPI metrics, adapt to new projects, and more.

7. Thinking Outside the Box

A creative mindset can be a major asset for customer service quality analysts. Identifying flaws in customer service means finding solutions too — and having the ability to conceive effective coaching and training methods could help agents reach new heights.

For example, agents could struggle to grasp a particular issue during coaching sessions. An analyst with the skills to approach it from another perspective and inspire the agent to see things more clearly is extremely useful.

Testing analysts in similar theoretical situations is a solid way to measure this KPI metric for quality analysts, as is monitoring their interactions with staff. Can they improvise? Are they able to make complex data understandable for people with different mindsets?

The KPI metrics of quality analysts explored above will all help you measure the quality analyst in your contact center and identify their capabilities. Your quality assurance program is too important to take lightly — mistakes, delays, and confusion can all affect your customer service significantly in the long run.

Make sure managers and team leaders stay in close contact with the quality analyst in your contact center. Communicate and collaborate across QA software to track agents’ progress, coaching, and more to prevent analysts’ working in isolation. Incorporate them into your company’s everyday operations from the beginning.

For more insights, request a demo from Playvox. 

7 Key Skills Your Contact Center QA Analyst Should Have
Playvox Team

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