Customer service QA automation: How AI can streamline QA

The ultimate goal of customer service quality assurance (QA) is to improve the performance of your support team and enhance your CX. But if you’re not evaluating the right processes or support interactions, you risk spending your time inefficiently. That’s where quality assurance automation can help.

Quality assurance automation streamlines the QA process by leveraging AI to assist your customer service evaluation process. It can be the game-changer you need to identify areas for improvement and effectively elevate your CX. This guide covers the benefits of automated quality assurance and how you can use it to improve your business.

In this guide:

• Manual quality assurance vs. automated quality assurance
• Benefits of automated quality assurance in customer service
• How to implement quality assurance automation in your organization
• Frequently asked questions
• Automate customer service QA with Zendesk

Manual quality assurance vs. automated quality assurance

When evaluating your quality assurance process, you shouldn’t be deciding on manual QA or automated QA—instead, consider incorporating both.

Manual reviews still hold immense value in customer service quality assurance. The “human” factor within the feedback loop is an irreplaceable aspect that helps you delve into nuanced situations and perform in-depth analysis. That said, there are inherent problems of manual reviews that automated QA can help with:

• Limited scope: Per the Customer Service Quality Benchmark Report 2023, only 2 percent of customer conversations undergo manual review.
• Potential bias: Reviewers may possess biases that could influence their evaluations.
• Lack of scalability: Manual reviewers may struggle to keep pace when customer interactions surge due to business growth or a short-term increase in demand.

Automated reviews can be the remedy for manual review inefficiencies. QA automation ensures 100 percent coverage while providing an impartial and thorough overview of customer conversations. It can automatically spot weak points that reviewers may miss and direct them to problematic interactions. For example, it could help identify a situation where the agent didn’t reach a solution or the customer expressed frustration.

On one hand, customer service QA automation can help you expertly analyze a large volume of customer interactions. On the other hand, businesses still need manual reviewers to bring context, nuance, and the human touch to conversation evaluations. Together, they can create an automation-first strategy that delivers better human support.

Benefits of automated quality assurance in customer service

Here are several benefits of automated quality assurance that can improve your business.

Enhanced agent performance

With quality assurance automation, you can analyze every support interaction, providing greater opportunities to improve agent productivity and identify team training needs.

For example, some agents may not greet customers by name or end conversations properly—perhaps not asking the customer if there’s anything else they can help with. These interactions would likely fall between the cracks with manual QA, but automation helps prevent this and turns them into valuable learning experiences.

Improved customer experience

With automated QA, you can continuously monitor and evaluate customer conversations between both your human agents and your AI agents, ensuring you provide an outstanding customer experience. These automated systems can identify problematic conversations, team performance issues, and trends in customer sentiment and satisfaction. As a result, you can adjust your customer service management (CSM) and overall strategy to improve CX.

Increased scalability

Quality assurance automation can assist your customers—whether you have 10 or 10,000. Manual reviewers can only manage a limited amount of conversations, and that number drops even lower when faced with fast business growth or unexpected surges in demand.

With QA automation, you can handle large volumes of customer data and interactions, ensuring your support team can maintain customer service standards despite drastically higher ticket volume.

Reduced operational costs

Quality assurance automation can help you control costs with AI. First, it can make your team more efficient. While there is still a need for human reviewers, automated QA can empower them to expand their capabilities and do more work in less time. This means you don’t need a large team of reviewers to keep up with demand.

Additionally, quality assurance automation can help your team make strategic decisions. For example, automation may alert you to team knowledge gaps, troubling customer trends, and other inefficiencies before they become real problems. This enables you to take swift, corrective action—leading to happier customers, lower churn rates, and more revenue.

How to implement quality assurance automation in your organization

Now that we’ve covered why quality assurance automation is important, we’ll dive into how you can bring it to your organization.

Define your goals

The first step in implementing QA automation is to define your goals. Determine what you want to achieve with quality assurance automation, whether that is reducing customer churn, reviewing more support interactions, improving customer service key performance indicators (KPIs), developing agent skill sets, or another related objective. Once you set clear goals, you can move forward with a clear path.

Leverage AI-powered QA tools

Next, find the right QA software. Look for systems and tools that integrate quality assurance review data and customer feedback survey responses. Prioritize a solution that is secure, quick to set up, easy to use, and scalable to grow alongside your business and customer base—like Zendesk QA.

You can use Zendesk to leverage AI, review every customer conversation, and gain expanded insights that are impossible with manual QA alone. We also empower you to build and customize CSAT surveys to monitor customer sentiments without needing a robust customer feedback management system. Overall, we help you highlight team problem areas, coach your agents, enhance service quality, and reduce operational costs.

Get your team up to speed

After selecting an AI-powered QA tool, give your agents visibility into the QA process so they gain a better understanding of their performance. You should schedule regular coaching sessions to review QA scorecards and other evaluation metrics. This approach will help your team get up to speed quickly and improve efficiency.

Review and improve

One of the most important parts of quality assurance automation is tracking agent performance and ensuring your systems are helping you reach your goals. The right tools will help you automatically track agent performance over time, leading to ongoing assessment. Additionally, you will want to periodically take a step back and evaluate the system to identify any areas that can help streamline your customer support.

Frequently asked questions

Automate customer service QA with Zendesk

Quality assurance automation can be the process you need to uncover meaningful insights. That said, you can’t partner with just any QA tool—you need one that empowers you to hit your goals.

Zendesk QA is robust, AI-powered software that helps you harness automation in your quality management. You can review 100 percent of agent conversations, identify churn risks and outliers, view performance trends, and more.

Discover how Zendesk QA can remove the guesswork from your quality assurance process.