How to select auditors

Depending on your organization's size, you might consider having a dedicated QA Audit team or a singular role with responsibility to provide checks and balances on the reviews that your QA team conducts. If you choose a singular role, the best candidate is someone who is familiar with the QA Review process; an experienced employee with a good sense of your organization's processes and policies.

In smaller organizations, it is not uncommon for a QA Auditor to be a member of the QA team, with team members auditing each others' QA Reviews.

What is the best QA Audit cadence?

For some organizations, it is difficult to allocate enough time to conduct QA Reviews. However, providing feedback to your QA team can be just as important and valuable as providing feedback to your front line.

You do not necessarily need to conduct QA Audits as often as you conduct QA Reviews. For example, if QA Reviews are done daily, then you might consider conducting QA Audits weekly.

The sooner a QA Audit is conducted after a QA Review, the more relevant the review context will be for your QA team. This makes it easier to have a conversation with the QA team about the QA Audit, as the details are still fresh.

Choose the right QA Audit process

There are two ways an organization can approach the QA Audit process:

• Audit QA Reviews

• Evaluate QA Reviewers

Each of these approaches offers its own advantages, and there is no right approach for all organizations. The approach that you choose should align with your organization's policies and culture.

Audit QA Reviews

In this approach, a QA auditor evaluates the original interaction between the customer and agent without looking at the QA Review that was conducted. The auditor uses the same scorecard the QA reviewer used to grade the original interaction.

This approach focuses directly on the outcomes of QA Reviews rather than the performance of QA reviewers.

The QA auditor grades the interaction and provide answers as well as comments in the scorecard. When the QA auditor completes the review, the auditor compares the results to the answers and comments that the reviewer provided in the original QA Review. Any discrepancies are noted and tabulated, and a follow-up discussion with the QA reviewer can be scheduled to discuss the differences.

Evaluate QA reviewers

In this approach, a QA Auditor uses a scorecard with questions that examine the QA reviewer's performance, without re-scoring the underlying customer interaction.

This approach focuses directly on the the performance of QA reviewers, while using a specific QA Review as a point of reference.

In a scorecard used to evaluate reviewers, example questions might be:

• If a reviewer indicated that the agent did not follow standard practices, did the reviewer note specific details?

• Was the reviewer fair?

• Did the reviewer catch and correct any mistakes the agent made?

Similar to a QA Review, the questions and answer choices in the Audit scorecard can be allocated different point values.