QA Audit best practices

The QA Audit process seeks to ensure that QA reviews are accurate, up-to-date on company processes and have been completed with the latest product/company knowledge without bias or errors. There are a number of ways to ensure your organization can implement a QA Audit process that will best fit your needs.

Should you have a QA Audit team or a single QA Audit role?

Depending on your organization's size, you might consider having a dedicated QA Audit team or singular role whose responsibility is to provide checks and balances on the reviews that your QA team conducts. The best candidate to consider for this team or role is someone who is familiar with the QA review process, and who has a good sense of your organization's processes, policies and procedures.

In smaller organizations, it's not uncommon to have a QA Auditor be someone from the QA team or for the QA team to QA Audit each others' QA Reviews.

What is the best QA audit cadence?

For some organizations, it's 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 frontline.

You don’t necessarily need to conduct QA Audits as often as you conduct QA Reviews. For example, if QA reviews on interactions are done on a daily basis, then you might consider a QA Audit process to be conducted on a weekly basis.

The closer/sooner your QA Audit process is conducted after a QA Review has been conducted, the fresher that QA Review context is for your QA team and the easier it is to have a conversation with the QA team about the QA Audit as the details are still fresh.

Setting up your QA Audit process

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

  • Auditing the QA Review

  • Evaluating the QA Reviewer

Auditing the QA Review is a process in which the QA Auditor evaluates the original interaction between the customer and agent, without looking at the QA Review that was conducted. Additionally, the auditor uses the same scorecard the QA Reviewer used to grade the original interaction.

The QA Auditor grades the interaction and provide answer selections as well as comments in the scorecard. When the QA Auditor completes the QA review process, they compare their answers and comments to the answers and comments the QA Reviewer provided in the original QA Review. Any discrepancies or differences in answers are noted and tabulated and a follow-up discussion with the QA Reviewer can be scheduled to discuss the discrepancies.

Example scorecard with 4 questions, the last is the Outcome

Evaluating the QA Reviewer a process in which a QA Auditor uses a scorecard with questions that examine the QA Reviewer's review. Some example questions might be:

  • If a Reviewer marked the agent as not having followed standard practice, did the Reviewer provide directions in their comment for what the agent should have done instead?
  • Did the Reviewer practice fairness in their scoring?
  • Did the Reviewer catch and correct any mistakes the Agent made in handling the interaction?

Similar to a QA Review, the questions and answer choices set up within the Audit scorecard can have point allocations. The intention behind this type of QA Audit is to provide direct feedback on that exact Reviews so there is a working example for the QA Reviewer to reference.

Example auditor review scorecard with 4 questions, 2 are QA Feedback

Get started today with QA Audits

There is no one-size-fits all approach to QA Audits. Each organization has its own unique set of needs and resources to build out their optimized process. Whichever process you employ, rest assured that Medallia Agent Connect is here to help facilitate that process for you and your organization.