Quality Assurance: Definition, Examples, and 8 Key Benefits

Quality assurance has long been the cornerstone of great customer service. It helps customer support agents understand the root causes of poor customer experiences and churn to gain a competitive advantage.

Research shows more than half of consumers will switch to a competitor after a single bad experience*. So, with support teams facing more pressure to perform in challenging economic climates, it’s no surprise many are turning to technology to deliver more personalized, seamless services.

The increasing availability of artificial intelligence (AI) is leading this charge, and it’s not just big corporations set to benefit. Almost three-quarters (72%) of mid-size companies said they were investing in automation last year, and a third of teams are already using AI to assist with conversation reviews**.

Still, quality assurance is a human-first responsibility. So, before you embrace a software-based approach to improving this crucial performance metric, let’s go back to basics… 

Key takeaways:

• Measuring quality assurance is essential. Improving your QA metrics will help you increase customer satisfaction and remain competitive.
  
• QA best practices differ. Every company and industry will have a unique approach to the QA process but can achieve the same benefits.
  
• Technology can help! Integrated AI tools such as CloudTalk’s customer support software will help you cut wait times by 50% and prevent churn.

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*Zendesk, 2023

**Klaus, 2023

What is Quality Assurance?

Put simply, quality assurance (sometimes referred to as QA) is a process of making sure your services are meeting quality and performance expectations. 

In the context of customer service, this usually involves evaluating calls, chats, and other interactions between your call center agents and customers. This lets you benchmark performance and maintain long-term service excellence.

Some of the methods for evaluating customer service quality include:

• Manager reviews
• Peer reviews
• Self-reviews
• Specialist reviews

The purpose of measuring core QA metrics such as first contact resolution (FCA), customer satisfaction scores (CSAT), and average handle time (AHT) is to give you deeper insights into your customers’ needs, preferences, and behaviors.

Harnessing this information to tailor support strategies is essential for delivering efficient, personalized customer services. This is a crucial consideration in today’s market, with 78% of business buyers and 61% of consumers saying they expect companies to adapt to their changing needs.

Quality Assurance vs Quality Control 

You’ll often hear these two terms used interchangeably, but they don’t actually mean the same thing.

Quality assurance describes the processes for evaluating customer perception and the broader quality management of various products and services, usually including customer service. 

On the other hand, quality control activities are more concentrated on ensuring product or service quality in line with relevant standards and best practices.

Here’s a comparison of the two in the context of customer service…

Quality Assurance:

• Process-oriented
• Aims to optimize customer service processes to avoid issues
• Preventative

Quality Control:

• Interaction-oriented
• Aims to ensure every customer interaction meets standards
• Corrective

Who’s on the Quality Assurance Team?

Wondering what roles make up a quality assurance unit? 

Although this varies between companies and industries, there are a handful of common positions you’re likely to find in any QA team:

• QA managers: Responsible for managing quality planning, quality control, and improvements, collaborating with other team members to deliver reports and lead enhancements.

• QA team leaders: Oversee the entire QA process within a company, working with stakeholders, customers, and customer support teams to ensure services meet expectations.

• QA engineers: Manage systems and examine services to identify quality issues. They evaluate the effectiveness of various functionalities, oversee testing, and adapt relevant standards. 

• QA testers: Undergo training to execute manual or automated QA software testing, report problems, and create test cases for various scenarios.  

• QA analysts: Assess QA software tools and processes to ensure they’re performing correctly and identify areas for improvement in line with current regulations and best practices.

Together, these individuals streamline QA processes and manage complex datasets, acting as a key source of advice and performance insights for your sales and support teams. 

How Does Quality Assurance Change by Industry?

As we mentioned, quality assurance looks a little different within every industry. However, every sector can work to enhance customer experiences and foster brand loyalty.

Some organizations may focus on software quality assurance to identify and remediate product development challenges. Meanwhile, others will focus on the quality of customer interactions to improve call center performance and sales. 

Each approach offers different benefits, but they share a common goal: Increasing customer satisfaction.

• Software and tech. QA is crucial during software and product development, helping organizations ensure quality is built into project management processes. It also allows providers to prove their solutions and services meet industry standards.   

• Financial services. This highly regulated industry has endless privacy and operating standards. Effective QA ensures agents deliver consistent, compliant services to foster trust and mitigate risk.

• Professional services. By guaranteeing continuous process enhancement and adherence to best practices, QA can help professional services firms increase customer satisfaction and provide seamless user experiences. 

• Education and e-learning. QA teams will ensure all courses and materials are accurate and effective. This helps customer support teams to champion process improvements for user experiences, leading to better learning outcomes and student satisfaction.

• Healthcare. Assuring quality in medical contexts is essential to maintaining patient trust and improving service performance, enabling support teams to offer clear advice, deliver seamless patient experiences, and keep accurate records.  

Examples of Quality Assurance in Action

Looking for some more specific examples of how quality assurance can support business success?

Here are two companies that invested in quality assurance to transform their customer management systems and empower employees with better processes and insights:

E-bike Commerce Company

An e-bike company worked with SupportNinja to address critical gaps in its customer experience infrastructure. 

It lacked the appropriate measures to ensure smooth order management and inquiry response, leading to disappointment and frustration within the sales process and reducing customer loyalty.

Through an effective QA strategy, SupportNinja implemented a cloud-based CRM solution and integrated it with the company’s ecommerce, communications, and order management platforms.
As a result, the team enjoyed a 23% increase in customer satisfaction in just 30 days thanks to an enhanced customer service system, systematic ticket management, and service level tracking.

Pro Tip

CloudTalk offers powerful and easy one-click Integrations to make your day-to-day workflow more efficient.

Improve customer communication, send all activity to your CRM, and manage orders or sales processes to make your conversations more productive.

DiscoverCars

Upon reviewing its customer service quality data, DiscoverCars (an international car rental website) found it was struggling with low customer satisfaction scores. This was due to long waiting times and an excessively high volume of calls.

To resolve this issue, they partnered with our team at CloudTalk to implement an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system that would automate routine queries and route complex inquiries to the appropriate call center agent.

Here’s how our solutions helped:

• 15% increase in customer satisfaction scores
• 80% decrease in waiting times
• 25% decrease in call handling times

Read more about this customer success story here!

The 8 Key Benefits of Quality Assurance

So, now you understand what quality assurance is and how it can be applied within different companies and industries. But why bother in the first place?

Keep reading to discover eight of the most impactful advantages quality assurance can offer sales ops and IT managers. 

1. Improved Product Quality

During the quality assurance process, you’re likely to gather a lot of feedback from your customers about what they do and don’t like about your products or services. 

This can act as an early warning system for detecting problems, highlighting issues with product quality control or development processes. What’s more, customer surveys can identify problems within customer service processes themselves, helping to guide better decision-making across sales and support teams. 

By providing advanced situational awareness of your agents’ day-to-day interactions, these practices can help you take action—whether it’s implementing training or initiating product improvements to reduce user complaints.

2. Customer Satisfaction

In an interview with CCW Europe Digital, Martin Kōiva, Co-Founder and CEO of Klaus explains that tracking QA system metrics can highlight what drives customer satisfaction within your business.

For example, Klaus’ research found that 76% of organizations agree conversation reviews help improve customer satisfaction scores. With modern automated Call Recording, it’s easy to capture and analyze each interaction to optimize your calling strategies and ensure a first-class customer experience.
CloudTalk can help you visualize these insights in a Real-Time Dashboard, allowing you to tweak your business strategy at a moment’s notice and maximize call center performance.

3. Cost Savings

If your customers have a bad experience with your products or processes, you’re going to know about it. From damaging your reputation to increasing customer churn, poor quality assurance can harm your financial status now and in the future.  

Alternatively, improving your quality assurance methods can help you save money in several areas. For example, effective QA management can:

• Deliver high-quality products
• Reduce the risk of recalls
• Minimize call handling times
• Optimize resource allocation
• Prevent customer complaints

Using AI to support these functions can take your savings even further. By automatically tracking and analyzing core QA metrics over time, you can determine which methods and measures are working (and which aren’t) to refine your QA strategy. The result? Higher productivity, less wasted time, and lower operating costs. 

4. Regulatory Compliance

The role of quality assurance is to ensure your products and services consistently meet safety, security, and performance standards. 

Quality assurance is especially crucial for compliance in highly regulated industries such as financial services or healthcare. So, proving your CRM systems meet all data privacy and quality requirements is vital to earning the trust of clients, partners, and policyholders.

That’s why CloudTalk’s tools come with end-to-end protection for customer data. With features like Single Sign-On, STIR/SHAKEN, and Spam Protection, you can rest assured that you’re delivering seamless customer experiences without compromising compliance.

5. Risk Management

Quality assurance and risk management are two separate aspects of quality management systems (QMS). 

Risk management is responsible for identifying, assessing, and prioritizing anything that might negatively impact business operations. However, monitoring quality assurance performance can support effective risk management by acting as a preventative measure to find issues within product or service life cycles before they escalate.

In the context of customer service, quality assurance can improve risk management by ensuring process compliance. Plus, it can reduce the likelihood of complaints and legal challenges that might cause your sales, IT, and compliance teams headaches down the line.

6. Continuous Improvement 

A great QMS will ensure you’re constantly assessing your customer satisfaction feedback to make ongoing quality improvements.

Through rigorous call monitoring backed by accurate data insights from call center analytics software, you can make regular updates to your review and training procedures to drive more service value.

Not sure where to start? With advanced AI-powered features like Sentiment Analysis, you can get immediate feedback on your customers’ moods throughout a call or message interaction. This helps your support teams refine their approach in real time to get better results. 

7. Enhanced Brand Reputation

Quality assurance standardizes processes within your business to ensure customers receive a consistent, accurate, and helpful service. This should help prevent silly mistakes and increase standards within your support teams, improving the overall perception of your brand.   

CloudTalk’s software can help your business put its best foot forward through call center monitoring tools that integrate with existing CRM systems to boost overall performance. 
For example, our Talk/Listen Ratio tool for sales and support lets you know whether your agents listen to your customers effectively. It provides data on how much each participant spoke during a call, helping you give your teams tangible feedback to enhance service quality and efficiency.

8. Increased Employee Morale and Productivity 

It’s not only your customers that stand to gain from quality assurance. It also plays a crucial role in improving processes and streamlining workflows across your support teams and beyond.

Collecting customer satisfaction and service performance data will shine a spotlight on high-performing individuals, helping keep everyone accountable and motivated. These insights also enable your agents to understand where they’re exceeding expectations and where they might be falling short, encouraging a culture of self-improvement and growth.

Plus, embracing call center automation can reduce workloads by taking care of mundane or repetitive admin tasks like Call Routing and Note-Taking, having a transformative impact on productivity and morale.

Take Control of Quality Assurance with CloudTalk

Quality assurance should be a boardroom-level concern for any organization, regardless of industry. Without it, you can’t accurately measure performance across customer service and support teams to determine whether agents are hitting those crucial KPIs.

There are plenty of quality assurance methodologies you could follow. But we recommend using a purpose-built software platform that can integrate with your entire tech stack for the ultimate ease of use.

CloudTalk’s cloud-based solutions can help you track call center metrics to empower your agents with actionable insights. Whether you’re prioritizing monitoring remote agents or hitting your customer satisfaction goals, our feature-rich product is here to help!