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3 Reasons to Switch from Spreadsheets to a Conversation Review Tool

Automation7 MIN READJun 19, 2019

3 Reasons to Switch from Spreadsheets to a Conversation Review Tool

Feeling that your customer service quality assurance process is becoming a chore? Not sure how to set up conversation reviews efficiently? Internal quality assessments can take hours of work – we’ve seen companies spend 70% of their QA time on copy-pasting data and searching for information in spreadsheets.

Whether you’re conducting conversation reviews to bring consistency to your team, to boost your CSAT, to onboard new agents, or for any combination of reasons, the fact is that the quality of your customer service depends on it. You genuinely believe in the benefits of internal feedback, but can’t handle the administrative work it creates – we get it.

Most companies start by using spreadsheets to organize their internal feedback. With a small team and low conversation volume, a shared document can be enough.

However, as your company grows and your needs change, you’ll see that spreadsheets become less and less efficient for the purpose. If it takes too much time and manual work, and nobody enjoys the process, then the quality of the feedback will suffer. That’s when dedicated conversation review tools come in handy.

Here are the main reasons why companies like Automattic, PandaDoc, Figma, and others are using Klaus for doing conversation reviews.

3 Reasons to Switch from Spreadsheets to a Conversation Review Tool

Setup struggles

Spreadsheets are a unique means of dealing with a lot of data, including those related to conversation reviews. However, if you and your team aren’t spreadsheet pros, you might find it difficult to set up the review process, and then continuously tweak it as necessary.

Here’s what most companies want to see in their support assessment documents:

  • ticket name, date, time, content;
  • agent’s response, date, time, content;
  • reviewer’s name, date;
  • rating categories (e.g., product knowledge, tone, solution);
  • rating scales;
  • comments and suggestions;
  • total internal assessment score.

Can you put all that information into spreadsheets? It’s doable but often difficult. It’ll take hours, probably even days, to structure this data in a way that is comprehensible to everyone.

With multiple people evaluating your support interactions, you need to make sure that they all understand your rating categories and scales in the same manner. A clear and well-structured scorecard is the foundation of an insightful review process.

Internal Quality Score (IQS) is the metric used in conversation reviews and it gives you quantitative insight into your team’s performance. To get statistically relevant results, you need to evaluate quite a lot of conversations. Most companies review about 5-10% of their interactions, so an efficient support QA process matters a lot.

So, there’s a lot you need to consider when setting up your conversation review procedure. Luckily, tools like Klaus do this work for you. Being able to skip the setup and start giving internal feedback right away is one of the main reasons why many customer service managers turn to us.

Maintenance commotion

Are you a spreadsheet ninja who created a neat document that includes all the necessary data and formulas? Great – but work doesn’t stop there. Keeping the system up and running requires constant work:

  • Most teams who use spreadsheets to manage their conversation reviews are frustrated with the amount of copy-pasting they need to do. Getting ticket information from your help desk to your assessment repository is a major waste of time, and can result in errors.
  • Many customer service managers stress about making sure that agents really read the feedback they’ve received. Reminding the team to go and check the spreadsheet seems to be a daily chore for teams that rely on spreadsheets with no built-in notifications.

The more effort the review procedure requires, the less likely are your team members to participate in it. Maybe you’ve already noticed how feedback is getting less and less frequent – but conversation reviews only work if you do them.

So, here’s another great reason to switch from spreadsheets to a conversation review tool. Klaus pulls in all your tickets and phone calls from your help desk software, so you’ll never have to copy-paste them manually again. We’ll also automatically notify agents about new feedback they’ve received. Nothing beats a good old ping on Slack, right?

3 Reasons to Switch from Spreadsheets to a Conversation Review Tool

Reporting pains

Reporting is the third prominent reason why companies prefer conversation review tools to spreadsheets. The amount of time it takes to create meaningful charts and conclusions manually is unfathomable.

  • You’ll first notice this when you’re doing regular reports to your managers or execs. If you spend hours on finding data that reflects your team performance, then there’s your clue. You can easily leave data calculation and analysis to software instead.
  • An even more alarming situation when you find yourself struggling to find the right data is when the quality of your support is dropping. To tackle this, you need to pinpoint the causes of the decline and find the agents who are bringing your service down. With the right tools, you’ll filter them out in no time.

Getting insights out of a large spreadsheet is very difficult. When scrolling through hundreds of rows, you won’t know what trends to look for. Moreover, finding actionable insights will be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Rather than paying a data analyst to filter through data saved in a spreadsheet, use an analytics tool that does the work for you and uncovers trends you might not even have thought to look for.

In addition to the features that will help you find, process, and manage data related to your conversations, Klaus makes it super easy to track one of the most crucial customer service KPIs – your Internal Quality Score. It reflects how well your team is performing based on your internal assessments, which is an essential addition to the customers’ perspective that you get from tracking CSAT, NPS, and CES. IQS is a perfect metric to report to your higher-ups.

Whether you’re looking for ways to bring efficiency into regular reporting or to make urgent searches easier, a conversation review tool will help you out.

3 Reasons to Switch from Spreadsheets to a Conversation Review Tool

Working in customer service can be stressful for both the agents as well as their team leads and managers. With execs pushing to improve the quality of customer service, managers are often overwhelmed by their assignments and responsibilities. Switching from spreadsheets to a conversation review tool will save you loads of time and bring efficiency to the feedback process.

“Klaus integrates directly with Zendesk, and that is a huge time-saver as it removes the need for all those manual steps – everything from pasting URLs to sending reminders and creating a rating system,” explains Valentina Thörner, Happiness Team Lead at Automattic.

If you’re ready to ditch spreadsheets and want to get going with a proper conversation review tool, check out Klaus. We’ve got years of experience in leading international and quality-focused support teams, and we’ve condensed it all into building a reliable customer service feedback tool.

Even when your customers think you’re amazing, you know you can do better. We’ve seen industry leaders, who constantly deliver CSAT of 95% and more, find ways to continually push their quality higher than they thought possible. It’ll probably work wonders for you, too.

Download The Future of Conversations [ebook]

Read more:

The Ultimate Customer Service Quality Assurance (QA) Software Guide

Customer Service Scorecard Template for Quality Assurance (QA)

Written by

Merit-valdsalu
Merit Valdsalu
Merit is the content writer at Klaus - though most of her texts have probably been ghostwritten by her rescue cat Oskar.

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