Zendesk QA
Liberty is a renowned luxury department store. With a strong brand reputation for excellence, the company aimed to elevate its customer service to match its product standards. They have used Zendesk for eight years, and Zendesk QA (formerly Klaus) for two years.
Sophie Elgar, Quality and Training Manager at Liberty, talked to us about how they made QA a pivotal role in enhancing customer experience and streamlining their teams.
Their customer service team operates from three locations: the customer-facing team in the flagship London store, a central London team of support agents, and an outsourced customer team in South Africa. Conversations from every faction of their support undergo quality assurance reviews through Zendesk QA.
Over the two years that they have been using Zendesk QA, both CSAT and IQS have consistently risen (currently at 80% IQS and 88% CSAT).
Defining luxury customer service and how to measure it
They use Zendesk as an all-in-one platform for email, phone, and chat, using Zentalk to record conversations to review through Zendesk QA. Customers can also talk to them face-to-face at their flagship London store.
In comparison with competitors, Liberty found Zendesk QA’s ease of use stood out. It had all of the features they needed for an effective quality assurance program that could involve the entire team.
At Zendesk QA, we often say that quality differs from company to company. Tracking metrics and improving KPIs may be your priorities, but teams need to first define their support goals and internal values before setting a path to improvement. Using Zendesk QA advice and ideas, Liberty were able to create a scorecard and quality program that matched their objectives.
We are always talking about ‘Liberty magic’ and what that consists of. Liberty magic is all about creating a luxury, memorable experience for the customer, and we find that this happens when agents go above and beyond on the soft skills – making the customer feel heard, special and valued, so we embedded that in our scorecard. On top of that we use up to 15 different systems on a daily basis and there are so many different products. There’s a lot of information and it’s important to keep that fresh.
Agent evaluations at Liberty are based 50% on quality (CSAT and Zendesk QA reviews), 30% on productivity, and 20% on knowledge. Sophie runs monthly 1:1 sessions with each team member for a quality-focused coaching session where they go over QA scores and data. Additionally, there are weekly emails and monthly quizzes to keep their product and promotional knowledge fresh.
What is ‘Liberty Magic’?
Liberty magic represents a customer service ethos that embodies exceptional standards. It encompasses several key principles:
- Make it special: Going beyond the basics to provide an experience that leaves customers happier than when they first engaged. This involves being fully present and engaged to deliver personalized interactions.
- Accountability: Agents taking ownership of customer inquiries, documenting internal notes to ensure transparency and reliability throughout the customer interaction.
- Growth Mindset: Maintaining a proactive approach to product, process, and promotions knowledge. Agents should offer informed assistance and adapt to evolving customer needs.
- Initiative: Proactively fulfilling their role as much as possible, e.g. using face-to-face interactions with colleagues at Liberty to find the fastest solutions, and keeping on top of their ticket workload.
- Communication: Ensuring swift, accurate, and friendly communication with customers to address their inquiries promptly. Internally, communication should always be respectful and helpful.
Maintaining consistency across every interaction
As the quality manager for outsourced, contact center, and customer-facing teams, one of Sophie’s key focuses is making sure that no matter who the customer is talking to, they receive a quality of support that is of Liberty standard.
Working with a team that’s not in the same countries, you sometimes have difficulties in terms of cultures and communication styles. We have to make sure the brand voice is being communicated consistently – whether or not a customer is talking to London or Cape Town. The flagship team, in particular, is really highly scored. They are on the ground meeting customers and handling escalated tickets about in-store purchases. Whereas in a contact center, there is more distance since interactions always start from phone, email, or chat, which can affect quality. So, we take communication tips and tricks from the flagship team to bring all team scores to that level. Zendesk’s tone shift really helps. It’s about getting the balance right: not sounding like a robot, especially if the macros are more formal, but it’s a customer the agent already has a good relationship with.
They use Zendesk’s intelligent triage to automatically sort and direct incoming tickets to the right agents, which entails AI recognizing and categorizing customer intent, sentiment, and language. Liberty want to get rid of manual triaging completely, setting up rules to direct tickets to agents who have the most expertise in each area.
Zendesk tone shift also helps them tailor responses to perfection. Liberty uses tone shift Make more friendly to offer message adjustments that will bring every response in line with the brand.
Detecting improvements and calibrating
We need to provide great customer service 100% of the time. Zendesk QA has helped us maintain focus on the consistency of quality and identify specific areas where we need to improve.
Although she conducts the majority of reviews herself, it is important for team leads to also be involved in the process. Using Assignments, she has automated the review cadence so that team members consistently receive reviews from team leads as well as herself.
Assignments feature
Regularity helps every QA reviewer understand and assess how effectively each Liberty agent adopts the brand’s tone and responds to the tonal assistance provided by Zendesk AI features.
They are able to reinforce this consistency by calibrating all feedback through Calibration sessions. These sessions use the same setup and logic as their routine QA reviews to help all reviewers calibrate their scoring. Sophie conducts monthly calibration sessions to keep all team reviews aligned.
In Zendesk QA, I find the Calibrations feature one of the most useful tools for me. When you’re a person who is constantly doing reviews, you may not remain as objective as you need to be. Calibrations get me back to the base point – I love how interactive the feature is, everyone can see the scores. We do them internally and with outsourced teams.
Coaching and tracking progress
Zendesk QA isn’t just about feedback collection; it’s a cornerstone for coaching and progress tracking. As a certified coach, Sophie uses QA as a tool for both quantitative analysis and qualitative development during sessions.
Coaching Sessions offers a space for coaches and support agents to pin conversations, make action points, and track past and planned sessions. Sophie implements regular trainings structured around establishing rapport and building customer relationships.
It’s basically a training needs analysis that I’m doing every time I’m reviewing a ticket and I give feedback directly in our sessions. In the Sessions feature I put all my notes, so they can see everything for our 1:1s. Reviews and feedback are very consistent, and we’ve got a really good process for improving right now. Zendesk QA’s ease of use really helps the team understand everything. It’s about having it front of mind for everyone, that has really helped us with higher metrics.
Consistent reviews and feedback sessions facilitated by Zendesk QA have led to a robust process for improvement at Liberty. While the organization currently maintains high service scores across all teams, there’s a continuous drive to elevate standards even further.
Quality results with Zendesk QA and plans for the future
Although their scores are impressive, Liberty has set goals to reach new heights: increasing CSAT to 90% and IQS to 85%. So how are they investing their resources to make this a reality?
- Increase the number of reviews
- Hire someone else to take on review tasks
- Conduct targeted monthly workshops based on issues picked up on through reviews
We’re at a really good place with the scores for all teams. But it’s about consistently getting it even higher. The data we’re able to get from Zendesk QA is at the core of our plans for this year.
Does Liberty’s commitment to excellent customer service inspire you?
Your team can also use QA to ensure consistency and enhance metric scores.
