Why Customer Experience Quality Assurance Is Key to Omnichannel Support

Adding more communication channels doesn’t automatically guarantee happier customers. Sure, you probably track your CSAT, monitor your FCR, and have a solid read on how specific agents perform on each channel.

But do you know what your customers experience when they jump from one platform to the next?

Traditional quality assurance was built around individual touchpoints: select a few phone calls, grade them, give the rep some feedback, and start over. However, that method won’t give you the visibility you need once your clients start bouncing between channels.

So, how can you make sure your omnichannel customer experience quality assurance program keeps pace as your communication options multiply? Keep reading to discover the metrics you need to track the level of service you offer clients and how AI can help you scale.

2% Reviewed, 98% Unseen

Typically, customer experience quality assurance programs audit somewhere between 2% and 5% of interactions. If you only operate on one platform, even this small sample can give you a snapshot of how your staff is performing and how satisfied your clients are.

But once you move to omnichannel support, that model will no longer give adequate coverage. Your QA team may end up reviewing 30 interactions a week. Across five channels, that gives you just six per channel, which isn’t enough to catch recurring issues or spot patterns.

Voice calls still hog the majority of evaluators’ time, because it’s the channel they’ve reviewed the longest and the one their grading templates were tailor-made for. At the same time, live chat volumes are skyrocketing, so your customer experience quality assurance teams end up lagging behind the fastest-growing channel.

You might think that customer input would bridge this gap, but this isn’t always the case. Fewer than one in three consumers share direct feedback with businesses, based on a report published by Qualtrics.

This means the clients experiencing poor service on your under-monitored channels will move to a competitor without giving you a heads-up. Worse, they may start sharing their complaints online, affecting how others perceive your brand.

With AI-powered quality monitoring, though, you can flip this script. Instead of cherry-picking which channels to sample, AI tools can assess 100% of interactions across social media, voice calls, email, and chat.

Different Benchmarks

Delivering true omnichannel support means your customer’s journey needs to be seamless no matter how they decide to reach out. 

However, when your company’s customer experience quality assurance benchmarks vary by channel, your clients can end up receiving different levels of service. Your customers will notice these inconsistencies, even if your dashboard doesn’t show them.

Keep in mind that you’re not evaluating the same type of interaction across every touchpoint. Here are the quirks you should keep in mind:

• Live chat exchanges: They tend to be shorter, more transactional, and lightning-fast.
• Phone calls: You need to account for vocal inflections and longer troubleshooting steps.
• Email: This channel sits somewhere in between; it offers more room for detail but is generally less urgent.

You won’t get a clear picture if you apply the same criteria to all three. For instance, your voice support representatives shouldn’t be benchmarked against the rapid-fire response times expected in chat.

Customer experience quality assurance frameworks that ignore these channel-specific dynamics often miss important issues or penalize agents for doing what works best in that format.

However, you shouldn’t build separate QA programs for each channel. Instead, nail down one clear definition of great service for your entire company, then tweak how your QA team measures it based on the type of interaction.

This matters even more if you’ve decided to outsource your customer experience function. One of the biggest customer experience outsourcing risks is working with a provider that evaluates each communication platform separately, using different benchmarks and reporting schedules.

Context Loss

Now, consider how your customer experience quality assurance team tracks what happens when a client crosses from one channel to another.

Traditional QA frameworks usually judge engagements one by one. A rep handled a chat well? Give them a high mark. A phone call went smoothly? Grade it. But if you have an omnichannel setup, you need to assess the full customer journey.

A client might start a conversation in live chat, follow up by email the next day, then call if neither channel delivers a resolution. That’s a single experience made of three distinct touchpoints.

Switching channels shouldn’t mean starting from scratch. But that’s what tends to happen when your second and third agents have no context from the first interaction. They’d have to ask your client to explain the issue again to start working toward a resolution.

A QA team that scores each interaction in isolation may end up rating all of them as acceptable, even when the overall experience was frustrating.

According to Zendesk, 76% of consumers would choose a business that lets them share text, images, and video in the same conversation thread without restarting. So, most customers expect continuity. If your customer experience quality assurance team doesn’t measure it, you’ll have no way of knowing whether your company delivers this.

AI solves this common CX problem by instantly pulling up a client’s history across every platform, so they don’t have to repeat themselves. That said, your QA process still needs to verify that your reps are putting that background information to use.

How to Create an Effective Customer Experience Quality Assurance Process

You’ve seen what can go wrong when you evaluate your company’s omnichannel support one touchpoint at a time. Luckily, you don’t have to tear your whole system down to fix it.

Just a few simple tweaks to how you evaluate interactions can make your customer experience quality assurance function more effective. Better yet, the same steps apply whether your CX operation is internal, outsourced, or a mix of both.

Unified Scoreboards with Format-Specific Adjustments

You need one set of quality standards that defines what your customers expect from your brand. You can then add adjustments that reflect each channel’s dynamics.

For example, you should lean more heavily on speed and accuracy as benchmarks for chats. As for voice calls, put more emphasis on empathy and how thoroughly the agent diagnoses the issue. Finally, use both to calculate the overall quality score.

AI-powered monitoring makes this kind of unified scoring realistic to pull off. Without it, you’d be stuck manually reviewing interactions across every channel to build an accurate picture of performance.

Cross-Channel Journey Evaluation

Your QA team should track interactions that span multiple channels and evaluate the handoff process. Was the customer forced to reiterate the issue? Did the agent use the transferred context? Did the resolution path continue from where the last representative left off?

To make this work, your customer experience quality assurance team should tag multi-platform conversations in your ticketing system. That way, supervisors will have a complete picture of the customer’s journey instead of separate snapshots from each platform.

Most customer experience quality assurance programs overlook this, even though it directly impacts omnichannel CSAT.

QA Standards for Outsourced Operations 

If you’re working with a CX partner, their QA model should be the first thing you audit.

When it comes to customer experience outsourcing quality assurance, you need answers to these questions. First off, how do they grade interactions across different platforms? Second, do they track the full cross-channel customer journey? And finally, when a quality issue pops up, how fast do they report it?

Since we’ve covered how AI can help, ask your provider whether they use these tools to improve wait times and low CSAT.

You should also have standardized benchmarks if you’re running a hybrid CX model. These customer experience outsourcing performance metrics include CSAT, FCR, and re-contact rate. Set these in your SLAs and track them in shared dashboards.

Customer Experience Quality Assurance with FlairsTech

Every obstacle we’ve covered in this piece is exactly what our managed CX model is built to overcome.

With AIMY, our exclusive AI tool, your QA team can review 100% of conversations across voice calls, emails, and chats in real time. Each one is assessed against the criteria you define. This way, you can see where quality is slipping without relying on a small sample.

AIMY also functions as a knowledge retrieval tool. Your agents can use it to find relevant answers during live conversation instead of jumping between systems. Better yet, when a client moves from one touchpoint to another, it helps maintain context.

Thanks to this system, agents have reported a 10–15% boost in CSAT, and compliance errors have decreased by 30%. The numbers speak for themselves: a 30%+ increase in FCR, a 41% decrease in cost-per-contact, and a 75% reduction in abandonment rates.

You also get round-the-clock support in more than six languages, backed by ISO certifications and GDPR compliance.

If your current customer experience quality assurance setup can’t keep up with the number of channels you’re running, book a call, and we’ll map an alternative model for your business.

Key Takeaways

• Omnichannel support makes tracking quality more complex. Every new channel you add chops up your sample size, introduces new variables, and creates blind spots that conventional QA can’t pinpoint.
• Sample-sized customer experience quality assurance setups that work for a single channel become unreliable once you’ve got four or five different ones. Most often, the fastest-growing platforms end up with the least amount of supervision.
• Your customer experience quality assurance function should assess your customers’ journey across channels instead of focusing on isolated touchpoints.
• You should set unified SLAs when working with a CX partner. Your customer experience outsourcing metrics need to track CSAT for each platform, QA scores broken down by both channel and agent, and re-contact rates.
• AI tools make 100% cross-channel coverage possible. They let you audit everything without having to hire a massive QA team to keep up with your growing list of communication channels.

Frequently Asked Questions