Quality Assurance (QA) vs Quality Control (QC)

Introduction

Quality is paramount. Delivering a high-quality product, service, or experience is the cornerstone of creating a seamless customer journey—an ultimate goal for customer experience and contact center leaders worldwide. This significance is underscored by the numerous processes in place to ensure our deliverables meet customer needs and expectations, including quality assurance and quality control.

However, one might wonder: aren't quality assurance and quality control quite similar? What differentiates them, and why does this distinction matter?

While the difference is subtle, it is crucial to understand. This nuance can greatly impact how one organizes, manages, and evaluates performance within the organization. This understanding is particularly vital if  involved in customer-centric roles such as contact centers, customer experience (CX), or quality assurance (QA) itself.

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Quality Assurance (QA)

Quality assurance (QA) is a critical process in contact centers designed to review customer interactions and ensure agents adhere to established quality standards. This process can be managed by dedicated QA managers or team leaders who evaluate their agents' performance.  They use QA scorecards or checklists to assess the interactions against consistent criteria, such as the proper use of greetings, customer identity verification, and offering further assistance.

Manual QA evaluations are usually performed on only 1-3% of each agent's conversations due to the time-consuming nature of the process. However, advancements in QA automation technology now allow for the automatic evaluation of objective criteria on QA scorecards across 100% of customer conversations. This automation enables managers to identify performance trends on a larger scale and provide fair, data-driven coaching to their agents.

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Quality Control (QC)

Quality control (QC) is often likened to quality assurance, but the terms have distinct meanings. Quality control  refers to the set of processes a business employs to ensure its products or services meet documented quality standards. While quality assurance is a narrowly defined activity within contact centers, quality control has a broader application, particularly in product departments. For instance, quality control tests are conducted to detect defects in new products.

Quality control remains relevant in contact centers as well. In this context, it involves the operational activities undertaken by contact center leaders to maintain service quality. This may include modifying processes, systems, or agent training to reduce compliance risks, enhance agent performance, and improve the customer experience.

Moreover, contact centers can contribute to product-related quality control by sharing customer feedback on product issues. Conversation Intelligence software can help categorize and quantify these issues, providing valuable insights to the product department.  This collaboration helps the company make informed product improvement decisions and quickly identify potential defects.

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The Differences Between Quality Assurance and Quality Control

Although quality control (QC) and quality assurance (QA) activities in a contact center may overlap, they have distinct focuses and approaches. Quality control has a broader scope, ensuring that both products and services meet customer needs and expectations. In contrast, quality assurance in a contact center context is more specific, concentrating on analyzing agents’ performance to ensure they align with the business's service delivery standards.

Quality assurance (QA) and quality control (QC) serve distinct yet complementary roles within a contact center, each with its own focus, scope, methods, and key personnel. QA is primarily concerned with evaluating customer service agent performance and ensuring compliance with standards. This process is tactical, concentrating on analyzing individual agent calls to identify coaching opportunities. Common methods used in QA include call monitoring, QA scorecards, and coaching sessions. Typically, QA activities are conducted by QA managers or contact center team leaders who focus on refining agent performance and maintaining service quality.

In contrast, QC has a broader scope and focuses on ensuring the quality of both products and services delivered by the business. It adopts a strategic, organization-wide approach to maintain high-quality standards. Methods employed in QC include quality control testing, product inspections, and the collection of customer feedback. This process helps to identify and rectify any defects or issues in products or services before they reach the customer. QC activities are generally conducted by product managers and cross-functional groups, who work collaboratively to ensure that the overall output of the organization meets customer expectations and regulatory requirements.

While there is some overlap between QA and QC activities, the key difference lies in their focus and application. QA is more about ensuring that agents meet the company's service delivery expectations, whereas QC is about ensuring that the end products and services meet customer needs and expectations. Both processes are essential for maintaining high standards and improving overall performance in a contact center.

Conclusion

Quality control (QC) and quality assurance (QA) are deeply interconnected. Failing to share insights with the product team can actually complicate the team's work. A better product results in fewer customer issues, leading to fewer calls for the team and an enhanced overall customer experience.

While quality assurance within the contact center is crucial, the commitment to quality should extend beyond this realm.  As someone who interacts with customers daily, the contact center can be a rich source of product and service insights 

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