Customer Service Quality Assurance Interview Questions

So you’re here because you’re considering a career hop, want to hire a quality expert, or are a little lost – in any case, welcome! We’re scratching at the most common customer service quality assurance specialist interview questions. 

In customer service, quality is currency. 

Specializing in this niche is a smart move for support professionals who like digging into the why of processes and performance. Hiring a specialist is a shrewd step for businesses wanting a competitive edge. 

Job brief

Customer Service Quality Assurance Specialist (or Manager or Analyst) is quite the hairball-inducing mouthful – the role is sometimes known just as Support QA. 

The responsibilities boil down to improving quality and maintaining high customer service standards by: 

• Establishing and/or strengthening a support QA program
• Conducting/assigning internal feedback reviews
• Tracking quality metrics
• Providing insights for coaching purposes 

Your role is to make sure the wheels of your 360° support QA program are turning smoothly. This involves examining processes and guidelines, reviewing conversations or organizing reviews, providing actionable feedback to team/s, identifying coaching opportunities, and using data to track progress. 

Customer Service Quality Assurance Specialist Interview Questions

✨Why are you applying for this role?
✨How do you define customer support quality?
✨How do you measure quality?
✨How do you improve customer satisfaction?
✨Which tools do you have experience with?
✨What is the greatest challenge you’ve faced in quality assurance?

And now we bring you the answers that will definitely get you the role!*

*Job offer not guaranteed. Klaus cannot be held responsible for recruitment outcomes. Answers and advice intend to inspire and add juice to your existing cognitive functions & experiences, not to be repeated verbatim. Feline guidance advised.

Why are you applying for this role?

A general question you can expect in most interviews. Can also come under the guise of ‘what makes you suitable for this role?’, ‘why do you want to be a customer service QA specialist?’, etc. 

However, your answer cannot be general.

You want to demonstrate a solid understanding of the job brief and the company’s current performance. In other words, show the interviewer that you’ve done your research. 

Talk about the importance of customer service quality: making a customer happy will increase their loyalty and make them less likely to go to your competitor next time. 

If you know that the company you’re applying to has a solid reputation, talk about why you appreciate that and want to bolster their efforts. If you know that the company you’re applying to needs to improve its reputation, don’t say this outright, but elaborate on why you want to help bring its support team to a high standard. 

Include experience that you already have. Never been a quality specialist before? No problem – if you come from a support background, use specific examples of times when you went the extra mile to ensure you provided quality service to your customers. 

Stat to memorize
People are twice as likely to talk about a negative experience than a positive one.

How do you define customer service quality?

Customer service quality is defined by: 

• Ease of use for the customer
• Quick response time
• Correct and consistent style and tone of voice
• Being customer-centric 

From a business point of view, a quality conversation likely also entails the support rep driving product engagement and growth. 

Find the definition of customer service quality in greater detail here.

Of course, you don’t have to memorize this perfectly. But you have to be able to show your awareness of the full scope of customer service.

Bonus points for including an example of exceptional customer service. Maybe it’s a circumstance in which you were the customer, or the agent, or even something you can find on the company you’re interviewing with. Failing all that, find a fun example online.

How do you measure customer service quality?

As a quality specialist, it’s your responsibility to track support team performance and align processes with goals. There are two ways to do this: internal reviews and tracking metrics. 

Internal conversation reviews are a vital part of the quality assurance process. It is the only way to measure agent performance against internal company standards and goals. Customer service quality reviews help you pinpoint weaknesses or strengths in processes and give team members direct, actionable feedback. You might mention specific topics that you think are important to include in reviews such as accuracy, style and tone, or personalization.

Bonus points for mentioning tools that help you automate and track quality reviews (spoiler alert: manual reviewing is tedious and prone to error). 

Tracking metrics is also a vital part of your job. Companies will expect you to mention CSAT – a golden metric for many support teams. However, you also need to include IQS (measured through internal reviews), FRT, and NPS. 

How do you improve customer satisfaction?

Although it may seem like a customer service QA specialist has a huge cluster of responsibilities, it really comes down to making the customer happy. 

Your role is to smooth the path for agents to do this. This means: 

• Making sure processes are effective and understood;
• Providing teams with the feedback they need to improve;
• Tracking metrics to identify weak points;
• Helping to construct and bolster onboarding and coaching programs.

Tip: Talk about how support teams are not just a cost center for customers to solve their problems. Customer satisfaction should be embedded deep into company values, fuelling product development and sales/marketing strategies.

Check out how Rentman embed these values into their company ethos. 

Which tools do you have experience with?

This one is fairly self-explanatory, but don’t worry if the list of software you have hands-on experience with isn’t lengthy. 

Talk instead about best practices for using tools. Some help you connect with customers – channels like Intercom and LiveChat. Some help you conduct quality reviews and track progress – platforms like Klaus and Maestro QA. Showing that you understand the landscape of support QA tools and customer service software will impress the interviewer, even if you haven’t used them extensively. 

What is the greatest challenge you’ve faced in quality assurance?

Some examples for inspiration: 

Doing manual QA 

Using spreadsheets for quality reviews causes maintenance commotion. Many support professionals know how cumbersome the admin of support QA becomes when you don’t have access to the right tools. 

Sound familiar? Here’s your chance to discuss how understanding, improving & scaling support quality is a lot easier on a QA platform. Not only is it time-saving, but you are given a much more sophisticated outlook with automation, data tracking, and AI at your disposal. 

Aligning reviewers and categories 

As a QA specialist, you may be conducting every review personally. But as teams scale, this gets much harder to manage.

When there are multiple reviewers, you also run the risk of multiple opinions. You need cohesion for any outcome to be useful – if a conversation is reviewed differently by three different people, you have a problem. 

Discuss how important it is to conduct regular calibration sessions. And how as the quality expert, you will take charge to align reviewers and promote the value of constructive feedback. 

Purrfect for if you have experience as an agent, but not yet in QA: 

You did everything right but the customer left a bad review

This happens a lot – for example, the customer is angry because they weren’t offered a refund or free trial, so marks the conversation as unsatisfactory. But, as a support rep, you followed the rulebook to a T. 

Talk about the importance of quality assurance in separating what a customer thinks is bad service from actual bad service. A stellar review program would catch out problems like this, and you wouldn’t have to worry about red herrings looking like red flags. 

Last but not least, remember to smile. 

Now you’re clued up on how to answer any support QA interview question that might be thrown your way (or know what to throw if you’re the recruiter!).

Time for you to wander the online support quality realm for more advice, or to find your dream role: 

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