{"id":19814,"date":"2019-03-15T17:26:18","date_gmt":"2019-03-15T17:26:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/?p=19814"},"modified":"2020-07-30T12:54:42","modified_gmt":"2020-07-30T11:54:42","slug":"how-to-maintain-high-quality-conversations-with-your-customers-at-scale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/how-to-maintain-high-quality-conversations-with-your-customers-at-scale\/","title":{"rendered":"How to maintain high quality conversations with your customers at scale"},"content":{"rendered":"

Building great relationships with your customers and offering them world-class support<\/a> depends on a lot of things, but one of the most important is the quality of the conversations you have with them.<\/p>\n

If those conversations are inconsistent or unsatisfactory, you will struggle to make valuable, long-term relationships with your customers.<\/p>\n

To ensure that conversation quality stays high, however, you have to be able to measure the quality, and that can be quite challenging. There are a few common ways to measure it<\/a>, such as with Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) ratings. Other important ingredients for a quality conversation can be harder to measure, such as the product knowledge and tone<\/a> of your customer support agents.<\/p>\n

Effectively measuring our conversation quality was an issue we faced at Intercom, especially as we scaled<\/a> up so fast. Our support organization started small, with two or three people working closely together and having good visibility on each others\u2019 conversations. However, as we grew and began supporting customers across different time zones<\/a> with staff located across different offices<\/a>, it became a challenge to ensure we were giving consistently excellent support to all of our customers.<\/p>\n

“While having more support agents means that there can be a greater variance in conversation quality, you also have more talent and resources on your team”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Whether you are a growing startup or a mature company, maintaining customer conversation quality is likely a pain you have felt. Without some kind of auditing tool, it can be extremely difficult to ensure your support organization is maintaining up to date product knowledge and delivering the correct tone throughout conversations with customers.<\/p>\n

Conversation Carousel<\/h2>\n

A growing support team brings benefits, however \u2013 while having more support agents means that there can be a greater variance in conversation quality, you also have more talent and resources on your team to conduct reviews of conversation quality. With more people available to focus on this problem, we were able to develop a peer review system called Conversation Carousel<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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An internal email from Jeff<\/a>, our then-head of Customer Support and current head of Platform Partnerships, announcing Conversation Carousel<\/p><\/div>\n

This tool helps with the onboarding of new staff members and identifies those team members who need further guidance. We created an internal Ruby-on-Rails app to review conversations by leveraging our REST API<\/a> and Sidekiq<\/a>, a background processor for Ruby.<\/p>\n

When a customer support agent logs into the app, they can see reviews left by teammates on their conversations. They can also choose to fetch a number of teammate conversations in order to review them. These are pulled via Sidekiq. To ensure the review process is evenly spread across the team, everyone has to review a certain number of teammates\u2019 conversations every week. By writing some custom logic in the Rails app, conversations aren\u2019t pulled for review if they are too short or if they have been labelled as spam, for example.<\/p>\n

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Snapshot of Conversation Carousel<\/p><\/div>\n

Defining conversation criteria<\/h2>\n

A reviewer then scores a conversation based on a number of criteria. At Intercom we score tone, quality and whether the conversation followed internal processes.<\/p>\n