Zendesk Quality Assurance, Done With What You Have
You can run good Zendesk quality assurance with a view and a spreadsheet. The tooling helps at scale and doesn't create the discipline.
Zendesk quality assurance with what you already have
Build a view of recently solved tickets, filtered to one agent, and review five a month each. Score them against a rubric everyone has read. Keep the results somewhere shared.
That's a functioning QA programme and it costs nothing. Teams that can't sustain it will not sustain it with better software either.
What to sample beyond random
When the QA product is worth it
Zendesk sells a quality product that automates sampling, scores conversations at scale and spots sentiment. It earns its price above roughly twenty agents, where manual sampling stops being statistically meaningful and starts being a full-time job.
Below that, a rubric and a recurring calendar entry does the same work.
What QA keeps finding
Run it for a month and one pattern shows up in nearly every team: two agents answered the same customer about the same problem, sometimes differently.
It scores as a quality failure and it's not one. Neither agent could see the other ticket. No coaching fixes it, because the cause is in the queue rather than in the person.
Frequently asked questions
Is Zendesk quality management a separate product?
Zendesk quality management is sold as an add-on for reviewing and scoring conversations at scale. You can run perfectly good QA without it, using a view, a sample and a shared scorecard.
How many tickets should Zendesk quality assurance review?
Five to ten per agent per month, plus every reopen and every low CSAT with a comment.
Is Zendesk QA worth buying?
Above about twenty agents, usually. Below that a rubric and a calendar entry does the same job.
The failure nobody can coach
Two agents answering one customer differently is caused by a duplicate, not by either agent.
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