Introducing QA outsourcing

Did you know that offering high-quality services is crucial for success? If not, don’t worry, we will explain its importance in a bit. Maintaining great quality control regarding your company’s processes can be time and money-consuming. Because of this, many companies decide that outsourced quality assurance solutions are their best options to ensure their products and services will meet the highest standards without the need for great investments. 

Quality assurance is one of the most important services you can hire when you decide to outsource some of your business operations. Outsourcing quality assurance is a big step, so we know it is important to better understand what is call center quality assurance, best practices for quality assurance, pros and cons of qa outsourcing, and more. With our guide, you will have a clear picture of it, so you can make an informed decision when considering outsourcing quality assurance services.

What is QA outsourcing?

Call center quality assurance involves hiring an external partner or vendor to handle a company’s quality control. The thing with these external specialists is that they need to focus on ensuring that your products and services meet your defined quality standards, whether they were previously set or recently established. The qa process varies from software testing and compliance to customer experience audits. Outsourcing quality assurance allows businesses to have global expertise, smooth their operations, and enhance their overall quality.

It doesn’t matter if you are an expert in the world of outsourcing, or if you are planning to hire outsourced services until now, you will need to keep measuring the team’s performance and help them maintain your quality standards. Outsourcing can lead to miscommunication or misunderstandings sometimes, which can damage your reputation when it comes to your support, content moderation, or other business processes. 

That’s one of the reasons why quality assurance is important. If you want to understand a bit more about them, don’t worry, we will be discussing about the advantages and challenges you will face when you outsource quality assurance.

Pros and cons of QA outsourcing

1. Cost Efficiency: One of the most significant advantages when you outsource quality assurance is the potential for cost savings. Outsourcing eliminates the need for extensive investments in infrastructure or in-house staff, while still providing access to skilled professionals at a lower cost. This approach allows companies to scale their quality assurance efforts as needed, without the overhead expenses tied to maintaining internal teams.

2. Access to Expertise: By hiring outsourced quality assurance services, companies gain access to specialists with expertise in assessing service quality, compliance, and customer experience standards. These external teams bring in-depth knowledge of the latest methodologies and tools to ensure that service delivery aligns with industry best practices. According to a report by Deloitte, companies that outsource quality assurance can enhance service quality by leveraging third-party experts who specialize in these areas. 

Your company can gain access to a global talent pool without having to invest a lot of resources in the scouting and interviewing processes. You are taking advantage of the outsourcing company’s network and having the opportunity to have people from different backgrounds collaborate with your quality standards.

3. Faster Response Time: Speed is essential in service-based industries, where quality needs to be maintained in real-time. QA outsourcing enables companies to improve service delivery speed by allowing the quality teams to operate across multiple time zones, ensuring continuous monitoring and fast issue resolution for service-based operations.

4. Focus on Core Competencies: Outsourcing quality assurance for services allows companies to concentrate on their primary competencies, whether they are client management, service innovation, or customer support. With an external team handling QA, internal resources can focus on strategic initiatives, leading to improved service offerings and customer satisfaction.

5. Scalability: Fluctuating service demand can be challenging to manage. Outsourced quality assurance services provide the flexibility to scale efforts up or down based on demand, without overextending internal resources. This adaptability is valuable during peak service periods or when launching new service offerings. This allows your QA process to include or exclude team members depending on your company’s needs, without having to deal with high investments

6. 24/7 availability: One important benefit that your company will be receiving from outsourced quality assurance solutions is around-the-clock coverage, or in simple terms, 24/7 quality assurance. The thing is that when you decide to partner with a QA outsourcing provider, you will be getting access to global teams that are operating across different time zones. What does this mean for your company? It means that you will be ensuring your quality assurance processes won’t stop when your internal teams log off. If you offer 24/7 support, you need to have quality assurance processes in place that will help you identify gaps in your service to take action immediately.

7. Improves customer experience: Outsourcing quality assurance will significantly improve the customer experience by leveraging unbiased evaluations and a structured QA process. When you decide to hire a third-party team, they will bring to your table a fresh perspective on aspects like call handling, tone, script adherence, and empathy. Maybe you haven’t thought all of this through, so this will lead to improvements on your metrics. As time passes by, this will drive consistency, boost customer satisfaction, and support any of your current loyalty efforts. When you make sure this is done right, outsourced QA processes align with best practices for quality assurance and enhance overall service delivery.

Challenges of outsourcing quality assurance

1. Miscommunication: When you are working with external QA teams, you can experience an increase in miscommunication, especially if your expectations, processes, or metrics aren't clearly defined once you start working with them. Miscommunication can lead to your team not understanding too well what your products and services are about, leading to a false sense of quality or believing they meet quality standards when they don’t. 
2. Problems for the team to understand your company: Outsourcing partners may struggle to fully understand your brand values, company culture, or customer needs. When this happens, you are negatively affecting your customer satisfaction and their overall experience with your company. This gap can impact how well the outsourced quality assurance team evaluates interactions and analyzes your set of quality standards. Having a clear onboarding process and ongoing training are key to closing this gap and ensuring evaluations are meaningful.
3. Language barriers: While accessing to a global talent base is a great advantage, you can experience a negative aspect of it too. If your QA outsourcing team operates in a different region, the language barrier can affect both communication and the quality of feedback. This is particularly important when assessing soft skills like tone or empathy, which are more specific and culturally sensitive. Take this into consideration if you want to have an offshore team handling your qa processes and workflows.
4. Lack of control: When you outsource quality assurance, you give up some control over how evaluations are done and how insights are delivered. While this isn’t always a problem, you may still think of it as a concern if the outsourced team isn’t closely aligned with your internal standards. You need to establish from the beginning how the performance is going to be measured and how often it will take place.
5. Higher training costs: Having to onboard an external team to your systems, tools, and customer service standards will most likely require significant time and financial investment. This will happen, especially if your QA process is complex, so you should expect to spend both time and money to get the outsourced team running your operations smoothly.
6. Security risks: Outsourcing quality assurance involves sharing sensitive customer data, which can come with security and compliance concerns. You’ll need to take special care of your QA provider, ensuring proper data handling protocols are in place, and make sure they align with privacy standards to mitigate potential risks.

Overcoming the challenges of QA outsourcing

While Quality Assurance Outsourcing offers several advantages, it is not without its challenges. One potential concern is the risk of miscommunication between the internal team and the outsourced QA provider. To mitigate this, it’s essential to establish clear communication channels, define expectations upfront, and regularly monitor the performance of the external team. Another way to avoid this, companies need to establish structured communication plans and align on what call center quality assurance means for their specific goals.

Another challenge is ensuring that the external QA provider fully understands the company’s unique service requirements and quality standards. To address this, businesses should choose partners with proven expertise in their industry and invest time in comprehensive onboarding and knowledge transfer. According to the World Quality Report, close collaboration between internal teams and outsourced QA providers is critical for achieving the best results.

How can you avoid problems related to language barriers? You can filter your hiring process and hire people who speak your language or neutral languages that you speak, like English or Spanish. This way, you will avoid any unnecessary complications. 

Are you experiencing a lack of control when you hire an outsourced team? Don’t worry, you are not making a critical mistake, since this can be solved easily by setting up clear performance metrics and establishing a recurring performance evaluation. This way, you and the outsourcing vendor will know exactly what areas of opportunity need to be improved and act on them.

Outsourcing comes with some hidden costs, some of which are related to training. The best way to avoid being surprised by new costs like this, is to save a percentage of the investment for new costs. This way, you will avoid having to invest way more than it was originally planned.

By outsourcing some services and business operations, you are facing the risk of having data breaches and having your customer data mishandled. You need to set clear guidelines that back you up and help you avoid crises. You can ask your outsourcing partner to help you determine the safety protocols that will be established, so you can both be on the same page.

The future of outsourcing quality assurance

The demand for QA outsourcing services is expected to grow as more companies recognize the value of outsourcing non-core functions to specialized providers. With advancements in automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, outsourcing QA processes is becoming more sophisticated, enabling faster, more accurate testing processes.

So, what are we expecting to see in the near future for QA outsourcing? These are some of the trends we believe will be rising soon:

Implementation of AI in quality assurance processes

You must be living under a rock if you are not aware that AI is truly revolutionizing QA and other call center services. You can automate routine tasks, automate quality scores, identify quality gaps, and many other benefits. So, it is only natural to believe that more companies will start introducing the use of artificial intelligence on their quality assurance processes.  

In the coming years, we believe that we’ll see AI being more widely used in outsourced quality assurance services. This will help teams detect issues in real time, deal with higher volumes of data, and even predict trends. This will not only be reducing the manual effort but also it will enhance the evaluation consistency.

Data-driven QA process

One of the most human skills we possess is our ability to have a sort of “sixth sense”. This sixth sense is related to or also known as a gut-feeling, while this has been really helpful in the past, we should not rely entirely on it, and even less so when it comes to decisions that can affect business processes.

The future of QA outsourcing is all about leveraging data and using said data to make better informed decisions. Outsourcing companies are working on optimizing the use of analytics to drive better insights, improve team members’ training, and align QA results with business KPIs. 

Do you still not understand the importance of this? Well, a data-driven QA process allows companies to make smarter decisions at a faster rate, and outsourced teams will be expected to deliver dashboards and performance analytics as part of their standard service.

Increase in cybersecurity protocols

The thing with outsourcing is that you will inevitably share sensitive data, you can’t avoid this most of the time, so as companies outsource these services and more sensitive customer interactions take place, data security protocols need to be top priorities. 

What can you expect from the future? You can expect that it will bring more strict cybersecurity requirements for QA outsourcing providers, which will include stronger compliance measures, encrypted data handling, and stricter access controls. Expect security to be a non-negotiable part of any outsourced quality assurance agreement moving forward.

Smooth CX integration

What is call center quality assurance without it focusing on customer experience? You need to know that your customer expectations evolve, so your QA outsourcing needs to be driven toward a more holistic CX approach. Rather than simply scoring their interactions, outsourced teams will be expected to assess how each touchpoint contributes to the overall experience. This means that you need to align your QA metrics with customer satisfaction and loyalty indicators. This way, you will be ensuring that quality assurance processes aren’t just about performance, but about impact.

Best practices for quality assurance outsourcing

These are the best practices for quality assurance outsourcing that you should follow in order to have a great strategy at your business:

Best practices for QA

Evaluate your current QA processes

There are certain steps you need to follow to outsource quality assurance, the first one is to take a closer look at your existing qa process. Your quality assurance processes need to be evaluated to know what’s working and what is missing. Understanding your workflows’ strengths and weaknesses will help you identify your needs, facilitating your outsourced quality assurance team’s life. 

This also helps you set realistic expectations and have a better set of goals, this way you won’t have false expectations of what the team can do for you.

Define your objectives and goals

Your goals need to be clear for the team to know exactly what you need and what you are expecting from them. You need to be realistic about what they can do for you, and explicitly let them know if you want to improve your call performance or elevate your customer experience. The backbone of your strategy will be shaped by the goals you set, so having clear objectives is not negotiable, it is a must-have.

Combine human and technological efforts

Do you know what a balanced qa process looks like? Balanced quality assurance processes are those that combine the efforts of both humans and technology. The human ability to read in between the lines and the high-volume capacity of AI combined ensure a winning strategy. This way you will have a better decision-making process, helping your company achieve the goals you set.

Evaluate existing outsourcing vendors

When you are considering to outsource quality assurance, you need to evaluate the existing options before jumping into one. Analyze their pricing, pros and cons, reviews, case studies, and what they can do for your specific problem. Research everything you can, and if you need more information, ask them to provide it.

Select your best options

Once you have curated a list of your best options, you can start having meetings with them to ask them specific questions to help you filter out your best option. See this as a long-term relationship that will involve a commitment from both sides to make it work. So, you will need to make sure the best company is one that adjusts to your budget, is a cultural fit, and can help you solve your specific needs.

Hire and train your team

After you have selected your outsourcing partner, it is time to hire your new team. You can collaborate on this process or fully trust your outsourced partner with it. We recommend that you be an active participant in this process, this way, you both will contribute your points of view and help each other comprehend what the ideal team looks like. 

Once you have your team in place, make sure they receive the best training so they can understand your company, culture, products, and customer needs. The best way for your team to surpass expectations is by preparing them to face any possible situation and updating them on new trends.

Evaluate their performance regularly

Training is not enough, you need to optimize and personalize it. The only way you will be able to prepare your team is by evaluating their performance and discovering areas of opportunity. How can you measure their performance? With the metrics you set, and by asking your customers to provide feedback.

Remember to define how often the performance meetings should take place, and what actions will be taken after.

Continuous improvement and optimization

Quality assurance processes evolve as your business does, too. You need to have time for regular process reviews, tool upgrades, and feedback sessions. You may be wondering why it is important? Well, that’s simple, because the best quality assurance processes are never static, they’re always improving based on results, data, and real-world changes in customer expectations. This means that your needs will also evolve as time progresses, meaning you will need to define new goals later on.

Horatio’s outsourced quality assurance services

Now more than ever, service quality can make or break a company’s reputation. Quality Assurance Outsourcing has emerged as a powerful solution for ensuring excellence in service delivery.

By outsourcing QA functions, businesses can achieve cost savings, access specialized expertise, accelerate service timelines, and gain the flexibility to scale operations. Despite challenges, with the right strategy and a reliable partner like Horatio, companies can consistently deliver top-quality services, ensuring great customer service and maintaining a competitive edge.