Creating rating categories for scorecards

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Quality Assurance (QA) or Workforce Engagement Management (WEM)

Quick Look: Zendesk QA > Settings > Scorecards

Besides taking advantage of the existing Zendesk Quality Assurance system categories, you can also create custom rating categories tailored to your organization's needs.

Rating categories allow you to effectively assess customer conversations.

Internal Quality Score (IQS) is calculated based on these categories, helping you evaluate and improve your customer support.

This article contains the following topics:

• Understanding rating categories for scorecards
• Common rating categories
• Best practices for naming categories
• Creating manual custom rating categories
• Creating exact text-match custom rating categories

Related articles

• Accessing and managing your scorecards, categories, and root causes
• Viewing and managing Categories

Understanding rating categories for scorecards

There are countless ways to build a rating system. The key is to find what works best for your team.

Proper rating categories help streamline the review process and ensure consistent quality assessments in Zendesk QA.

Before creating categories, it’s important to understand the following information about categories and how they’re used in Zendesk QA:

• Enabling automatic scoring allows Zendesk QA to automatically evaluate and score agents. Autoscoring categories are indicated by a hologram () icon.
• When a new category is created, only new incoming conversations with a Closed or Solved status are automatically analyzed and rated based on the category conditions. It may take some time for the scores to load due to necessary calculations.
• To qualify for analysis, conversations must include at least one message from both the customer and the agent, with a minimum word count of 10.
• When AutoQA is on, user interactions are automatically scored with AI.
• AutoQA doesn’t evaluate existing conversations, spam conversations, or historical data on dashboards. However, existing conversations with a status of Closed or Solved that are updated after the category is added are also automatically analyzed and rated. As a result, you may notice a conversation that has already been analyzed and rated being analyzed and rated again in a new workspace.
• If no matches are found, "N/A" is assigned. AutoQA may also return an "N/A" evaluation for certain categories when there is insufficient information to provide an accurate rating.

Common rating categories

There are countless ways to build a rating system. The key is to find what works best for your team.

Some of the most commonly used rating categories in Zendesk QA are:

• Spelling and grammar: Did the agent use correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation?
• Comprehension: Did the agent understand the issue and its root cause fully?
• Solution offered: Did the agent use the correct process and offer a correct solution according to internal guidelines?
• Tone of voice: Was the response personal and 'on brand'?
• Closing: Did the agent anticipate any upcoming issues and go the extra mile to help solve them before closing the ticket?
• Documentation: Did the agent document everything correctly internally?

Best practices for naming categories

Deciding how to name your rating categories is crucial for clarity and ease of use.

When naming your categories, use the following best practices:

• Keep the names of your categories simple to maintain a clean and user-friendly interface.
• If additional context is needed, add details in the category’s description, which is shown when hovering over the category name.

For example:

Category name: Solution

Category description: Did the agent provide a solution or a workaround for the customer?

Creating manual custom rating categories

Manual categories are created and scored by human reviewers.

Admins and account managers can create new manual custom rating categories.

To create a new manual custom category

1. In Quality Assurance, click your profile icon in the bottom-left corner.
2. Click the Settings () icon.
3. In the sidebar () under Account, click Scorecards.
4. Click Create and select Category.
5. Select the Manual custom category type.

   

6. Enter a Category name and Description for reviewers (optional).

   This is displayed when hovering over a category name while rating a conversation.

7. Click Create category.

Creating exact text-match custom rating categories

Besides taking advantage of the existing Zendesk QA system categories, you can also create custom rating categories tailored to your organization's needs.

Admins and account managers can create new exact text-match custom rating categories.

Exact text-match categories use autoscoring to identify specific keywords or phrases and evaluate agent responses that meet or do not meet your quality standards.

You can create up to 20 custom AutoQA categories per account.

To create a new exact text-match custom category

1. In Quality Assurance, click your profile icon in the bottom-left corner.
2. Click the Settings () icon.
3. In the sidebar () under Account, click Scorecards.
4. Click Create and select Category.
5. Select the Exact text-match custom category type.

   

6. Enter a Category name and Description for reviewers (optional). This is displayed when hovering over a category name while rating a conversation.
7. Type or paste the keywords and phrases you want autoscoring to identify in agent messages, with one word or phrase per line.

   You can add multiple rows and use the following conditions for complex findings:

   Condition name	And condition name
   is	is any of
   	is all of
   contains	contains any of
   	contains all of
   is not	is not any of
   	is not all of
   does not contain	does not contain any of
   	does not contain all of

   Type '/' to add the variable {..}. You can use this dynamic content placeholder {..} to represent any name. For example, “Hello {··}!”
8. Select how you want to automatically rate the agent. For example, if the agent did not offer a demo, and the text does not include “let’s schedule a demo,” the agent receives a negative () score for this category. Otherwise, you can choose to score them positively () or use ‘N/A’ if unsure.
9. Click Create category.
10. Add the category to your scorecards.