Team B365! Meet one of the best QA Officers around

At Benchmark 365 we pride ourselves on our incredible people. So we thought this week we would introduce you to one of newest team members – Khristine. Hear's what she had to say

Tell us a little bit about yourself?
My name is Khristine and I’m the (QA) Officer for our team here at Benchmark 365.

Why did you choose Quality Assurance as your career?
I feel quite lucky in that both of my mother and grandmother were English teachers and they taught me from a young age to speak and write very clearly and professionally in English.

Helping our customer service staff and engineers communicate with  our partners and their customers really drives me and motivates me and I get to see the positive results every day in our customer feedback.

What does a Quality Assurance Officer do?
My role entails developing processes and standards for handling customer support and customer incidents. My primary focus is on creating high quality written and verbal communications from our team to our partners and their customers.

Why do you believe Quality is important in an MSP?
In my experience working with engineers or technicians I have found that, even though they all are great English speakers, ‘tech talk’ sometimes gets in their way.

I think this is true all over the world in MSP’s and other IT related businesses. So working with our team to improve this I believe is very important. I also believe that our communication on the phone or by a ticket or an email should always be easy for a non-IT person to understand.

What sort of things do you do to set quality standards at Benchmark 365? First, when we hire someone at Benchmark 365 they go through an extensive training course. As a technical company, there is a considerable amount of IT related training.

Since I joined the company we now also dedicate a large portion of time to training each individual on communication processes. I really think this is a point of difference for us.  We spend so much time on training and developing our people to ensure quality standards are met all the time.

Even after the initial training I run regular 1 on 1’s and group training to drive further improvement.  I develop individualised plans for the team so they always know what’s working and what can be improved.

When I’m not training I’m constantly reviewing our ticket notes and this helps me design better systems and processes for our team.

How do you know you’ve been successful in your role?
Well of course we’re always raising the bar and trying new things.  I’m here every day with my team getting to see the results in real time and if I see something that can be improved I get to work developing a new process and training our people.

It also helps that we measure customer feedback on every call or ticket using ‘CSAT’. Through this I can see if customers are happy and giving us positive scores. That’s a really good feeling knowing I’m making a positive difference!

What advice do you have for MSPs?
In my experience customers have very high expectations when it comes to communication. Times have changed and I think training your people to be good communicators and follow standardized processes is really important in a modern MSP – no matter where you are in the world.

And that’s a wrap on this  Team Spotlight. We’ll be running our team spotlight on a regular basis so stay tuned!