The complete guide to intelligent scoring

What is intelligent scoring?

We see intelligent scores all the time, often without questioning their origin.

Let’s take the example of restaurant safety ratings. We’ve been socialized to understand that an A is better than a B, which is better than a C, and so on. This understanding helps us decide which ratings we’re willing to risk, and which we might pass on when choosing a restaurant for a quick lunch.

Behind the scenes, over fifty different criteria—each weighted according to their likelihood of causing foodborne illness—are distilled into a single score, which then is ranked on a scale and placed in public for potential diners to see.

Rather than forcing diners to sift through pages of information, the single measurement quickly displays a cohesive story about the facility’s state so restaurant-goers can make their own informed decisions about where to eat.

This single score is an “intelligent” score because it takes into account many disparate criteria and compiles it into one easily-understood rating.

This is just one example of how scores can be compiled from multiple different criteria for ease of understanding. Whether it’s getting a quick snapshot of digital interaction data, judging the performance of all your digital channels, or measuring agent quality, intelligent scoring can be an effective way of seeing the big picture at a glance.

For many businesses, the most pertinent use of Intelligent Scoring is for measuring agent quality, customer experience, sales efficacy, legal risks, or even to monitor consumer reactions to current events.

Free eBook: 2023 Contact Center Trends Report

Why does Intelligent Scoring matter?

Scoring effectively is key for understanding your performance both internally and externally. In the interest of time, team effort and a nuanced understanding, you don’t want to be evaluating customer experience data in a siloed vacuum.

Intelligent Scoring can answer questions like:

• Which contact center agents are struggling to answer questions about new products?
• Which agents are better equipped for chat customer service as opposed to phone channels?
• How can I improve my agent training materials based on score discrepancies between new agents and more tenured agents?
• Which interactions have multiple important indicators of legal risk?
• Which customers are good candidates for proactive outreach based on poor experiences with company policy?
• Which customers are having poor experiences with my brand, despite having interacted with highly trained agents?
• Which current events are my customer base reacting most strongly about, and how can I future-proof my organization’s policies accordingly?
• Which agent behaviors most correlate to high customer satisfaction?

Answering these questions with a score that encompasses multiple avenues of data—both internal and external—means you can focus on taking action to improve your digital customer service channels and your internal systems to better meet customer expectations. Your goal is to ultimately remain competitive, and by using an Intelligent Score, you can focus on executing your strategy rather than analyzing your data.

Using Intelligent Scoring for business improvement

Get a better read of digital customer service channels

Analyzing your digital customer service channels and your internal data on customer interactions can be incredibly time-consuming to manually score. Intelligent Scoring with a system such as Qualtrics + Clarabridge can help you to automate these processes to free up your team’s time to focus on tweaks and improvements.

Intelligent Scoring can also take into account a far wider range of channels. Creating a unified scoring system that’s omni-channel and can encompass all of your data sources means you spend less time finding the insights, and more time taking action.

Intelligent Scoring can also be made much more effective than manual scoring with machine learning engines that can utilize natural language understanding (NLU) to source relevant information, no matter where it is.

Use more than just customer service metrics for rating your customer experience

Customer experience surveys—such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Effort Score (CES)—can be an effective way to gather insights on how your customers feel about your brand. Customer service metrics, such as tickets closed or customer lifetime value, can also illuminate how effective you are at driving your bottom line.

However, taking these datasets and creating individual scores can be limiting. There’s also the bias issue—the scores you give yourself through more traditional means might have inherent biases that sway your score.

Intelligent Scoring with an automated system can you help to:

• Remove the inherent biases of traditional scoring methodologies with objective, data-driven scoring processes
• Compare your scores more reliably with industry-standard category models across numerous verticals, helping you to drive value more quickly

The beauty of Intelligent Scoring is that it’s highly customizable. No matter where you place your value, you can develop an Intelligent Score that accurately reflects your business’ performance.

To make sure your Intelligent Score accurately captures what matters most to your business and your customers, you’ll need:

• Transparent, explainable scoring rubrics including custom weights, relevant importance, and desired result of rubric criteria
• Targeted, well-informed rubric weights based on desired outcomes
• The ability to drill down into root causes of your scores

Create success for your client service specialists

As a business, you know your own rules best. The goals you have for your client service specialists are particular to your brand—meaning you need an Intelligent Score that can reflect what you consider success.

An Intelligent Scoring system should have user-defined, customizable criteria based on the intimate knowledge you have of your organization’s business rules. This will help your client service team to not only meet your expectations more effectively, but to get insights into their performance based on scores that take myriad factors into account.

Rather than being manually scored on their calls and chats by a team member they know, they can get a score that takes all their data into account in an unbiased fashion. With clear trend tracking over time, you’ll be able to drive continuous improvement within your teams for a better chance of success.

Qualtrics Intelligent Scoring: a streamlined approach to unified measurements

Intelligent Scoring is a patent-pending, proprietary feature that allows customers to distill many complex criteria into a customizable, unifying measurement. Our Intelligent Scoring is a breakthrough in omnichannel interaction analytics that can automatically evaluate and score both conversational and non-conversational data sources.

Our Intelligent Scoring automatically distills many complex criteria into a single unifying score, harnessing features across the entire XM for Customer Frontlines product suite. You can leverage enrichments like effort and sentiment to create customer experience scores without surveys, build complex conditional logic, and deploy root cause features like Drivers and Outliers to ensure your index captures what you’re aiming to track.

In a nutshell: if you can feed it into Qualtrics, you can score it, regardless of the data source.