navigation menu
Search this site
Close search

Quality Assurance

What is Quality Assurance?

Quality Assurance (QA), sometimes referred to as including Quality Monitoring or Quality Audit as well as other terms, is a process to measure, review and evaluate the quality of products and services delivered to customers by assessing various interactions throughout the customer journey lifecycle. It can drive actions if outcomes do not meet set objectives and standards.

Why is QA important?

  • Ensures that customers receive good outcomes from their interactions with you
  • Allows you to put things right for customers if poor outcomes are identified
  • Highlights areas for improvement, helping your business to enhance products, services, and customer experience
  • Monitors staff performance and can be used to change behaviours
  • Identifies where staff training, upskilling and support is needed
  • Enables better insight into your customers’ needs and how to meet them
  • Provides assurance over compliance with business standards, and regulatory and legal requirements

Key components of a QA framework

Purpose and Objectives

Define what your QA framework is looking to achieve, how it will be used and how it aligns with the values and objectives of your business.

This includes setting out roles and responsibilities, and consequences as a result of poor customer outcomes.

Standards and Measures

Set clear, meaningful, and relevant quality QA standards, with guidance on how to apply them, focused on the customer outcome. Develop specific measures. Build scoring criteria, making it simple, understandable, and easily reportable.

Controls

Your QA framework should be robust and include elements such as: the volume, range and frequency of assessments; responsibility for assessments; regular calibration sessions with colleagues using the assessments to agree “grey” areas; root cause analysis; action implementation and tracking; and regulatory issues escalation

Reporting

Agree the structure for reporting MI on QA progress, outputs, analysis and action tracking, including who is responsible for reporting, where and when.

Recent developments

The FCA’s Consumer Duty, which comes into effect for new and existing products at the end of July 2023, will require financial services firms to demonstrate how they deliver for customers against the new set of outcomes – Price & Value, Products & Services, Consumer Understanding and Consumer Support.

An effective QA framework is one way in which you can monitor and evidence that these outcomes are being achieved or make improvements if required.

Questions to ask

  • Does your QA framework cover all stages of the customer journey lifecycle?
  • Does your QA process help you to demonstrate that your customers have achieved good outcomes?
  • Do you identify and track actions arising from QA to completion?
  • Do you ensure that additional training and support is provided to staff based on results of QA?
  • Are the results of your QA and any actions regularly reported to and discussed by senior management?
  • Are all team members (in particular new starts) clear on your quality expectations and also how the QA process will score to benchmark their delivery against these expectations?

Related Articles / Content