With Agent Connect’s QA Assignment feature, you can assign a customized QA completion target for your QA reviewers or team leaders, and easily keep track of progress against your targets. Based on your participant selection and the interaction selection criteria, Agent Connect's Assignments will automatically surface appropriate interactions for review, and will evenly distribute the workload among reviewers on the chosen recurring cadence. This saves time and effort for Reviewers and their managers, while eliminating selection bias, to drive valuable manual Quality Assurance programs and coaching conversations.

Important Update: The introduction of Role Based Access Control (RBAC) allows for the creation of new custom roles which can be leveraged for the selection of participants in Assignments. The ability to select participants by Groups has also been introduced.

Note: Only users with roles that allow for the management of QA assignments will be able to create, edit, or archive QA assignments. Only users in roles that grant them access to perform a QA Review will be available for Reviewer selection.

The QA Assignments feature is only available to clients sending Agent Connect survey requests in an integrated fashion. For more information on getting integrated, contact our Support Team, your Account Manager, or Professional Services Team.

To create and configure a new QA Assignment:

You will now be taken through a series of steps to configure your new Assignment.

An effective Assignment is built with four key considerations. They are:

Enter the name for your Assignment in the Assignment Title text field. This name will help you identify the assignment from the Assignments index page. You might choose to categorize your assignments by team name, by interaction types, or some other meaningful name for your organization.

Note: Assignment Titles must be unique as identifiers for the Assignment.

Next, you'll select which Groups, Teams, or Individual Employees should be reviewed as part of this Assignment. This allows you to create Assignments to review any Group, particular Team(s), or any combination of individual Employees.

Selecting Reviewees by Groups will allow for the selection of multiple Groups and will include all Employees in the selected Groups in the Assignment. The selection of a parent Group within your Group Hierarchy will also automatically include all subgroups and members of those subgroups which will be reflected in the total number of employees included.

Note: Reviewees who are a part of multiple Groups will be counted only once towards the total, as a single Reviewee participant. For example, if John is in the New Hire Group but is also in the Vendors group and both are selected for the ‘Reviewees’ criteria John would appear once in the count of eligible employees.

Once you have selected your Group(s) or Team(s) you will select which Role(s) should be included to be reviewed in this Assignment. For example if you wish to exclude Admins within a Group or Team from being included as eligible for review you can deselect the Admin role from the Role drop down menu. The total count of included employees in the Assignment will be updated based on the adjustment of eligible Roles.

Additionally, you can choose to exclude individual employees from the Assignment. The list of Reviewees will include all eligible individuals based on the Groups or Teams selected that fall within the eligible roles before any individual exclusions are made. The exclude individual employees from the Assignment select the ‘Exclude’ button from the Reviewees list.

We provide you with a total of Reviewees included in the Assignment in the Assignment Summary calculated based on your selected Reviewee criteria.

You can choose whether the Reviewees included in your Assignment should be evaluated by their own team leader based on your employee hierarchy or by another designated group of reviewers.

If the Reviewers selection is set to Respective Team Leaders all reviews for each Reviewee will be assigned to their direct team leader automatically. The individual goal for the Assignment for each Reviewer will then be dependent on the size of their team and the number of reviews to be performed for each Reviewee.

Team Leaders included as Reviewers who do not have sufficient permissions to complete reviews will be flagged as missing permissions when an Assignment is being created or edited. A Reviewer may be flagged as missing permissions if their Role does not include the ‘Perform QA Review’ permission.

Alternatively, if the Reviewers selection is set to Designated Reviewers the total number of reviews included in the Assignment will be distributed evenly across the Reviewers.

In the event that the total number of reviews calculated as the Assignment goal cannot be evenly distributed we will round up the individual Reviewee goal so that all Reviewees will start with the same number of Reviews set as their goal. However, as the Assignment progresses we will update the Reviewee’s goal and progress based on the total reviews completed within the Assignment.

Example: If the total Assignment Goal is 10 reviews across 3 Reviewers the average would be 3.33 reviews. Each Reviewer will receive an individual goal of 4 reviews. However, the first person to complete 4 reviews will then trigger the update of the other Reviewer goals to be set to 3 reviews to meet the overall assignment goal of 10 reviews.

Please note that individuals will appear in the selection options for Reviewers whether or not they have the ‘Can Manage Teams’ permission enabled for their role.

Reviewers who have insufficient scope to conduct reviews within the parameters of the Assignment will also be flagged when an Assignment is being created or edited.

A Reviewer may be flagged for insufficient scope if the ‘Data Visibility’ setting of their role prevents visibility to Groups, Teams, or Team Members selected in the Assignment.

Note: The selection list for a Designated Reviewer will only include users who have the permissions to conduct a QA Review. If an employee cannot be located in the selection it could likely be that their role is missing the permissions required to conduct a QA Review.
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We provide the option to enable ‘Blind Reviews’. Selecting this option will hide the team member name and photo from the interaction details while the reviewer is completing the review. However, if the reviewee’s name is included in the transcript or audio recording please note it would still be accessible to the reviewer.

A cadence specifies the number of days in the assignment before it repeats with new eligible interactions. You can select a cadence of either ​Weekly​, ​Monthly​, or ​Custom​. ​Weekly cadences begin on Monday and end on Sunday. Monthly cadences begin on the first day of the month and end on the last day of the month.​​

​If you selected a custom cadence, in the ​Start Date​ field select the first day of the cadence, and in the ​Number of days​ field select the duration of the cadence. An Assignment cadence can ​begin​ in the past, but the entirety of the cadence cannot be in the past. For example, you can configure a weekly cadence in the middle of the week, even though that cadence begins on a Monday. You cannot configure a custom cadence that ends before the current day.

Additional information on Scheduling and Frequency is outlined here.

When reviewers work on the assignment, this scorecard is selected for them. Reviewers can change the scorecard used when starting a review.

Selecting a default scorecard helps to save time switching between scorecards. If the Assignment is tailored to a specific type of interaction (ex: phone conversations) that you have a scorecard available for you’d want to set that scorecard as the default. However, it is possible to build an assignment without a default scorecard selection.

Indicate how many reviews should be completed as part of this Assignment by entering the expected number of reviews per reviewee based on the selected criteria. You can allocate reviews across specific criteria like interaction channel, tag, or CSAT score. If you do not have any requirements for the type of interaction expected to be reviewed, simply enter the number of reviews using Any interaction.

For example, if you expect four reviews total for each team member to be completed, and would like at least one review to be completed for a phone interaction, and at least one review to be completed for an email interaction, but the other 2 can be for any type of interaction, your assignment quantity selection would look like the example below.

In the right-hand side column, you'll see a breakdown regarding the number of total reviews your Assignment will generate as the total Assignment goal, as well as a breakdown showing how many reviews each reviewer will need to complete.
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Determine if the Allow Partial Match checkbox should be applied to your assignment. Allowing partial matches will ensure that if the QA Assignment runs out of interactions that meet the original criteria, it will automatically pull in similar interactions, with the criteria relaxed. Find additional information around Out of Interaction QA behavior here.

Note: This setting will only be available if the ‘Review Similar’ feature has been enabled within the QA Settings page.

First determine the desired look-back period for your assignment. The assignment will default to fetch interactions on a rolling 7-day look-back period but may be adjusted. This lookback setting ensures that reviewers are never reviewing interactions that occurred longer than 7 days ago. For this reason, there may be a different number of interactions eligible for review as the assignment progresses.

Decide and configure whether you want to scope any interaction types out of the assignment using the exclude tags filter. This option may be useful for your team if certain interaction types are generally not worth reviewing e.g. if a simple macro is used. This option can help keep the pool of interactions available for review more meaningful.

You can use any field in your CRM/source system to generate Custom Properties which can be added as eligibility criteria for QA Assignments to ensure you are pulling the right interactions in your automated queues of work for reviewers for each assignment. Common interaction fields may include contact reason, handle time, or topics if integrated with Medallia Speech or Text Analytics.

To enable the use of additional eligibility criteria based on custom interactions fields you’ll need to enable the fields to be leveraged within Assignments. On the Integrations page in Agent Connect, clients using Agent Connect QA will see their Custom Properties and will be able to tell us the Field Name they’d like us to use for this Custom Property, tell us which data type we should use for the Custom Property, and lastly, whether they should be visible on QA Reviews or available to use as a filter for QA.

Once published, Agent Connect will automatically begin to distribute interactions to reviewers based on the parameters set in your assignment. Interactions that fit your parameters are selected randomly in order to eliminate bias in the review process.

Once configured, the Assignment will run automatically per your cadence, and the Assignment progress for each reviewer will reset until the Assignment is archived. If edits are made to the Assignment participants during the Assignment period the Assignment Goal will automatically update based on the addition or removal of Reviewees or Reviewers.

If you are a QA Reviewer and you'd like to begin reviewing your Assignments, click on the QA tab in the main navigation bar at the top of the screen, then select Assignments from the dropdown menu.

In the ‘My Assignments’ section you will see a list of all Assignments for which you are a selected reviewer. You'll also see details about the Assignment (cadence, due dates), the Status (New or In Progress), the Progress of the Assignment, a list of Team Members to be reviewed and a list of Reviewers assigned to the Assignment. From here, you can take additional actions, such as reviewing the Assignment details to review the history of the Assignment, or choosing to start Reviews as part of the Assignment.

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Additional options to copy the Assignment to create a new Assignment based on the existing criteria or archive the Assignment are available from the three dot icon to view more actions. If you are looking to edit an assignment to make changes to the participants you can do so from the Assignment Details page based on the QA permissions allocated to your role.

To begin your work and start conducting QA reviews, select Review. Agent Connect will automatically select an interaction that meets your assignment criteria for you to review. We will continue to select interactions for you that match your assignment criteria until you've met your target for the assignment, or until eligible interactions run out. If there are no eligible interactions, check back later or utilize the QA Assignment Out of Interactions Preference setting to serve up additional interactions that may not match the original criteria.

When a QA Reviewer starts reviewing an Assignment, they can click on Skip Interaction if the interaction isn’t eligible for review at that point in time. The QA Reviewer may select one of our preset skip reasons or choose Other. When Other is selected, the QA Reviewer is prompted to type the reason. Please note that the Other open text form will populate other reasons that other QA Reviewers might have inputted for that QA Assignment. This is to reduce the amount of variations of similar Other skip reasons. Once the QA Reviewer confirms the skip by clicking Skip Interaction, that reason will be saved for reporting purposes. For more information on skip reason reporting, please see Skip Reason Reporting.

Once Skip Interaction has been selected, Agent Connect will automatically assign a different interaction for review, and will mark the skipped interaction as not eligible for the assignment.

When the QA Reviewers have completed their work for the assignment, we will celebrate!

Progress for each active assignment can be reviewed in the Assignment Overview section where you will see a count of completed reviews, remaining reviews needed to hit the overall target for the assignment, and a progress bar.

Assignments will be shown under ‘My Assignments’ if you are directly assigned as a Reviewer in the Assignment and are expected to complete QA reviews for the Assignment. The total goal and progress on the Assignment will be calculated based on your individual goal based on the distribution of reviews within the Assignment and the number of reviews completed by you against that goal.

Assignments shown under ‘All Assignments’ may include a combination of Assignments in which you are directly a Reviewer alongside Assignments in which you are not a participant but have visibility into based on the scope of your Role.

The total goal and progress on Assignments listed under ‘All Assignments’ will be calculated based on the total goal and number of reviews completed across all Reviewers. The progress seen under ‘All Assignments’ can vary from the progress you are being shown under ‘My Assignments’ based on the reviews completed or still remaining for the other Reviewers in the Assignment.

If there are changes to the participants within an Assignment (which can occur automatically by movements in Group or Team membership, manually editing participants, or the deactivation of user accounts) the goal for the assignment may change within the Assignment period. We immediately process updates that apply to an Assignment when there are participant changes to update the Assignment goal, included reviewees, and included reviewers. Further information on changes that occurred within an Assignment period will be available from the Assignment Details page.

Within the Assignment Details, you can get high level statistics about the Assignment, including understanding the current progress for the Assignment, when the Assignment started/how long it's been running for, how many Team Members are to be QAed as part of the Assignment, how many Team Leaders have been assigned to review the Assignment and the goal for number of reviews to be completed. Additionally, you can easily identify Team Members who are Champions (high achievers compared to other Team Members within that Assignment) or Team Members who may need additional coaching.

Within Assignment Details, Agent Connect provides in-depth reporting on the reasons for why an interaction has been skipped. Because QA Reviewers are required to provide a reason when they now skip interactions in Assignments, Agent Connect displays these metrics in the QA Assignment Details page.

A QA Manager can evaluate the trends for why interactions are being skipped, review the transcripts that were originally skipped by clicking into View Interactions upon hovering the reasons and request QA Reviewers to review if it was an interaction that shouldn't have been skipped.

Please note that in order for a QA Reviewer to review the interaction again, they must do so outside of the QA Assignment by clicking on the New Review button from the QA top navigation dropdown menu or on the Completed reviews tab (they will not be able to review the skipped interaction directly from the Skipped Interactions page).

Recent enhancements to QA Assignments now allow for the editing of participants within an active QA Assignment. This will allow for the update of Reviewees and Reviewers included in an Assignment without requiring the creation of a new Assignment while archiving the existing Assignment.

Assignments now also automatically update if there are changes to the participants in the assignment based on changes within a Group or Team hierarchy, addition of a new user to a Team or Group or the deactivation of a user from the platform. Additional details on how each update can impact your Assignments can be found here.

If you wish to manually update the participants in an Assignment you can do so by selecting ‘Edit Participants’ from the Assignment Details page for an active Assignment.

Choosing to Edit Participants will bring you to a new page that will allow you to manually change the selected participants who will be included as Reviewers or Reviewers in the Assignment. The Summary on the right hand of the Edit Participants page will provide you with details on the new total number of reviewees, reviewers, and average reviews per reviewer based on the updated selections. We will also provide additional context on how the new selections have increased or decreased against the previous participant selections.

Please note that changes to Assignments are applied immediately and will automatically update the Assignment goal and selection of interactions for the new participants.

When Reviewees are removed for which reviews were already completed we will retain the already completed reviews but will not have any new reviews generated within the active assignment. Reviewers who are removed from an active Assignment who have already conducted reviews will have those reviews also retained as part of the assignments but will not be expected to conduct any additional reviews and will see the Assignment removed from their list of Assignments.

Updates to the Assignment participants will be reflected at the top of the Assignment Details page for the current Assignment. Selecting the linked count of employees or reviewers will provide a side panel listing the individual employees or reviewers who were added or removed during the Assignment period.

If you are seeking to make changes to the Assignment interaction criteria such as the number of reviews per reviewee, tag selections or other custom property filters, you will need to create a new Assignment by creating a copy of the existing Assignment.

This can be done from the Assignments list by clicking on the triple dot icon and then choosing ‘Duplicate’. You will then be able to make the changes needed for your new desired criteria and then archive the previous assignment. This workflow is in place so that changes to the criteria are implemented and reflected in reporting moving forward and does not impact the historical reporting of Assignments which would have leveraged the previous set of criteria.

The Details page of an Assignment includes reporting on Past Periods listing the total number of Reviewees and Reviewers that were included in the Assignment. Hovering over the number of employees or reviewers will provide additional context to identify if individuals were added or removed from the Assignment during that Assignment period.

Totals for Assignment periods which have passed will include the total number of Reviewees and Reviewees at the time that the Assignment period concluded. Totals for the current Assignment period will reflect the most up to date totals of participants and would continue to update if there are further changes until the finalized counts are captured once the Assignment period ends.

As you add new users or deactivate existing users on the Manage Team page, Agent Connect will automatically update existing QA Assignments to reflect the current state of your team's hierarchy. ​
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If you have an Assignment where you have specified reviewers, and you remove or deactivate one (or more) of those reviewers, their share of the remaining reviews within the Assignment will be evenly distributed across the other designated reviewers.
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If you deactivate a reviewee that is to be reviewed as part of an Assignment, the review target will be automatically updated to reflect the status of the hierarchy. For example, if your Assignment requires reviewing interactions for 10 reviewees across 2 teams, where the target is to complete 2 reviews per reviewee (a total of 20 reviews), and one reviewee on either team is deactivated, the new target for the Assignment will be 18 total reviews.

If you add a user as a team member to a team that is covered by an existing Assignment, that team member will be automatically included in the assignment immediately once they are moved to report to a new team leader, and the target number of total reviews for the Assignment will automatically be increased.

If you deactivate a user or move them from their former team that is covered by an existing Assignment, the team member would also be automatically removed from the Assignment for their former team, decreasing the Assignment goal, and then added to the Assignment for their new team where applicable.

As you add or remove members from your Custom Groups, Agent Connect will update existing QA Assignments that leverage Groups to select reviewees to reflect the current state of your Group membership.
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If you remove a member from a Group that is to be reviewed as part of an Assignment, the review target will be automatically updated to reflect the status of the Group membership. For example, if your assignment requires reviewing interactions for 10 reviewees across 2 Groups, where the target is to complete 2 reviews per reviewee (a total of 20 reviews), and one reviewee in either Group is deactivated or moved out of the group, the new target for the assignment will be 18 total reviews.
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If you add a user to a Group that is included in an existing Assignment, that new Group member will be automatically included in the Assignment will be automatically updated and the target number of total review for the Assignment will automatically be increased.
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You can archive an Assignment by clicking on the triple dot icon while viewing an assignment on the Assignments list and then selecting the Archive button. Archiving will disable the Assignment for all of the selected reviewers. Past reviews completed as part of an archived Assignment will remain active and will be accessible as normal.

The narrower the criteria for assigning reviews, the more likely it is that Agent Connect will not have any reviews to distribute to your reviewers. If your reviewers do not have enough eligible interactions you might consider the following:

Note that even if you do not have narrow criteria, it is still possible that Agent Connect does not have any interactions available to assign. Check back later, as your team members handle more support interactions, more work will become available for your reviewers. Or, you may want to consider leveraging our QA Assignments Out of Interactions Preference setting.
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Weekly & Monthly Assignment Cadences

Assignments start at 12:00:00 UTC at the start of your cadence, and end at 23:59:59 UTC on the last day of your cadence. For example, a weekly assignment cadence will start on Monday, at 12:00:00 UTC and end on Sunday, 23:59:59 UTC. A monthly assignment cadence will start on the 1st of the month, at 12:00:00 UTC and end on the last day of the month, 23:59:59 UTC.

Custom Assignment Cadences

Custom assignment cadences start on the date and time that a user configures/sets the assignment cadence up for and repeats based on the number of days configured. Please note that you can set up your custom cadence to start at a certain time in your local timezone. Agent Connect displays help text to convert that local timezone into UTC so globally distributed teams can understand at what time a new assignment cadence begins.​
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You are able to create Assignments for members in any Role but the ability to complete QA reviews as a Reviewer is limited to Roles granted the permission to Perform QA Reviews.

The QA Assignments Out of Interactions Preference gives Medallia Agent Connect customers the option to choose what happens when a QA Assignment runs out of interactions.
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There are many reasons why a QA Assignment could run out of interactions (eg: a Team Member who must be reviewed as part of the Assignment lost their voice and couldn’t take phone calls for a week; another Team Member was on vacation for a week and had no interactions in that timeframe). When a QA Assignment runs out of interactions today, QA Reviewers are unable to complete the Assignment 100% because Agent Connect is unable to serve up interactions that meet the original criteria.

Providing some flexibility for the QA Assignment where QA Reviewers can be served up the next best interaction (even if it doesn’t match the original QA Assignment criteria completely) can help reduce frustration for QA Reviewers and allows teams the opportunity to get closer to completing a QA Assignment.
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A Company Admin must first navigate to Settings > QA and scroll down to Assignments. Under Review Similar, flip the toggle to ON in order to surface the Out of Interaction Preference setting.

When a new QA Assignment is set up, the Allow Partial Match checkbox should be selected. This will ensure that when the QA Assignment runs out of interactions that meet the original criteria, it will automatically pull in similar interactions, with the criteria relaxed.
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When a QA Assignment has run out of eligible interactions based on the original criteria, a QA Reviewer will see the following message:

When a user clicks on the Review Similar button, they will be served an interaction that best matches the original criteria, while relaxing certain other criteria.

Alternatively, a QA Reviewer can return to QA Assignments and wait for an interaction that matches the original criteria before continuing QA.
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Agent Connect uses 3 steps to prioritize the next best interactions to serve:

An original QA Assignment criteria was:

Interaction X fulfilled the following criteria:

Interaction Y fulfilled the following criteria:

In this scenario, Interaction X would be served for QA before Interaction Y is served because Interaction X matches on 2 criteria from the original QA Assignment whereas Interaction Y only matches on 1 criteria.

3. If interactions have the same number of criteria matching, they will be ordered by the interaction creation date. For example:

An original QA Assignment criteria was:

Interaction X fulfilled the following criteria:

Interaction Y fulfilled the following criteria:

In this scenario, Interaction Y would be served before Interaction X because they both match on 2 criteria but Interaction Y was created before Interaction X.