Creating Audit Rubrics

Audit rubrics define how your team scores quality during reviews. They turn quality from a loose opinion into a repeatable standard.

Use this guide when you want to set clearer expectations for conversation and ticket review.

What an audit rubric is

An audit rubric is an ordered set of criteria your team uses during quality reviews.

A strong rubric helps your team answer questions like:

Was the answer accurate?
Was the tone appropriate?
Did the issue reach a real resolution?
Did the handoff or follow-up meet expectations?

Conversation rubrics vs ticket rubrics

Use a conversation rubric when you want to score the customer interaction itself.

Use a ticket rubric when you want to score the quality of follow-up work, investigation, or completion after the conversation moves into a longer-running process.

Some teams use both because the conversation and the follow-up work require different standards.

What makes a good rubric

A good rubric is:

Clear enough that two reviewers would score similarly
Short enough to use consistently
Focused on meaningful quality signals

Start with a small number of criteria that matter most. You can expand later once the team is using the rubric consistently.

Create a rubric

Open Settings -> Workspace -> Audit.
Create a new rubric.
Choose whether it applies to conversations or tickets.
Add the criteria your reviewers should score.
Put the criteria in the order reviewers should work through them.

The order matters because it shapes how reviewers think about the work.

Choosing criteria

Common rubric areas include:

Accuracy
Clarity
Tone
Resolution quality
Customer effort
Policy adherence

Not every team needs every category. Pick the ones that reflect how your team defines good support.

Maintain rubrics over time

Rubrics should change when your operating model changes.

Update them when:

You launch new support channels.
A team adds new risk or compliance requirements.
Your escalation model changes.
Auditors keep disagreeing on the same criterion.

If a criterion causes confusion every week, it usually needs clearer wording or a better example.

How rubrics connect to QA review

Rubrics are the scoring standard behind audits. They help the team:

Review work more consistently
Compare quality over time
Spot weak patterns by topic, channel, or workflow
Decide what to improve in Knowledge, Flows, or routing

Without a rubric, audits become much harder to compare across reviewers or across time.

Best practices

Start with fewer criteria than you think you need.
Use plain language in every criterion.
Train reviewers on examples before treating results as final.
Review the rubric after the first few audit cycles.

Common mistakes

Too many criteria

This slows down reviewers and makes scores harder to trust.

Vague labels

If reviewers cannot explain what a criterion means in practice, it is not ready to use.

Mixing several ideas into one score

Keep each criterion focused so the team can tell what actually needs fixing.