Call center quality assurance: A guide from a CS leader

Call centers should have a dedicated quality team (or person, if you’re small) to carry out the QA program. You can have the team in-house, led by managers or supervisors, or you might hire external QA specialists. Their job is to monitor the call center’s operations, gather and evaluate data, and use it to help agents boost their performance. But often that’s not possible, and QA is done by team leaders or supervisors who are incredibly busy—if that’s the case, arm them with tools designed to get them high QA coverage.

Grab the Contact Center Playbook, which breaks down everything you need to know, from setup to improving customer satisfaction—with examples from real contact center teams across different industries.

Call recordings are essential not only for evaluating call center performance, but also for future training sessions. This is a big one for me as we often revisit our onboarding and training materials.

Unlike most other solutions, ours is built right into the unified communications platform—we can take customer calls and also message and video call each other without switching between different windows and tabs.

Remember, an effective call center quality assurance program takes agent feedback into account, so make sure you listen to your team, take action on their suggestions if they’re good, and tell them when their contributions have led to a positive change.

Targeted monitoring is a more insightful technique, as it focuses on specific conversations. You might choose to monitor interactions with high-value customers, or agents following up with customers who complained or gave negative feedback.

In a contact center with omnichannel communications (across social media channels, emails, and calls, and so on), you need full visibility into the quality of all interactions—not just phone calls. Here, you might find it helpful to create different evaluation forms for each channel, as each one might have specific standards and requirements.