Customer satisfaction has never been more important—95% of contact center professionals view it as the most important call center metric. To maintain high CSAT scores, you must know exactly how to start a call center QA program.
And customer satisfaction isn’t the only benefit, by following our 12-step guide you will be able to:
Deliver exceptional CX, driving retention and customer lifetime value
Stay compliant, avoiding costly legal action and brand damage
Keep agents engaged, reducing turnover and boosting productivity
Improve operational efficiency, eliminating waste and cutting costs
But it’s not as easy as installing new QA software and calling it a day; you must have a clear plan on how to launch (and maintain) your QA program.
Today, we’ll help you do exactly that, with a step-by-step guide on how to implement an effective call center QA program.
Setting up a successful call center QA program starts with securing support from key stakeholders. Without buy-in from C-suite leadership, operations, HR, and more, even the most well-designed program will struggle to take off.
You need to present QA as more than just a compliance process—it’s a tool for improving customer experience, operational efficiency, and employee performance.
Work with potential stakeholders and show them how QA will benefit them specifically. That could mean:
Highlighting QA’s potential as a revenue driver for the C-suite
Showcasing cost savings for the operations manager
Flagging the potential for increased employee retention with HR
Also, remain open to their feedback on how you should run the QA program. Their insights can give you valuable data for your own strategic decisions and, ultimately, help you build a better business case for the quality assurance project.
Implementing a new QA program means shifting behaviors, processes, and expectations. Agents might be skeptical about QA, so you need to showcase it in a positive light and get them engaged with the process.
A structured change management plan helps you introduce QA while lowering resistance, making agents more likely to get on board.
Start by framing QA as a tool for growth and improvement, and not a way to police or punish them. Agents might be afraid of excessive monitoring, while managers may worry about extra admin work and slower processes—so you need to be transparent about how it will work.
Explain how the QA process will enhance performance without creating unnecessary pressure. Offer training sessions and documentation, and let employees offer their opinions and ask questions so that everyone can be on the same page and grow as a team.
Before you launch your call center quality assurance program, you need to establish clear objectives that line up with wider business goals. What are you trying to improve—customer satisfaction, compliance adherence, agent productivity? Defining (and tracking) KPIs ensures your QA efforts aren’t going to waste.
Work with leadership and stakeholders to identify KPIs that matter most to your organization, this may include typical call center metrics like:
Customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores
First call resolution (FCR) rate
Average handle time (AHT)
Call abandonment rate
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Setting SMART goals for your call center QA program is the best way to make a real business impact. Goals like “Reduce repeat calls by 10% over the next six months by improving FCR” or “Improve AHT to ~5 minutes by streamlining processes” can help set realistic and achievable goals, which can then be backed by your QA process to ensure they happen.
Defining clear QA standards is the foundation of an effective call center QA program, as they establish what “good” means for customer interactions (and ensure evaluation consistency). Without them, evaluations become subjective, leading to inconsistencies in coaching, agent performance, and customer experience.
This means creating a framework for your evaluations that includes items like:
Greeting
Professionalism
Empathy
Product knowledge
Problem solving
Issue resolution
Compliance
Your foundation and benchmarks should align with your specific industry (and its customers). Creating a contact center quality assurance checklist can help you establish a solid framework for your call center that also covers compliance requirements (like PCI-DSS, HIPAA, or GDPR).
A well-trained QA team is essential to maintaining fairness and consistency in your evaluations. Your analysts and supervisors are responsible for scoring calls, identifying coaching opportunities, and ensuring your QA program drives real improvements.
Without proper training (and hiring of the right candidates), QA assessments can become inconsistent, leading to confusion and distrust among agents. Engaged and informed leadership will help get your agents excited about the call center quality monitoring process.
Start by aligning your QA team on evaluation criteria, scoring guidelines, and best practices for delivering effective feedback. This includes putting supervisors in place to review and refine the QA process to make sure it’s consistent (and effective).
A well-structured scorecard helps you assess agent performance objectively, track trends, and pinpoint areas for improvement. Without a clear and balanced scorecard, evaluations might end up feeling arbitrary, making it difficult to drive meaningful coaching and progress.
An effective scorecard should cover the criteria laid out in your quality standards. This means including categories such as:
Call resolution
Compliance adherence
Communication skills
Customer satisfaction
It should also stay streamlined—too many questions can overwhelm evaluators, causing them to lose focus on what’s important.
If you need a basis for your own scorecard, try starting with this free QA scorecard template, then tweak it for your own specific needs.
Without a defined process, QA efforts can become disorganized, making it difficult to track agent progress and implement meaningful coaching. Your review workflow should outline how interactions are selected, reviewed, and acted upon to maintain a continuous feedback loop.
Start by determining how many calls should be reviewed within a timeframe and the criteria for selecting calls. Do you want to monitor calls randomly, prioritize specific interactions, specific agent segments, live or pre-recorded calls?
Define how feedback should be delivered—real time coaching, one-on-one sessions, or written evaluations? Ensure your workflow integrates seamlessly with existing coaching processes so that insights lead to actionable improvements.
QA calibration sessions are critical for maintaining scoring consistency and fairness. Without them, evaluations can vary from one analyst to another, leading to confusion and frustration among agents. By aligning evaluators on scoring criteria, you ensure that quality assessments are accurate (and objective).
Schedule regular calibration sessions where your QA analysts, supervisors, and managers review sample calls together (or separately) and compare scores. They should discuss any discrepancies and work towards standardized scoring practices. Then, use these sessions to:
Refine your QA scorecards
Adjust evaluation criteria based on business needs
Reinforce a shared understanding of quality expectations
These calibration sessions shouldn’t be one-sided, though. Ensure your agents get an option to discuss and dispute their scores if necessary, helping build trust in the process and more accurate QA.
The right QA software can transform your call monitoring process, making evaluations more efficient, scalable, and data-driven.
A strong QA platform centralizes call recordings, automates scorecard workflows, and provides real-time insights into agent performance. Without software in place, QA becomes overly time-consuming and difficult to manage, limiting your ability to drive improvements.
Look for a solution that includes items like:
Integrations with your existing tools
AI-powered features like auto scoring, on-demand evaluator assistance, automated summaries, and more
Text and speech analytics
Customizable scorecards, dashboards, and reporting tools
Built-in coaching workflows
Calibration functionality
Ideally, your call center QA software should offer AI and automation capabilities to speed up the process. With it, you can streamline processes and automate tedious, time-consuming work that slows down productivity, and it can scale with your call center as it grows and evolves.
Without structured feedback and coaching, evaluations become static numbers instead of tools for growth, completely undermining the entire QA process. The right system ensures agents understand their performance, feel supported, and have clear action plans for improvement.
Implement a feedback loop where QA evaluations lead to timely—and constructive—coaching sessions. Use a mix of real-time feedback, scheduled one-on-ones, and self-assessment opportunities. Keep feedback specific and actionable, highlighting both strengths and areas for development, and try coaching feedback examples such as:
The 3:1 ratio (3 positive to 1 negative)
The feedback sandwich
The ERIC model
When agents get clear, data-backed insights into their performance, they become more engaged, confident, and motivated to enhance their customer interactions. Keep them in the loop about the QA process, making sure they're actively involved so they can see progress.
Your QA program generates a wealth of information and insights that go beyond just agent performance—it uncovers trends in customer behavior, operational efficiency, service quality, and more. To get the most out of your QA efforts, you need to take advantage of this data.
Look for patterns in agent performance and use predictive analytics to anticipate training needs, coaching opportunities, and where you can streamline workflows. Reporting around metrics like FCR, NPS, compliance adherence, and other KPIs should also be as transparent as possible so that stakeholders can communicate and maintain a positive sentiment around QA.
A data-driven approach allows you to move from reactive problem-solving to proactive improvement. When you embrace QA analytics, you gain a deeper visibility into your call center’s strengths and opportunities, enabling you to enhance both customer satisfaction and operational success over time.
Unfortunately, your call center QA program isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it setup—it’s an evolving process that needs regular adjustments to stay effective. As customer expectations shift, business goals change, and new technologies appear, your QA strategy needs to keep up with the times (and customer expectations) to stay relevant and impactful.
Get feedback from everywhere: agents, supervisors, customers, and evaluators all offer different opinions on your call center and its quality. Then, analyze the data to assess whether your quality standards still align with your business objectives.
Using a quarterly review checklist can help refine this process, and may include tasks like:
Analyzing scoring trends
Ensuring calibration consistency
Exploring coaching impact
Reviewing Customer experience insights
Checking compliance adherence
A robust call center QA program, powering impactful feedback and coaching, can completely transform your business, boosting efficiency, customer satisfaction, and more.
By starting your quality assurance program with clear goals, establishing a framework, using the right software, constantly reviewing and refining your QA process—and following our other steps—you will see results.
Still unsure about where to begin? Why not start with a proven framework—download our call center QA checklist template for free.
