Quality assurance (QA) is an essential part of any call center. It helps ensure service quality and brand reputation, and a consistent, positive experience for every customer.
However, maintaining these high quality standards is growing increasingly difficult, especially with more customers reaching out now than ever—and with higher expectations.
Adding a call center quality assurance checklist gives your agents and evaluators a structured tool to guide them through interactions and keep evaluations consistent and fair. They’re a great addition to your QA process to streamline processes, improve compliance, and give you deeper insights into agent performance.
In this blog post, we’ll cover what a call center QA checklist is (including a template you can use), how to customize and build one to suit your business needs, and how to get the most out of it.
A call center QA checklist is essential to any quality assurance process, helping ensure that your agents are operating at peak performance. It’s a standardized document that lists all the criteria and standards they need to meet during customer interactions.
A solid quality assurance checklist covers different aspects, including:
By implementing a contact center QA checklist, you can:
Ensure consistent evaluations: A checklist helps ensure that every agent is evaluated using the same criteria, so you can eliminate biases and personal discrepancies in assessments.
Identify areas where agents can improve: Pinpointing specific areas for improvement allows you to provide targeted feedback and tailored training sessions.
Find weak spots in your customer experience: Regular assessments highlight patterns and recurring issues, so you can address them to improve customer satisfaction scores.
Comply with regulations: Contact centers must adhere to specific regulations and standards no matter what industry you're in. A call center QA checklist helps you stay compliant, reducing the risk of costly fines, legal issues, and reputational damage.
Using a quality assurance checklist allows you to streamline your evaluation process, and improve both efficiency and customer experience within your call center. But what does one look like?
The template below is by no means comprehensive—different organizations will, of course, have different needs—but it’s a solid, foundational QA checklist to get you started.
Let’s explore the key elements of a call center QA checklist.
This ensures that agents start each interaction on the right foot. Agents should greet the caller in a friendly, professional manner, introduce themselves, and set a positive tone for the call.
An agent should follow company procedures to verify the caller. These procedures can be company-specific (like verifying account information) and should be explained to the caller before verifying.
Effective communication is the core of the customer experience. Agents should speak clearly and at an appropriate pace and use active listening skills. Additionally, they should avoid technical terms or jargon that the customer may not understand, keeping things simple.
Agents should be well-versed in the products or services they’re discussing and able to convey that knowledge in an easily digestible way. That means answering questions accurately and confidently and providing helpful and relevant information.
Call center agents should be able to identify customers’ needs and concerns quickly and effectively. Then, they should provide appropriate and timely solutions to their problems and follow through as necessary (such as taking action or following up).
Maintaining a professional demeanor is essential, which often means staying calm and patient (even with frustrated customers). Agents should demonstrate courtesy, patience, and empathy while adhering to company policy and procedures—regardless of the call's context.
Agents should be able to gauge whether they met the caller’s needs and address all of their questions and concerns. Checking in with the customer is a great way to ensure a positive and memorable experience without overlooking other concerns.
Your agents should adhere to all relevant company policies and industry regulations for each interaction. This includes script adherence, legal disclaimers, obtaining customer consent and authorization, and documenting when necessary.
A strong finish leaves a lasting impression. Agents should summarize key points, thank the customer, outline any additional steps if needed, and follow up with the customer if necessary.
Want to save a copy for yourself? Download a PDF of our call center QA checklist template here.
A sales QA checklist should evaluate the agent’s ability to build rapport, present product benefits, handle objections, and close the sale successfully. Metrics might include upsell success rates and adherence to sales scripts.
Since these focus more on resolving custom issues and improving satisfaction, agents should use customer-focused skills. This includes a greater focus on call center soft skills like empathy, active listening, reassuring the customer, and maintaining a polite, friendly tone.
Your call center QA checklist should cover diagnostic accuracy, clear articulation of steps, and technical expertise. This may also include ensuring the agent documented the issue for further reference or creating support tickets for outstanding issues.
Since these are initiated by customers, your checklist should include agent understanding of why they’re reaching out and ability to address needs. It should also prioritize promptness, issue resolution efficiency, and the ability to handle unexpected questions and escalations.
Outbound calls are typically proactive and might fall under sales, follow-ups, or surveys. A QA checklist should focus on the agent’s opening approach and ability to capture callers' attention and keep them focused on the outcome (like handling objections).
A call center QA checklist is essential to delivering excellent customer service and ensuring consistent performance across all your agents. Let’s break down how to use one to make the biggest impact on your contact center.
Every contact center is unique, so it's essential to design a call center QA checklist that reflects your business goals and industry standards. Ensure it aligns with your top key performance indicators (KPIs) and other business targets, and update it as your business needs change.
These KPIs can also change based on your industry. Tech contact centers might value first call resolution (FCR) and average handle time (AHT), while BPOs would want to track quality scores and service level agreement (SLA) adherence.
Additionally, you should factor in different compliance requirements for your industry. If you need to comply with regulations like HIPAA, PCI, CCPA, and GDPR, your checklists must include them.
A call center QA checklist isn’t a one-and-done list. Your aims might change over time, and your checklists should reflect that. Regularly review and revise your checklists alongside business goals to incorporate other KPIs or additional steps as processes change and evolve.
Collect feedback and data from your QA program and evaluators to update the checklists as your needs change. You can also tap into how your agents feel about the checklists and get their feedback, too, which can engage them in the process and give them a sense of ownership.
Using a call center quality assurance checklist is one thing—but how do you know if it’s making a difference? By tracking specific KPIs (whether through your QA platform or other means), you can get a deeper look at your checklists' impact and overall QA process.
Here are a few important call center metrics that you might want to track:
A QA checklist is an ideal way to help improve agent performance, enhancing service quality and customer experience. It gives call center managers, agents, and evaluators clear guidelines to follow, ultimately contributing to the overall success of your business.
Using a template is a great way to hit the ground running, with a basic outline of how your agents should perform. But if you want to get the most out of your call center QA checklist, build on it and make it your own with the tips provided.
And, if you want to take it to the next level, get in touch with Scorebuddy. We offer market-leading, purpose-built QA software that helps you save time, cut costs, and get a better ROI from your QA program.
Contact us today for a demo and try it yourself.
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