Quality assurance in call centres: What it is, why it matters, and tips to get it right

According to the 2024 UK Customer Satisfaction Index, over 30% of UK customers prioritise excellent service even if it costs more. Meanwhile, 41% of those dissatisfied with a business say they’d avoid using it again. So, quality customer service is crucial—and your call centre plays a crucial role in providing it.

Managers need to know that agents are delivering consistently positive experiences across all interactions, backed by efficient operations and processes. Call centre quality assurance gives you the means to measure performance and ensure you’re maintaining the highest standards.

In this post, we’ll explore the meaning of quality assurance in a call centre, and find why it’s about more than just ticking boxes. We’ll also provide you with some top tips for getting it right.

What is quality assurance (QA) in a call centre or contact centre?

Quality assurance (QA) is a process that ensures your products or services are meeting the standards you’ve put in place. Through continuous monitoring and evaluation, organisations can identify any problems or gaps in service and take necessary actions to improve.

In call centres and contact centres, managers use QA to maintain consistent and high-quality customer service. This involves monitoring every interaction between agents and customers, to assess overall call quality, agent skills, and compliance.

The data gathered from customer service quality assurance helps you to measure performance against key metrics, and use it to improve not just customer experiences but also operational efficiency.

What’s the difference between quality assurance and quality management?

Both processes aim to improve customer satisfaction and overall call centre performance. Quality assurance is just one component of call centre quality management (QM). QM is an overarching approach that encompasses various strategies for ensuring quality within an organisation.

Alongside QA, quality management incorporates quality planning, quality improvement, and quality control. It oversees all the tasks and activities that businesses carry out. QA is a tactical evaluation of how service is delivered against a checklist of standards. 

The importance of quality assurance in call centres

To deliver a top-quality service, quality assurance in call centres is an essential process. Continuous monitoring and evaluation ensures you spot any issues early on, and identify the best ways to improve customer satisfaction.

QA also helps you to implement standardised and measurable practices across all of your call centres. By sticking to a set of predefined guidelines during each interaction, agents can deliver consistent service, comply with privacy regulations, and maintain brand identity.

It’s not just about customer experience, either. QA is good for employee motivation and engagement, too. Based on the data, you can offer extra training for agents who are struggling, and reward those who excel. This will help you to reduce staff turnover (and recruitment costs).

Finally, quality assurance brings operational benefits as it enables you to identify inefficiencies like poor scheduling and time-consuming manual tasks. 

You can also use your findings elsewhere in the organisation. For example, if customers are calling because they’re dissatisfied with product quality, pass this on to the product team.

The first step to better QA: Creating a call centre quality assurance framework

We’re not going to pretend that quality assurance is a walk in the park. It takes time and effort to develop guidelines and to gather and analyse the data. A QA framework, though, provides a useful starting point, with three levels to work through.

The first stage of a quality assurance program for call centres is the operational framework. This helps you to measure QA in your core business processes, and work towards meeting a quota of scores. At this stage, you’re identifying gaps in performance, using monthly evaluations.

Next up is the tactical framework, where you measure variables and identify the causes of any problems. This involves looking at the team and its workflows, as well as individual performance. You’ll need advanced information about each interaction, and monthly or yearly trending data.

The most advanced level is the strategic framework, which focuses on long-term business goals instead of short-term objectives. It’s about understanding how customer service and QA drive loyalty and revenue. It also encourages managers to listen to agent feedback and provide the right tools. 

How customer service quality assurance software features can help in key areas

In an ideal world, you’d have a dedicated team for QA, either in-house or using external specialists. However, that’s not viable for many businesses, which is where call centre quality assurance software comes in. 

These tools help you measure performance across every interaction, and empower agents to provide consistent customer experiences. That helps call centres in a variety of areas.

Customer satisfaction, engagement, and retention

Great customer service isn’t just about first impressions—you need to maintain the quality for every interaction. That means continuous monitoring, which is far easier with the right software. You can view real-time call metrics on a dashboard, enabling you to act quickly if there’s an issue.

Call centre quality monitoring software also helps you collect customer feedback, through CSAT surveys, NPS (Net Promoter Scores), and speech analysis during and after calls. That might help you identify issues with your service offering. Like, for instance, that customers are left frustrated by waiting on hold or repeating information. 

The right contact centre solution can then help you ease those pain points. With skills-based call routing, for instance, you can automatically direct calls to the most suitable agent for any query, speeding up resolution. Here’s how that looks in Dialpad Support:

Employee engagement and retention

Quality assurance in a call centre also benefits employees. With the right software, they can help customers faster, which is more rewarding for them. 

Call routing and auto attendants pair callers with the right agent from the start, and agents don’t have to handle customers who are angry at having to wait. It all helps to boost employee retention.

Call monitoring tools enhance ongoing training, which helps agents feel supported. For example, Dialpad offers live coaching, where supervisors can view a list of current calls, look out for negative customer sentiment, and step in to help agents out if needed. 

From call recordings, too, you can create a “playlist” of good or bad calls to use in training:

Employee productivity and development

Call centre quality management tools help you improve productivity by identifying inefficient processes and providing ways to streamline them. With full visibility into the quality of all interactions, you can meet the QA goal of continuous development.

Software saves time and effort for employees, and ensures accuracy. For example, call recordings and transcripts mean there’s no need to make notes during calls, while smart routing enables agents to answer and resolve more calls per shift.

Dialpad Ai Contact Centre gives you a real-time overview of key aspects like hold queue length and agent availability, so you can act to prevent backlogs:

Collection and analysis of data

It’s important to collect data from as many interactions as possible to get a true picture of performance. Good software will automatically gather and analyse data, from speech analytics and sentiment tracking to call recordings and transcriptions.

You can see what’s happening in real time or look back at historical information to find trends. For example, if you see that call volume usually spikes at certain times, you can schedule your agents accordingly. Meanwhile, tracking call centre metrics and KPIs over time enables you to see progress.

If you spot common questions that customers ask, make sure agents know the answers. Dialpad's Ai Agent Assist feature automatically searches all the company’s knowledge bases (including past customer calls) to flag helpful info during interactions: 

Call centre QA best practices

So, we know why QA matters and how software can help you achieve your aims. As promised, here are some call centre quality assurance best practices: 

Have clear goals and priorities

With any project, it pays to set your objectives from the start. Think about your overall business goals and values, and make sure your call centre QA goals are aligned with them. 

It’s also important to establish priorities. For example, following up with dissatisfied customers.

Keep your goals and priorities in mind when you create guidelines for customer interactions, and when you document the criteria for successful performance. You could do this via a Quality Standards Definition Document (QSDD) that applies across your call centres.

Ensure clarity and transparency by outlining the standards required and telling agents how they’ll be evaluated. Remember that different types of calls should be measured against different criteria, using different metrics.

Use scorecards and metrics to consistently evaluate

QA scorecards are a means of evaluating and grading agent performance, measured against your predefined criteria. Managers assign a score for each interaction and share objective feedback with the agent. Scorecards enable QA teams to perform consistent call reviews at scale.

Dialpad Ai can listen to interactions in real-time and automatically suggest when the criteria is met. Supervisors can see this at a glance, instead of playing back the entire call recording or reading the transcript:

Important call centre quality assurance metrics include First Call Resolution (FCR), Average Handling Time (AHT), Call Abandonment Rate, and Call Transfer Rate. You can gauge customer happiness via CSAT and NPS, and improve scheduling by checking Agent Availability.

Keep your whole team involved and offer regular feedback

QA is everyone’s responsibility, so take a collaborative approach to designing criteria and performance metrics. This helps to demonstrate the importance of QA, and shows all agents that they are valuable members of the team (including remote and dispersed employees).

Encourage accountability by giving agents access to a dashboard that displays overall call centre analytics and their personal scores. With Dialpad’s handy dashboard, everyone can view real-time metrics—including heatmaps to show how answer times are trending:

As well as giving constructive feedback on interactions, you should also ask for feedback and ideas from agents­. This is a form of knowledge-sharing, which can generate useful suggestions for improvement. Always let employees know if you’ve used one of their ideas. 

Get a clearer picture of your performance with effective call centre quality assurance 

Call centre quality assurance helps you assess how you’re doing, and see what you need to do to improve. It’s a continuous process of monitoring and evaluating customer-agent interactions and using the data to identify problems and opportunities.

Remember, although your call centre exists to provide a positive experience for your customers, QA is about employee experience as well. With the right software, you can easily monitor interactions, analyse results, and streamline call centre efficiency.

That way, you’ll be able to maintain the highest standards while keeping everyone happy.