18 best practices for call center quality assurance (+ expert tips)

Ready to build better conversations?

Simple to set up. Easy to use. Powerful integrations.

Get free access

Any call center that wants to provide excellent customer service must closely monitor performance to gain meaningful insights. 

Satisfied customers and great customer service result from a cycle of data collection, analysis, training, and improvement. In other words: quality assurance.

Call center quality assurance helps you ensure the service your agents offer lives up to your customers’ expectations. 

Whether you’re setting up your call center quality assurance process for the first time, or want to optimize performance, this article provides 18 best practices to follow, with insights from leaders who’ve successfully transformed their QA strategies.

TL;DR

Delivering excellent customer service starts with understanding what “quality” truly means for your customers and building a QA framework around it.

This guide breaks down 18 proven best practices for call center quality assurance—from defining what “good” looks like and mapping the customer journey to leveraging AI for faster insights and creating a feedback-driven culture.

1. Define success around customer outcomes, not just efficiency metrics.

2. Use journey mapping and AI analytics to identify friction and guide coaching.

3. Keep QA collaborative and non-judgmental so agents feel supported, not monitored.

4. Reinforce progress through continuous, micro-level feedback and targeted training.

5. Align technology, people, and processes to make quality everyone’s responsibility.

Featuring insights from experts, this article shows how modern QA transforms customer interactions, strengthens teams, and drives lasting business growth.

Why your business success hinges on the performance of your call center

Your ability to build customer loyalty and increase revenue hinges on the quality of your call center interactions. 

And a single poor experience can leave a lasting impact. In 2025, more than half of customers will switch providers after just one negative contact center experience. 

• Businesses around the world risk $3.8 trillion in sales due to bad customer experiences.

• A positive experience makes customers 89% more likely to buy again. 

So optimizing your call center’s performance isn’t just an operational goal; it’s a vital business strategy.

While the customer journey has many touchpoints, the call center often makes the most lasting impact. 

Quality assurance identifies training needs and supports effective coaching, which leads to higher-performing agents. 

And this focus on quality directly increases both efficiency and team morale. Happier agents also stick around longer, which reduces turnover costs and strengthens service consistency.

What is quality assurance in call centers?

Quality assurance (QA) in call centers is all about making sure every customer interaction hits the mark, whether it happens over the phone, in chat, or by email. 

It’s the ongoing process of reviewing how agents communicate, measuring performance against clear standards, and using those insights to make each conversation better than the last.

At its core, QA isn’t just about scoring calls; it’s about understanding what great service looks like and helping teams deliver it consistently. It connects what customers experience with how agents are coached and supported.

Here’s how it generally works:

• Listen to or read a sample of customer conversations and score them using a clear, consistent rubric.

• Bring QA analysts together to compare how they scored the same calls and agree on what “good” looks like. This keeps evaluations fair and consistent across the team.

• Use patterns from QA reviews to coach agents, refine scripts, and improve workflows.

Today, many contact centers also use AI and analytics to automatically flag trends, highlight coaching opportunities, and free up supervisor time for higher-value feedback.

Getting started: Set clear goals

Before implementing or upgrading your system for call center quality assurance, you need to define what you hope to achieve. This will help you lay down solid groundwork.

1. Pinpoint your issues and decide what “good” means

Your first step for call center quality assurance is to evaluate which areas of your call center need improvement. 

What standard do you hope to reach? How can you measure this? Without a clear idea of what you want, you can’t build out an effective quality-monitoring strategy. 

As Conrad Wang, Managing Director at EnableU, explains, “good” isn’t a checklist—it’s about outcomes. In his words:

“Calls where clients leave fully informed, confident, and reassured often take longer than average, but they reduce follow-ups by 25–30%. One agent consistently resolved complex inquiries in 10–15% more time than peers, yet repeat contacts for their clients dropped to under 5% over three months. Clear explanations, asking clients to summarize instructions, and checking emotional comfort—these micro-moments build trust and prevent errors, which is far more important than hitting talk-time targets.”

He also tracks how often clients ask for clarification after a call. Even small reductions in those numbers signal meaningful quality gains. For Conrad, “good” must be measured by confidence, clarity, and safety outcomes, not efficiency alone.

That focus on trust and reassurance echoes Alfred Christ, Sales Director at ROKR, who defines “good” as a call where “the customer feels heard, understood, and leaves with confidence in our products.”

Pro tip: Think in terms of what you should START, STOP, and CONTINUE doing. Start measuring outcomes like confidence and clarity, stop relying only on speed metrics, and continue refining your definition of “good” through regular calibration sessions with your team.

2. Put the customer first

When you keep customer needs front and center, you’re more likely to make a positive impact on their experience. 

So design your quality assurance approach to enhance the customer experience directly—whether through faster response times, better communication skills for agents, or more personalized interactions.

Arsen Misakyan, founder of LAXcar, Angel City Limo, and Fleeter.ai, explains how defining “good” through the customer’s lens transformed his team’s QA process:

“For us, ‘good’ wasn’t just a seamless booking—it was clearing up any uncertainty about timing and professionalism for travellers. We mapped ‘ideal’ calls, identifying pressure points (say, airport pickups) and constructing QA rubrics that focused on addressing them unambiguously. By anchoring ‘good’ to what the customer was trying to achieve, not only matching a generic script, we baked in a standard that our team would really work with.”

Arsen’s example highlights that focusing on what customers value most is the surest way to raise overall service quality.

3. Collect caller feedback

A reliable way to improve service is to ask your customers what they want. We recommend providing a short, efficient feedback questionnaire after every call center interaction to help you pinpoint the areas in which your agents can improve. 

Pro tip: Launch an online forum that makes it easy for customers to share feedback on service quality whenever they’d like.

4. Benchmark against competitors

Compare your business to call centers of similar size and comparable activity, zeroing in on metrics like Average Handling Time (AHT) and First Call Resolution Rate (FCR). 

Just know that the benchmarking process is a continuous loop, and as you improve your performance in one area, you will need to start evaluating another.

It can be tricky to remain impartial when comparing yourself to competitors. For these reasons, hire an external quality assurance consultant to help maintain objectivity.

5. Map the customer journey

Customer journey mapping visualizes every step a customer takes when seeking support, from first contact to resolution. 

It helps QA teams understand where friction occurs and how those moments affect satisfaction. For example, a mapped journey might reveal: 

1. Customer calls about billing

2. Routed to the wrong team

3. Transferred twice

4. Issue unresolved

Peter Barnett, VP of Product Strategy at Action1, explains how you can get started with this and incorporate it into your QA process:

“We added a ‘customer friction log’ during QA reviews. Every time an agent had to jump through extra steps or the customer ran into a repeated hurdle, it went into the log. This not only helped coaching but also guided product fixes that reduced those pain points altogether.”

Pro tip: Start with your most common support queries and trace the end-to-end journey to spot improvement opportunities.

Ongoing QA: Monitor your call center’s quality of service

Once you've laid the foundations for what you hope to gain from your call center quality assurance process, it's time to set your plan in motion.

The operational side of call center quality assurance relies on performance monitoring. Take a look at how to leverage technology for call center quality assurance.

6. Choose the right software

Choose call center software that already comes with quality assurance features, such as call transcription, recording, and monitoring. 

Consider several factors when picking out a tool for running and monitoring your call center: 

• Features: Your call center software should come with built-in analytics features, as well as AI-powered tools like call summaries, key topic recognition, and talk-to-listen ratios. 

• Ease of use: Make sure that the software is intuitive. If you need to heavily train your employees before they can use it, it will hamper your call center’s productivity.

• Scalability: Your workforce needs will fluctuate, as will your workload (especially if your activity is seasonal), so pick software that will scale up and down with your company.

Discover Aircall’s powerful customer communication platform for a call center that maximizes agent productivity and customer satisfaction. Try for free.

7. Decide which metrics to analyze

Quality of service can be measured by many key performance indicators (KPIs). However, trying to track all of them drains time and resources without necessarily improving performance and agent productivity. 

Instead, focus on a few meaningful metrics that reflect real customer outcomes and agent effectiveness and build your QA scorecard around those.

Popular call center KPIs include: 

• Average wait time

• Missed call rate

• Conversion rate

• First-call resolution

• Employee satisfaction

But remember: Not all metrics are equally meaningful.

Nicolas Breedlove, CEO of PlaygroundEquipment.com, warns against getting caught up in vanity metrics like call volume:

“One vanity metric that I've seen teams cling to is the number of calls handled per hour. Initially, we obsessively tracked this, believing that more calls meant more efficiency. However, I noticed representatives speeding up conversations, leaving clients confused regarding product specifications or installation processes. Within two months, we experienced a 17% increase in recurring calls and a 9% increase in shipping/installation concerns.

We shifted our focus to ‘resolution confidence’—whether the client completely understood the next steps and did not require follow-up. We measured this by administering fast post-call surveys and tracking repeat contacts for the same issue. Within three months, first-contact resolution increased by 21%, customer satisfaction by 16%, and agents reported feeling less rushed and more empowered to solve problems thoroughly.”

Nicolas’s experience highlights a broader truth: metrics that look good on dashboards often hide the real story.

Similarly, Valentin Radu, Founder of Omniconvert, warns against over-relying on Average Handle Time (AHT). He advises focusing on First-Call Resolution (FCR) instead:

“While shorter calls may seem efficient, they often sacrifice the quality of the customer experience. Resolving customer issues during the initial interaction ensures satisfaction and builds trust.”

And Dirk Alshuth, CMO at emma, cautions against overvaluing high-level sentiment metrics like NPS:

“Net Promoter Score is often overvalued in call centers. It’s too broad and influenced by factors outside the agent’s control. Instead, track knowledge transfer—did the customer actually understand what was explained? That’s far more predictive of long-term satisfaction in complex industries.”

8. Frequently record your calls 

Modern customer communications software lets managers record and listen to active calls. However, given the volume of calls your business receives, we’d bet there’s no way supervisors can listen to all of them. So you need to decide which calls to examine closer.

Use the metrics you identified earlier and identify and analyze calls that are in conflict with your goals so you can pinpoint where agents need support. This could include calls that:

• Ran long

• Resulted in low customer satisfaction

• Required customers to call back multiple times

• Involved multiple transfers

Additionally, pinpoint calls that went particularly well and resulted in high customer satisfaction scores to help you develop agent training and protocols. 

9. Monitor calls from start to finish

Once you choose calls to analyze, examine them in their entirety. Exemplary calls should show how the agent solved the problem over the course of a single conversation. 

Pay attention to how the agent started the call, their tone and demeanor throughout, the solutions they offered to the caller, and how they signed off. 

Each call is like a self-contained case study. If you only pick bits and pieces of them, the agent's choices won't be put in context and the training-value of the recordings will be diminished. The best examples of high-quality calls should be saved as training materials.

10. Monitor conversations across several channels

You may not just be operating over the phone, but also over live chat, email, or texts. 

Your call center quality assurance must extend to every channel you use to reach customers and vice-versa. 

While the medium differs, you must have the same concern for quality assurance—regardless of where the interaction takes place. 

11. Leverage AI for quicker insights

The 2024 CallMiner CX Landscape Report shows that 87% of organizations see generative AI as crucial for their customer service strategy and 91% believe AI technology will improve efficiency in customer satisfaction levels. 

AI-powered tools can help you act fast to boost agent performance and customer satisfaction. Aircall’s AI features, for example, can help you:

• Streamline call reviews: Pinpoint key terms and critical moments across conversations. Aircall’s AI Assist allows you to focus on areas needing deeper analysis to save you time and improve call quality.

• Enrich coaching with context: AI-generated summaries and sentiment analysis provide actionable data to help you train agents effectively and build stronger customer connections. AI Assist Pro adds live transcription, real-time prompts, automated CRM logging, and call scoring to help managers coach more effectively.

• Increase sales conversions: Ensure sales calls hit the mark with balanced, engaging conversations. AI-driven insights and call center analytics let you quickly review pitches, coach reps, and drive better call outcomes.

• Turn support calls into loyalty builders: Identify friction points and train agents to deliver smoother interactions. AI analysis makes it easy to evaluate agent performance and find ways to enhance the customer experience.

Across industries, leaders are finding that AI is doing more than just speeding up QA, it’s transforming it into a proactive growth tool. Here’s how a few experts describe that change in action:

“AI has helped us spot blind spots we didn’t see before. For example, it surfaces recurring words or pain points across thousands of interactions. That helps us improve upstream, like adjusting website flows or FAQs, so fewer customers even need to call in. QA isn’t just reactive anymore; it’s feeding into better web experiences.” — Sara Cooper, Director of Web Strategy, Simpro

Sara’s experience shows how AI doesn’t just enhance call reviews, it strengthens the entire customer journey. That same principle applies internally, where insights from QA can inform broader business strategy:

“AI has allowed us to connect QA data with product strategy. By analysing patterns across calls, AI highlights where customers get stuck with features or updates. That means QA isn’t just about evaluating agents; it’s also feeding insights back into how we design better products.” — Peter Barnett,  VP of Product Strategy, Action1

For Maris Laatre, CMO at Bully Max, AI’s real-time emotional tracking brings humanity back to quality assurance:

“AI helps us track emotional tone in real time, which is huge in a consumer brand like ours. If customers sound frustrated or anxious, AI flags it so supervisors can step in sooner. It’s shifted QA from being reactive to being a proactive tool for protecting relationships.” 

See how Aircall’s powerful AI features can help you strengthen quality assurance in your call center. Try for free. 

Getting everyone aligned: Bring your staff on board 

Now that we've looked at the operational side, let's explore the human aspect of call center quality assurance.

12. Bring on a quality assurance manager

Call center managers already have a lot on their plate. And besides, what makes a great call center manager won't necessarily translate to an effective quality assurance analyst. 

Consider hiring a call center quality assurance specialist to design training material, monitor calls and trends, and uphold the standard you set for your business. This person could be an external consultant, or part of your staff.

13. Hire the right employees

Call centers experience a great deal of employee turnover. And every new agent you hire to fill an empty role needs a period of training before they can start working at full capacity. 

This represents quite a bit of time spent training new employees. This makes it crucial to select candidates who are likely to get up to speed quickly—then stick around. 

Pro tip: Present prospective hires with a range of assessments during the vetting process. Aptitude tests can help you identify whether a hire will be an asset to your call center.

14. Write solid scripts

Call center scripts help agents respect the quality standards you've set for your call center. Whether your call center deals in outbound or inbound calls, a script will help your agents deliver consistent, quality service. 

Still, scripts shouldn’t be static. They should evolve based on real call data, especially insights from QA reviews that reveal common friction points or where phrasing can make or break customer understanding.

Raihan Masroor, Founder and CEO of Your Doctors Online, learned how overemphasising script compliance can sometimes work against service quality:

“I’ve noticed new teams treat QA like a policing tool, focusing solely on mistakes. Early on, we scored calls for script adherence and factual accuracy, thinking that would ensure quality. But I observed that 35% of ‘perfect’ calls still left patients unsure about follow-up steps. Once we started measuring understanding and empathy, and coached agents on phrasing rather than just compliance, satisfaction scores jumped 18% in two months.”

Raihan’s experience shows that scripts are most effective when they’re used as a foundation and not a rulebook.

Encourage agents to adapt their language naturally and respond with empathy when situations demand it. 

A well-crafted script provides structure, but being confident enough to go off script and improvise on calls is what turns consistent service into exceptional customer experiences.

15. Provide proactive and regular training

Effective onboarding is crucial to empowering new agents and can spare them confidence issues and knowledge gaps down the line.

However, call center training shouldn’t stop after an employee’s first month. Use the insights you gain via call center analytics to design ongoing training sessions tailored to your employees’ areas for improvement, whether that’s learning how to improvise on calls or making the most of your CRM software and integrations. 

16. Involve the whole staff in a non-judgmental process

To ensure your agents accept your quality assurance efforts, you need to remove any associations of discipline around it. 

If you include all your agents in your quality assurance efforts, newer or low-performing agents won’t feel targeted or stressed out by the idea of being singled out. 

The key is to involve everyone and create a safe, collaborative space where agents can learn from one another.

Arsen Misakyan, founder of LAXcar, Angel City Limo, and Fleeter.ai, shares how reframing QA changed his team’s mindset entirely:

“A common mistake is to consider QA as something used for punishment and not coaching. Our team used to be defensive about evaluations until we reimagined our framework as support. We made QA sessions more collaborative—agents would listen to their calls and pinpoint the part that they were proud of. That made everyone’s mindset change, and QA went from being about catching mistakes to celebrating wins and fine-tuning the process.” 

Arsen’s experience shows that when QA is collaborative and strengths-based, agents become more open to feedback and more motivated to improve.

Yehor Melnykov, CEO of Loio reinforces this approach, emphasising the value of peer involvement:

“We added a peer-to-peer review element. Instead of all feedback coming top-down, agents now listen to and score one another’s calls. It not only built accountability but also sparked healthy discussions about what “great service” really looks like in practice." 

17. Establish clear goals and corresponding incentives

Educate agents about your call center KPIs and offer rewards for improving results to get buy-in from your whole team. 

This doesn't have to just mean financial incentives for your employee of the month; you could offer little bonuses like extra time off or a free lunch to any agents who are doing an exceptional job of driving quality in your call center.

18. Give continuous feedback

Feedback shouldn’t wait until the end of the week or the next performance review. Continuous feedback keeps quality assurance active and relevant, allowing agents to adjust in real time. 

Instead of saving notes for later, share small, actionable insights immediately after a call or chat.

Lacey Jarvis, COO at AAA State of Play, found this approach transformative:

“One of the most significant QA improvements we made was the implementation of immediate, micro-feedback after each customer encounter. Instead of waiting for weekly reports, managers present agents with one quick ‘win’ and one specific area for development right after a contact or email. Almost immediately, I noticed that agents began to change their conduct on the spot.”

Frequent, focused feedback turns QA monitoring into a daily coaching rhythm rather than a corrective exercise.

Pro tip: Keep feedback specific. Agents absorb it best when it’s timely, actionable, and focused on one clear improvement at a time.

Ready to turn feedback into something your whole team can act on? Discover how to turn call insights into team visibility with the Support Visibility Playbook.

Summary: Call center quality assurance best practices

Set yourself up for success with powerful call center software

Delivering exceptional customer experiences starts with understanding that quality assurance is more than a performance checklist, it’s the backbone of an effective, empathetic, and customer-focused call center.

Delivering exceptional call center quality starts with reliable, feature-rich software. Aircall provides AI-powered transcription, real-time coaching insights, and seamless CRM integrations to keep your team efficient and customer-focused—so you can consistently enhance service quality.

Built for reliability and scalability, Aircall’s cloud-based platform ensures clear, uninterrupted calls. 

Whether you’re looking to increase sales, improve support, or simplify operations, Aircall helps your agents do their job better so you can exceed customer expectations. 

Discover Aircall’s powerful customer communications platform for a call center that maximizes agent productivity and customer satisfaction. Try for free.

Frequently asked questions

How do you pass QA in a call center?

Passing QA in a call center involves meeting specific performance standards and consistently delivering positive customer experiences. This usually includes following call scripts, adhering to compliance guidelines, and resolving issues effectively. 

Agents should be knowledgeable about products or services and actively listen to understand customer needs. 

Regular feedback and coaching sessions can help agents perform better, and call recordings and AI-driven tools can also assist in identifying areas for improvement to ensure agents meet and exceed QA benchmarks.

What is the role of a QA specialist in a call center?

A QA specialist in a call center monitors and evaluates agent interactions to ensure quality standards are met. They review calls, assess adherence to scripts and protocols, and provide feedback to improve customer service quality. 

Their role includes identifying training needs, suggesting improvements, and helping agents improve their skills. QA specialists also track KPIs, analyze call trends, and work with management to create action plans for continuous improvement. 

What are the objectives of QA in a call center?

The main objectives of contact center quality assurance are to optimize overall agent performance, ensure compliance with company policies, and improve customer satisfaction. 

By monitoring and evaluating calls, QA helps identify areas where agents excel and where they need improvement.

Effective QA also aims to improve operational efficiency, minimize customer churn, and support ongoing training efforts.

What is the QA score in a call center?

The QA score in a call center is a metric that reflects an agent’s performance based on quality standards. It’s calculated by evaluating various call aspects, like script adherence, response accuracy, empathy, and problem resolution. 

The score can vary based on each call center’s specific criteria but generally indicates how well an agent meets customer service expectations. QA scores are vital for tracking individual and team performance, identifying trends, and guiding coaching efforts.

Published on December 3, 2024.