Call Center Quality Assurance: Complete Guide for 2025

How do you make sure that every interaction with your customers delivers the top experience and service quality they expect? Because customer expectations are growing. It’s not enough to respond quickly—you also need to provide personalized and consistent omnichannel service.

Unfortunately, 88% of service leaders agree that their service quality assurance (QA) processes don’t match customer expectations. The most common reason is that agents struggle with a heavy workload, don’t have the capacity to provide excellent service, and lack the right QA agent tools that would help them do their jobs better.

That’s why it’s important to ask questions like:

• Why is call center quality assurance important?
• How do you improve call center quality assurance in the first place?
• What is the best call center quality assurance software in 2025 to help you level up your operations?

That’s what you’ll discover in this guide on call center quality assurance.

What is call center quality assurance?

Call center quality assurance is the process of monitoring, evaluating, and improving customer support interactions to ensure agents deliver accurate, consistent, and customer-friendly service.

It’s how a call center checks whether agents are following procedures, communicating clearly, solving problems correctly, and creating a good customer experience. For example, if an agent forgets to follow a script or strays from your brand’s style and voice, QA procedures are in place to spot these gaps and help agents improve.

Key parts of call center QA include:

• Monitoring interactions by listening to calls or reviewing text communication
• Scoring performance using call center quality assurance scorecards to evaluate accuracy, compliance, professionalism, and resolution quality
• Identifying issues by spotting gaps like poor product knowledge, delays, or incorrect procedures
• Helping agents improve through targeted training
• Making sure customers get the same high-quality support no matter who they speak to

In short, QA improves customer satisfaction, reduces mistakes, boosts efficiency, and protects the company’s reputation. Poor QA leads to inconsistent service, more complaints, and customer churn.

Automated QA vs hybrid QA vs fully manual QA

Most call centers mainly fall into three types of quality assurance procedures:

1. Fully automated
2. Hybrid
3. Fully manual

As auto-QA tools get smarter, doubling down on automation operations just makes sense. McKinsey even found that automated QA can hit accuracy levels above 90%, while manual scoring usually tops out at around 70–80%, not to mention the differences in scope they can handle. And the best part? Companies can cut their QA costs by more than half with the right systems in place. However, having a human in the loop can combine the best of both worlds. Let’s see how these three call center QA process types compare.

Type of quality assurance	Pros	Cons
Automated	Often works as an agentic system, making decisions and taking independent actionCan analyze 100% of interactions, not just a small sampleFlags issues in real time or near real timeNo human bias; every interaction is evaluated using the same criteriaHandles large volumes without adding staffCan automatically categorize trends, sentiments, and behaviors	May misinterpret tone, nuance, empathy, or unusual scenariosAutomated rules or models may miss edge cases or exceptionsPoor calibration can cause inaccurate resultsAutomation can diagnose, but humans are still needed to train and guide agents
Hybrid (auto QA detects issues, humans review and validate)	Automation catches patterns, and humans interpret nuanceHumans provide context-rich feedback based on AI findingsAutomation reduces workload while humans handle complex or sensitive interactionsHuman oversight corrects AI misclassifications	Must allocate QA specialists to review flagged interactionsHuman judgment varies
Manual	Humans interpret emotion, intent, and edge cases better than AICan adapt evaluations on the fly without ruleset limitationsQA specialists provide personalized, qualitative feedback	Very low coverage, and in most cases, only 1–5% of interactions are reviewedRequires large QA teams to scaleHuman bias, fatigue, and subjective interpretationMore labor equals more expensesIssues may go unnoticed for weeks or months

The verdict? The best quality assurance procedures depend on your unique business. When your client base is small, even manual QA can work, but once you begin to scale, it’s beneficial to switch to hybrid or fully automated call center quality assurance.

The main aspects of call center quality assurance

If you’re opting for an automated or hybrid call center QA, it’s important to pay attention to the software you choose to help your team do its job better. Below, we list several aspects to familiarize yourself with the QA process.

Aspect	Description	Example
Real-time sentiment	A system that analyzes the customer’s emotional tone during the call. It detects frustration, anger, confusion, impatience, positivity, etc., and alerts the agent or supervisor. It helps agents adjust their communication immediately to improve the outcome.	A customer calls with a problem, and after the agent solves it, the system detects that the customer is in a positive and curious mood, which can be a great moment to suggest an upsell.
Real-time suggestions	Live guidance is delivered to the agent while the conversation is happening. It helps agents deliver consistent, high-quality service and avoid errors before they happen.	This can include prompts like: “Show empathy,” “Verify the customer’s information,” “Offer a solution,” etc.
Post-call QA	This includes an evaluation after the interaction ends. The system or a human QA specialist reviews call transcripts, audio, customer sentiment, agent behavior, and resolution accuracy. It provides structured scoring, identifies coaching needs, and tracks performance trends.	If a new agent keeps forgetting a key part of the conversation script, QA software can send useful resources after calls or text communication.
Automated call scoring	Technology that automatically assigns a quality score to each call based on predefined criteria, e.g., greeting, compliance, empathy, and resolution. It offers fast, consistent evaluations at scale, reducing manual QA workload.	You can use automated call scoring as your call center’s KPI to track agent performance and evaluate them.
Compliance monitoring	A system that ensures agents follow legal, regulatory, and internal rules—such as: Required disclosuresAvoiding prohibited languageData-handling guidelinesScript adherence It reduces business risk, ensures regulatory compliance, and protects customer data.	During a call, an agent forgets to provide a necessary disclosure about personal data processing, real-time auto QA can flag this in the moment and allow the agent to correct themselves.

Why is call center quality assurance important?

Call center quality assurance ensures that every interaction meets your customers’ expectations. Because here’s the thing: 91% of customers expect every experience with a business to be convenient, making QA a critical part of your processes. But it doesn’t only improve your customer experience—it also benefits your team. Let’s explore how.

Benefits of call center quality assurance for CX

When you maintain high service quality standards, it’s only natural that your customers will be happier to continue doing business with you. Proper call center QA ensures a consistent experience across agents and channels, faster resolutions, and lasting trust.

More consistent experiences

Quality assurance establishes standards for how agents communicate, solve problems, and follow processes. It doesn’t matter if your call center teams are scattered across the world—when a customer connects with you, they always get a consistent, on-brand experience.

By monitoring interactions and providing feedback, QA ensures that customers receive the same level of service no matter which agent they speak to. This way, they feel confident that every interaction—phone, chat, or email—will be clear, helpful, and professional.

Faster resolutions

QA identifies common bottlenecks, knowledge gaps, and workflow issues that slow down support. It also ensures agents follow best practices, which reduces unnecessary transfers, repeated explanations, and unresolved issues that lead to callbacks. This is crucial because 66% of customers agree that they would rather get hassle-free and frictionless service than a friendly one.

Satisfying brand interactions

QA focuses on tone, empathy, communication quality, and accuracy—the elements that shape how the customer feels during support. By reinforcing positive behaviors and correcting friction points, QA ensures that interactions reflect the company’s brand values. This way, customers walk away feeling heard, respected, and well-supported, turning service interactions into positive brand moments.

Imagine yourself in a situation many of us find ourselves in—your order got stuck somewhere and is late. You get frustrated and contact customer support. Instead of aggravating the problem, they listen to you, understand your situation, and do everything they can to de-escalate, such as finding the problem, offering alternative solutions, or even providing future discounts. Even if your order still hasn’t arrived, you feel good about the brand because of the attention they gave you.

Consumer trust

Trust grows when a company consistently resolves issues, protects customer data, and treats customers with transparency and respect. In fact, 71% of customers would repeat their business with a company if it provided top service. Well-tuned QA procedures can help you make this happen.

QA enforces:

• Compliance standards
• Accurate information
• Honest communication
• Reliable problem-solving

When experiences are reliable and professional, customers believe the company will take care of them, increasing loyalty and long-term retention.

Benefits of call center quality assurance for EX

When you bring excellent customer service together with the tools that help you achieve this, you also benefit your support team. Higher agent job satisfaction, reduced turnover, and increased productivity are just the beginning when you start implementing the right procedures.

Lower agent attrition

Call centers have one of the highest turnover rates across industries, with the average rate of 30–45% annually, and some experiencing as much as 60%. Having a strong QA program can help switch the script by providing clear expectations, structured feedback, and fair performance insights. 

When agents understand how to succeed and receive helpful coaching—not criticism—they experience less stress and burnout, which reduces turnover.

More effective training

It takes anywhere from six to twelve weeks to train a new support agent. Pair that with high turnover, and you have a huge bottleneck. Most call centers can’t afford to have senior agents overseeing every interaction and training new hires at the expense of their personal time. 

That’s where quality assurance comes to the rescue. QA highlights skill gaps, common errors, and best practices based on real interactions. Training becomes personalized and targeted instead of generic.

Agents improve faster, feel more confident, and retain knowledge better because training is grounded in real needs.

Higher brand loyalty

When QA ensures smoother processes and fewer frustrated customers, agents experience more positive interactions and feel proud of the service they deliver. This strengthens their emotional connection to the brand. Employees who believe in the brand and enjoy their work environment are more motivated, more engaged, and more likely to stay.

More revenue

QA improves upsell accuracy, reduces errors, and ensures agents communicate and solve problems effectively. Agents become more skilled at identifying opportunities and providing value-driven solutions.

Better performance and smoother interactions lead to higher conversion rates, more repeat customers, and fewer costly mistakes—all contributing to revenue growth. 

Another great way to avoid mistakes, reduce wait times, and, as a result, cut costs is by giving your team agent assist tools to excel at their job. That was exactly the plan PepsiCo had when they turned to Capacity and deployed the Answer Engine® to help their agents succeed.

When a customer has a question or a doubt, instead of wasting time going through countless documents, agents can just prompt the system to deliver answers right away. The Answer Engine® searches through millions of pages of content living across both first- and third-party connections to find answers in seconds. And the results? PepsiCo now saves more than 438 hours each month and has grown its monthly users by more than 2500%.

How do you improve call center quality assurance? Call center quality assurance: 7 best practices

Improving your call center quality assurance shouldn’t be mission impossible, especially if you have the right tools at hand. As a manager, you have concrete steps you can take to make sure every interaction meets your customers’ expectations without draining your team. Let’s go over some of the best call center quality assurance practices.

1: Define your goals

Before improving QA, you need clarity on what “good service” looks like for your organization. Your call center goals should be measurable and specific. Otherwise, they’ll be impossible to follow. Due to the lack of concrete goals, around 46% of businesses don’t have a three-year plan for their customer support. Setting the right goals can set you apart!

You can start by going over your call center productivity metrics. There are many to follow, and you don’t need to do them all at once.

For example, you can start by setting goals like:

• Reducing customer effort by 5% by the end of the second quarter
• Increasing first-call resolution by 3%
• Improving compliance accuracy
• Boosting NPS/CSAT
• Decreasing escalations or repeat contacts

Clear goals guide your call center quality assurance scorecards, training, automation, and coaching, ensuring your QA program actually drives business outcomes—not just scores.

2: Map your customer journey

Understanding every touchpoint—from initial inquiry to resolution—reveals where quality matters most and where breakdowns occur. Quality assurance in a call center helps your virtual and human agents meet your customers where they are. If the first contact is usually made through web chat, it must reflect the tone and help lead customers to the next step. Where do customers go after that if they need further assistance? Is it easy to reach human agents or schedule a call?

Journey mapping identifies:

• Common frustrations
• High-risk moments, such as billing, complaints, or cancellations
• Opportunities to optimize processes or scripts
• Skills agents need at each step

QA becomes aligned with real customer experiences rather than generic standards.

3: Integrate QA into your process

QA should not be a once-a-month scorecard exercise. It becomes truly effective when built directly into daily operations. As a manager, you should schedule regular meetings with your team to review their scores, analyze mistakes, and create a plan to improve.

This includes:

• Regular coaching sessions
• Clear feedback loops between QA and supervisors
• Continuous monitoring, manual and automated
• Updating policies, scripts, and workflows based on QA findings

However, your QA procedures and tools should also integrate with your helpdesk software, knowledge base, CRM, ERP, and other systems to reach their full potential.

4: Implement strategic automation

Automation enhances QA by handling the large-scale, repetitive, or objective parts of evaluation. As we mentioned at the beginning, an automated and hybrid approach works best for reducing workload, saving costs, and ensuring continuous quality tracking. 

But for that, you need the right systems that work by:

• Auto-scoring greetings, disclosures, and procedural steps
• Detecting high-risk language or compliance violations
• Providing real-time sentiment and agent prompts
• Identifying trending issues or emerging patterns

This way, you increase coverage, reduce manual workload, and find issues quickly—while still using humans for nuance and coaching.

5: Develop strong training programs

QA findings should directly influence your training. If a trend shows that customers are more likely to be interested in upsell services during call interactions, you can train your agents to increase upselling options during calls or move them from another channel.

The best training programs are:

• Targeted (based on real problem areas)
• Ongoing (not just during onboarding)
• Skills-based (empathy, active listening, product knowledge)
• Supported by real examples from calls

Agents learn faster, perform better, and feel more confident because training is tied to actual customer needs and behavior.

6: Reward agents

Recognition reinforces positive behavior and motivates agents to maintain high quality. One study analyzing Southwest Airlines’ appreciation program found that 86% of their employees felt appreciated and respected as a result of the program, and 79% agreed that the program had positive effects on their engagement and motivation. Setting up reward programs is much easier when you have clear data at hand.

Rewards can include:

• Bonuses
• Public recognition
• Career progression opportunities
• Special privileges or incentives

When agents feel appreciated, they’re more engaged, have higher morale, and naturally deliver better customer experiences.

7: Leverage analytics

Analytics provide insight beyond individual scores.

They help you see patterns at scale, such as:

• Which issues cause the most repeat contacts
• Which agent behaviors correlate with high CSAT
• Where processes break down
• Differences across teams, products, or regions

Data turns QA from a scoring mechanism into a decision-making engine, helping leaders fix systemic issues—not just agent-level problems.

What is the best call center quality assurance software in 2026? 7 tools compared 

As we’ve already consolidated the theory, let’s move on to practical ways to make a difference in your customer experience management. Whether you want a hybrid or fully automated QA, we’ve collected seven software options for you to explore and find the one that works best for your business based on features, pros, and cons.

1. Capacity

Think of Capacity like a modern AI-driven “quality assurance engine” for your contact center. This customer support automation and call center quality assurance software automates much of what would traditionally be manual QA work.

Capacity offers quality monitoring across channels that leverages AI, speech recognition, sentiment analysis, real-time suggestions, and many other features to automatically score interactions, identify coaching opportunities, and alert supervisors to key issues. It integrates with your call recording, CRM, and many other systems, and helps you scale your QA faster and with higher coverage.

Main features

• Auto QA features allow the system to analyze each interaction and automatically evaluate calls and chats using AI. It checks for compliance, tone, and other guardrails
• Sentiment and speech analytics detect tone, sentiment, keywords, and identify risk or service issues
• Integration with existing systems blends with your contact center tech stack, so you don’t have to rip and replace
• When the system spots a problem like agent tone, compliance breach, etc., it triggers an agent coaching workflow rather than waiting for manual review
• AI-based live chat with QA features proactively engages customers and ensures that each interaction meets your company’s expectations and goals
• AI-powered knowledge base connects to your data across documentation, internal chats, third-party integrations, and more to pull the most up-to-date information

Pros

• Scales QA significantly beyond what humans alone can do 
• Faster detection of issues 
• Reduces manual burden on the QA team
• Helps enforce consistency

Cons

• Like any AI, it might miss nuances that a human would pick up

2. AmplifAI

AmplifAI positions itself not just as a QA tool but as a unified performance and agent engagement platform that embeds QA, compliance, coaching, and analytics all together. AmplifAI promises to unify contact center data, drive agent performance, improve leader efficiency, and business outcomes—all in one place.

Main features

• Auto QA across interactions helps spot issues without human involvement 
• Integrations pull in data from many sources, like your CRM, CCaaS, chat, and voice, and present one “agent performance” view
• Coaching and next-best-action driven by data not only flags errors but also suggests targeted coaching steps
• Compliance and risk detection offers built-in monitoring of compliance issues as part of QA

Pros

• Very broad and holistic
• Strong analytics and integration capabilities
• Can drive strategic improvements

Cons

• Possibly overkill for smaller operations or those just starting QA
• Implementation and data integration complexity could be high
• Higher cost and change effort

3. Balto AI

Balto focuses heavily on real-time guidance for agents during live conversations, plus automated QA. It’s more of a frontline “assist” tool with QA benefits. This platform is a strong option for AI-powered real-time guidance, with features such as prompts, script suggestions, and compliance flags. It integrates with telephony and CRM, so agents get help in the moment and supervisors get QA insights afterward.

Main features

• Real-time conversation guidance during calls prompts agents on what to say, when to ask questions, etc. 
• Automated scoring and 100% call coverage enable scoring every interaction against custom call center quality assurance scorecards
• Call summarization and insights after calls provide summaries and analytics so supervisors and agents can learn
• Compliance monitoring ensures compliance while agents are on call and for post-call review 

Pros

• Immediate agent support
• Could reduce agent ramp-time 

Cons

• Real-time prompts may feel intrusive or “watched” by agents 
• Needs strong integration and data flow

4. MaestroQA

MaestroQA is more of a classic QA and quality management tool with strong scorecarding, coaching workflows, and analytics. It’s less about live agent prompts and more about structured QA program management.

MaestroQA offers a platform where you build custom scorecards, evaluate agent tickets and calls, automate workflows, capture root cause analytics, and deliver coaching. It’s well-suited for omnichannel support and organizations serious about QA programs.

Main features

• Scorecard builder defines what “quality” means for your company and allows you to build tools accordingly
• Auto QA and automated evaluation assistance spot gaps and help you evaluate your team’s performance 
• Root cause analysis and analytics dashboards identify why issues are happening, which agents, workflows, or interactions are problematic
• Coaching workflows and agent development use QA findings to create targeted coaching and training opportunities

Pros

• Strong for structured QA programs and mature QA teams
• Good for omnichannel environments, not just voice
• Customizable scorecards allow alignment with your business needs

Cons

• May not cover every interaction automatically unless you implement the automation features
• Requires a disciplined QA team or process to get maximum value

5. Talkdesk

While Talkdesk is a full contact-center platform rather than purely a QA tool, its “Quality Management” module offers solid QA features integrated into the broader platform.

Talkdesk’s Quality Management offers AI-powered automated scoring, voice and screen recording, customizable forms, contextual feedback, coaching, and gamification. Because it’s part of a full CCaaS suite, it works smoothly with routing, omnichannel, CRM integrations, etc.

Main features

• AI-powered automated scoring uses keywords, tone, sentiment, and AI to evaluate calls 
• Voice and screen recording give a full context of what the agent did on screen and what was said 
• Customizable forms and scorecards help you build your own evaluation criteria and attach time-stamped comments to recordings
• Gamification and coaching workflows track performance metrics, incentivize agents, and schedule coaching tasks

Pros

• Integrated within a broader contact-center platform
• Good for organizations using Talkdesk already

Cons

• If you only need QA and not full CCaaS, it can be overkill
• As with any platform, you may face a learning curve and cost overhead

6. Eureka by CallMiner 

CallMiner and its Eureka tool offer conversation analytics and quality assurance that focus heavily on mining voice and digital interactions for insights, risk detection, compliance, and agent performance improvement. 

It’s commonly used in regulated industries like financial services, insurance, and healthcare, where identifying risk, compliance breaches, and customer sentiment is critical.

Main features

• Omnichannel interaction mining covers communication across voice, chat, and email channels 
• Automated scoring evaluates interactions against custom scorecards and rules
• Risk and compliance detection helps identify unauthorized language, missed disclosures, and high-risk phrases
• Root-cause analytics and trend detection spot patterns across agents, teams, products, and customers

Pros

• Strong for compliance-heavy environments 
• Deep analytics capabilities
• Covers many channels 

Cons

• May be more complex and expensive than simpler QA platforms
• Requires good data integration and change management to unlock full value

7. Observe.AI

Observe.AI is an AI-led QA and agent performance platform that combines speech-to-text, real-time, and post-interaction analytics, and coaching workflows. It aims to turn large volumes of interactions into actionable insights and support QA at scale. 

Main features

• Automated evaluation provides analysis of most interactions, not just a small sample
• Real-time or near-real-time alerts trigger agent coaching, e.g., when the customer gets frustrated
• Customizable scorecards and dashboards for QA teams make it easy to track specific goals
• Coaching workflows built on insights assign training based on specific performance gaps

Pros

• Good balance of automation and coaching support 
• Enables faster feedback loops, which can improve agent learning and service quality

Cons

• Requires good setup, calibration, and monitoring for accuracy
• Might still miss the nuanced human context

Revamp your call center quality assurance for excellence

Whether you’ve never invested in quality assurance in your call center or have been doing it for a while, it’s always useful to review and improve it.

Because top-standard call center QA procedures ensure:

• More consistent experiences
• Faster resolutions
• Satisfying brand interactions
• Consumer trust
• Lower agent attrition
• More effective training
• Higher brand loyalty
• More revenue

If you’re unsure how to get the most out of it, empower your team with the right tools. 

Some of the best quality assurance call center automation software includes:

1. Capacity
2. AmplifAI
3. Balto AI
4. MaestroQA
5. Talkdesk
6. CallMiner Eureka
7. Observe.AI

If you want more than just quality assurance—and instead a 360-degree call center automation solution—you can’t skip Capacity. Designed for busy call and contact centers, it not only improves your customer experience but also offers countless AI-powered agent assist features for your team, integrations with over 250 tools, and advanced automation. The best part? Incredible cost savings. But see it for yourself—calculate how much Capacity can save you using our ROI calculator.

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