What is contact center quality management? Key processes, tools, and best practices

Contact center quality management programs help managers build teams that get better week after week. When agents have the right training and tools to do their best work, issues get resolved faster, escalations are reduced, and a happier customer base can be built.

In this blog, we discuss contact center quality management, why it matters, and the best practices for improving service across voice, chat, email, and more. You’ll also get a glimpse into how AI is changing the game and learn how to set up a quality management program in your own contact center.

Contact center quality management is the process companies use to monitor and improve agent performance. The end goal is to give customers the best experience possible.

The four key components for successful contact center quality management are: monitoring, evaluation, feedback, and improvement. 

First, managers analyze and review the quality of each agent’s interactions using tools like call recordings and speech analytics software.

This helps them spot recurring issues, such as gaps in agents’ skills or knowledge, or agents sounding too rushed or scripted — problems that can lead to poor outcomes. 

Team leaders can then share this valuable feedback with their agents and provide personalized training to correct these issues. With awareness and training, there’s a better chance that they’ll consistently hit their KPIs and provide customers with a positive experience. In the past, contact center quality management was a time-consuming ordeal, but recent advancements in AI have automated the process, taking the heavy load of interaction analysis with accuracy and speed. This gives managers time back to focus on upskilling their team to improve the service they provide.

Call center quality management programs give managers the tools they need to provide every agent on their team the skills they need to deliver a higher standard of care. The five main advantages are:

Improved agent performance

Regular feedback and training help agents handle complex interactions, close sales, and resolve problems and issues. It also reduces basic errors that can derail interactions like:

• Not verifying customer details at the start of a call
• Missing out key compliance phrases like “calls may be recorded for training and monitoring purposes”
• Talking over customers when they’re speaking

Extra training empowers agents to improve their performance. It also delivers another major plus: increased confidence that they can hit their targets. 

Managers are empowered to quickly build a talented, capable, and dependable team that can handle even the most complex calls without needing extra support.

Enhanced customer satisfaction

Contact center quality management programs set high benchmarks for agents to hit on every type of query, including sales, support, and technical interactions.

With more first-contact resolutions, there’s less need for follow-ups, freeing up your team’s time to support more customers and help achieve your contact center KPIs.

Increased efficiency

Find out why agents are losing time, and you’ll uncover ways to speed up service. Common examples that lead to bottlenecks in contact centers include:

• Placing callers on hold while agents find their order history and previous interactions
• Customers getting stuck in a loop, telling the same story again and again to multiple agents
• Agents writing up long summaries after each call

Look for the reasons why delays keep happening. Then, fix the problem by setting up workflow automations to manage them. 

For example, connect your contact center platform to a CRM like Salesforce or HubSpot. Agents can then see a customer’s call history or account details on one screen, without having to switch between systems or ask unnecessary questions. 

You might also use a feature like Zoom AI Companion, which is built into Zoom’s CX solutions, to generate interaction summaries. Agents can then move quickly on to the next customer because they’re not spending time writing long and detailed notes.

The more efficient and knowledgeable your team is, the more customers they can support successfully, making it easier for you to hit team targets.

Reduced compliance risk

Contact center quality monitoring programs help you stay compliant with industry regulations, such as:

• HIPAA: Effectively and securely store and encrypt recorded calls on-site or in the cloud with a cloud contact center
• Do Not Call (DNC): Keep an updated DNC list to prevent unlawful telemarketing calls
• PCI DSS: Accept payment while having payment information masked to avoid having customers disclose payment details in recordings

Compliance is incredibly important, particularly given the increasing number of data privacy and protection laws in the U.S. and around the world. 

A single breach can lead to legal trouble, fines, and reputational damage. Stay on top of these issues to protect your business.

Data-driven insights

The software that powers contact center quality assurance programs collects valuable data across different teams, channels, and contact types.

For example, speech analytics tools can monitor calls and warn you about problems like rising frustration over delivery delays and a recurring problem with a product or service. Contact center dashboards can also alert you to rising drop-offs, such as agents not picking up calls that IVRs, chatbots, or colleagues route to them.

Data-driven insights give you the information you need to correct emerging problems before call volumes increase and agents start missing targets.

To find the gaps in your service and take action to remedy them, you need the right solution. Here are the different types of tools and technologies that can provide you with the visibility you need:

• Omnichannel QM software: Review how agents handle conversations across voice, chat, email, social media, and other channels to reveal whether your agents deliver the same high level of care and attention at every touchpoint.
• Call recording systems: Listen to call recordings to check whether your agent followed the script, included key compliance phrases, and managed the situation effectively.
• Screen recording software: Watch how your agent uses their CRM system, unified communication platform, and other apps to see if it’s slowing them down or making their jobs more difficult.
• Speech analytics: Flag issues like multiple customers asking the same questions and objections that sales reps find hard to manage. Update your team scripts and back them up with coaching to help agents handle objections more confidently and resolve recurring issues faster.
• Automated quality monitoring software: Get an alert when an agent skips a key requirement, such as reading out compliance statements. Let the system do the searching rather than you having to listen to hundreds of call recordings looking for issues.
• Customer survey platforms: Automatically send post-call surveys so customers can tell you about their experience with your agent while it’s still fresh in their minds. Most systems let you match survey answers to individual calls so you can find out why a call went well poorly.
• Agent self-assessment tools: Ask agents to review their own scores to better understand where they think they struggle. When managers see the world through their agents’ eyes, this can lead to better coaching and faster improvement.
• Multi-channel monitoring solutions: Track interactions across all communication channels. Find out if your agents are as helpful and consistent in chat, SMS, email, and social media interactions as they are over the phone to prevent issues down the line.
• Performance analytics dashboards: Monitor KPIs like average handle time, first call resolution, customer satisfaction, and QA scores in real time. Give agents their own contact center analytics dashboard so they can track their progress and take ownership of their performance.

Contact center quality management aims to build a repeatable process that keeps your customers happy, helps your agents continuously improve, and spots potential problems before they affect your CSAT score or revenue.

Follow these seven best practices to build the best contact center quality management framework for your business:

Set clear and measurable performance standards

Start with a scorecard for each channel, like voice, email, SMS, social media, live chat, and more. Measure your agents:

• Technically: Did they follow their script, leave helpful notes for coworkers, go through the “Know Your Customer” process properly, and so on? Do they use correct grammar and spelling in text conversations?
• Personally: Did they come across as friendly and approachable?

Share these goals with your agents so they’re clear on what’s expected of them. Being precise also makes it easier for agents to identify the exact issues they need your help with.

Use a balanced approach to evaluate agent performance

Metrics like calls answered per hour and first call resolution show you when there’s an issue, but they don’t always explain why.

For example, you might think an agent is taking too long on their calls. But when you listen to their recordings, you can tell that they take that long because they’re following their scorecard’s technical and personal standards to the letter.

Let your team know that when you write up their reviews, you don’t see them as numbers — you see them as individuals. Be as clear as you can be on how you judge their performance. It’s hard for agents to hit their targets if they’re not entirely sure what they’re aiming for.

Track and analyze performance data for trends

Performance dashboards give managers extra insights that can drive team improvements forward.

Zoom out and look at data over longer periods to see whether certain departments or individuals are more responsible for escalations. Or does call time shoot up when customers call about a particular product?

The goal isn’t to catch anyone out. It’s to identify patterns and determine what you need to do better as a business. Tackle the root cause of every issue you uncover to better help agents hit their targets and make life easier for them and your customers.

Leverage speech and sentiment analytics tools

Speech analytics software can help you uncover why complaints are increasing or calls take longer. Look for:

• Recurring phrases: This can include lines like “I’ve already called about this” or “no one got back to me.”
• Complaints: Customers may mention issues like long hold times, billing errors, or difficulties sending returns.
• Missed steps: This might be the lack of a data protection disclaimer at the correct part of the call.
• Drop in sentiment: This can be identified when customers go from polite to frustrated or start raising their voice.

Share this data with other team leaders and stakeholders, such as QA professionals and customer experience leaders, to investigate what’s behind any downward shift in performance. The sooner you act, the better the chance of protecting your revenue and satisfaction scores.

Regularly monitor team calls and interactions

Random call checks can highlight your agents’ individual opportunity areas, but they don’t uncover issues affecting the whole team. To dig deeper, review a wider selection of live and recorded calls. 

Monitoring team calls can also uncover internal issues, such as team members sharing tips with one another that you haven’t approved. For example, listen for repeated occurrences of promising an unauthorized discount for a quick sale.

If you find an issue, address it with your team before it becomes a habit. Bringing your team together will save time by reducing the need for one-on-one training.

Provide individual ongoing agent training

Focus on the challenges individual team members face to unlock better performance. Look especially for gaps in reps’ skills and knowledge, as this can negatively affect their confidence and happiness at work.

When reviewing a call, highlight what they did well before pointing out any mistakes. Then, replay that part of the call to your agent, explaining how they could have handled it better. Let them practice conversations with you first so they can try out your approach in a low-pressure setting.

Make short, personalized training sessions a regular thing to build on their progress. If too much time passes between sessions and you end up building a lost list of mistakes to address, it can feel more like criticism than support, which can be discouraging.

Implement real-time feedback

Use live call coaching to correct mistakes in real time. This is a great way of keeping your agent on track and gives you a chance to show them how you’d handle a situation.

Many contact center platforms, including Zoom CX, provide these two useful live call monitoring tools:

• Whisper: Your rep can hear you, but the caller can’t. Guide your agent through a part of an interaction they’re struggling with, but let them be the person who speaks to the customer to help build their confidence.
• Barge: Speak to both the rep and the caller. Use call barging to take over an interaction where your rep is in danger of giving the wrong information, such as misquoting a return, or the customer wishes to escalate the call.

Real-time feedback builds your team’s confidence in your abilities and gives them another reason to follow your advice and respect your experience.

Track the following metrics to see what’s working, where performance is slipping, and what needs your urgent attention:

• First call resolution (FCR): This is the percentage of problems agents fully resolve on a customer’s first contact. A high FCR results in shorter queues and fewer interactions because you cut back on the number of follow-ups.
• Customer satisfaction (CSAT): This metric shows how happy customers are with your products and services. Businesses invite customers to score them out of 3 or 5, where 1 is poor and 3 or 5 is excellent.
• Average handle time (AHT): This tells you how long a customer stays connected during a call or interaction. Shorter calls mean your agents can deal with more customers during their shift. Be careful with this metric because it may make agents feel like they have to rush calls that need more time and attention.
• Service level: This measures the percentage of calls you answer within a given timeframe — 20 seconds, for example. Issues like call volumes and absenteeism can negatively affect service level scores.
• Net promoter score (NPS): This satisfaction metric is like CSAT, but it measures how likely a customer is to recommend a company, not individual products and services. Check for calls with low NPS to see if there were any customer satisfaction opportunities your agent missed.
• Agent utilization rate: This metric details the percentage of time your staff works on productive tasks. Many managers aim for a utilization rate between 60% and 70% to prevent burnout.
• Quality scores (call grading): Quality scores measure tone, clarity, product knowledge, process compliance, and active listening. Some platforms now use AI to score call quality automatically.
• Abandonment rate: This measures the percentage of customers who give up before speaking to an agent. A persistently high abandonment rate can seriously damage customer trust in your brand.
• Transfer rate: This is the percentage of agents who hand calls off to someone else. If you have an ACD contact center platform, these figures will be available via your dashboard. 
• Agent turnover rate: Find out how many agents have left a business over a given period. High turnover impacts overall performance quality because new hires take training time away from established agents, and it can be weeks or months before they reach full productivity.
• Escalation rate: This rate measures the percentage of customers transferred to higher levels of support either by the agent or at the caller’s request. A high escalation rate suggests that agents lack the authority, knowledge, or confidence to resolve certain problems themselves.
• Compliance adherence: This metric tracks whether agents are following regulatory and internal rules during calls. Speech analytics software can detect whether an agent has secured a caller’s consent or read the customer the required legal disclaimers. With this information you can reduce the risk of fines or legal issues.

Many of the best contact center software providers, including Zoom CX, have integrated artificial intelligence (AI) into their platforms in recent years.

Contact center AI unlocks more opportunities for quality management. For example, AI can scan every team interaction with customers, from voice and email to chat and social media. AI can flag issues like recurring questions or skipped verification steps. It then notifies you so you can follow up with extra coaching. 

AI can also pinpoint missed steps during interactions, like not reading a regulatory compliance statement, to bring it to your attention. It assesses the sentiment of individual customers during an interaction through changes in tone, silent gaps, and other emotional cues on both sides of the call. Reps can use this information to respond with more empathy and steer the conversation toward a better outcome.

AI makes spotting training opportunities easier, as it listens to interactions for you. It can then suggest calls for you to play back to agents during training to illustrate an issue. 

The technology can also help you predict future performance. It sees patterns in calls and text conversations to highlight a rising escalation rate before it becomes a trend, for example. Use this as a chance to look for ways to optimize workflows. Are handovers between departments too slow? Are agents having to complete too many steps to resolve an issue? Fix these issues to help improve team performance and outcomes.

Zoom Quality Management, available as part of the Zoom CX platform, provides contact center managers with the tools they need to get the best performance out of their team. 

The system records calls and tracks agent performance in real time across voice, video, and chat. Advanced features, such as Ask QM and Auto QM, use AI to evaluate all customer interactions, customize scorecards, and generate insights, streamlining operations and enhancing decision-making. Managers can see live metrics, so it’s easy to see which agents are on target and who needs more training and attention.

To find out more about Zoom CX and see how it can improve quality management in your call center, request a personalized demo today.

Below, discover answers to some of the most frequently asked questions our service reps deal with on issues relating to contact center management.

What are some challenges of contact center quality management?

The main challenges to successful quality management in contact centers are:

• Vetting interactions across multiple channels, including phone, email, text message, and social media
• No single view of the quality of calls and messages across channels and teams
• Spending time supporting new team members to help them build confidence and fluency

The evolution of AI-first omnichannel contact center software has made quality management much easier. These platforms monitor interactions automatically and surface specific calls for review, so managers can spend more time coaching and less time searching.

How often should quality assessments be conducted in a contact center?

Aim to provide quality assessments on agent performance every week when the calls are still fresh in the agents’ minds. That way it will be easier for them to see how your advice applies. A weekly review also gives managers a chance to spot issues early.

What is contact center quality assurance?

Contact center quality assurance is the process companies undertake to review interactions between agents and customers to make sure they meet minimum company standards. QA teams or managers listen to agent calls and read call transcripts and other messages (like email, SMS, and chat) to check that agents are using the right tone, sharing the right information, and resolving each issue effectively.

Quality assurance isn’t just about catching mistakes. It’s about spotting coaching opportunities, celebrating great performance, and keeping service levels consistently high to reduce complaints and retain customers for longer.