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3rd October 2023

3 Common Contact Centre QA Challenges

Video Image: What Are Some Challenges to QA?

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Quality assurance (QA) is crucial for maintaining high customer service standards, but traditional approaches often fall short.

To find out more, we asked Chris Mounce, Product and Training Specialist at EvaluAgent, to explore common QA challenges and how to address them effectively.

Video: What Are Some Challenges to QA?

Watch the video below to hear Chris explain some of the challenges to effective Quality Assurance in contact centres:

With thanks to Chris Mounce, Product and Training Specialist, EvaluAgent at for contributing to this video.

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What Are Some Challenges to Contact Centre Quality Assurance?

1. Limited Sampling

Traditional QA methods focus on randomly sampling a small percentage of conversations, often around 1%.

This leaves 99% of interactions unchecked, creating gaps in risk mitigation and performance improvement.

“The traditional approach to quality assurance is about randomly sampling a very small percentage of conversations.

And realistically it can be a waste of time. It’s a risky waste of time, because with the number of conversations that are happening between customers and agents every day, that percentage in terms of conversation coverage is typically around 1%.

So unless we have an army of evaluators working to increase that number, that’s leaving 99% of conversations completely unchecked. So the result here is a wafer thin approach to QA that doesn’t really mitigate risk, or improve performance.”

Without a comprehensive view, it’s difficult to spot trends or ensure consistent quality.

2. Inefficient Workflows

Contact centres that are using traditional QA methods often rely on disconnected systems, manual workflows, and multiple spreadsheets.

“And then there’s all the admin, that data from various spreadsheets, various disconnected systems, and manual workflows. And you’ll likely need to produce various manual reports that need to be double, and triple, checked.

And before you know where you are, there’s hours of the day being pulled down to producing reports that very quickly go out of date, and no one really reads.

Not really, not enough to justify the effort that’s been put into producing the reports in the first place. “

Generating reports can become a time-consuming process, requiring extensive verification.

These reports quickly become outdated and are often underutilised, making the effort seem futile.

3. Lack of Actionable Insights

While AI, auto-scoring, and analytics are gaining traction, they don’t always provide actionable insights.

Without understanding why mistakes happen or how to fix them, coaching and performance improvement remain ineffective.

“And AI – that’s a very big discussion point right now, and progressive organizations may be trying to use analytics and auto scoring to get higher coverage and more timely reports.

But the challenge here is a lack of actionable insights, which really means that we still don’t understand why mistakes are happening, or more importantly, what we can do to fix them.

So those auto QA results on their own don’t allow you to manage effective coaching conversations. So nothing really changes.”

How to Overcome These Challenges

To overcome these three challenges, QA processes need to:

Expand Coverage

Leverage technology to review a higher percentage of interactions.

Streamline Workflows

Use integrated systems to reduce admin time and generate real-time, actionable reports.

Improve Insights

Go beyond scores to understand root causes and enable meaningful coaching conversations.

By addressing these areas, organisations can turn QA from a box-ticking exercise into a valuable tool for enhancing service quality and agent performance.

If you are looking for more great insights from the experts, check out these next:

Author
Robyn Coppell

Robyn Coppell has worked as Digital Content Manager for Call Center Helper since 2021. After University her first job was in a contact centre and has stayed in this space ever since.

She has experience of contact centre operational management, software systems, css and php coding. She edits a lot of the guest content that is published on Call Centre Helper.

Connect with Robyn on LinkedIn