Quality is king. A high-quality product, service, or experience is the fundamental foundation of a low-effort experience for a customer—and the goal of customer experience and contact center leaders everywhere. It’s so important that we have lots of processes dedicated to making sure that our deliverables meet customers’ needs and expectations. These processes include quality assurance and quality control.
But wait, you might ask. Those sound pretty similar. What is the difference between quality control and quality assurance, and why does it matter?
The difference is subtle, but it’s there—and understanding that nuance can make a big difference in how you organize, manage, and analyze performance in your organization. Understanding these differences is essential, especially if you’re working in a customer-centric area of the company like the call center, customer experience (CX), or quality assurance (QA) itself.
Let’s take a look at:
What is quality assurance in a call center?
Quality assurance (QA) is a call center process that involves reviewing customer conversations to ensure agents are meeting quality standards. Some call centers have dedicated QA managers responsible for this process, while others rely on team leaders to evaluate their agents’ interactions. QA managers or team leaders typically listen to or read the transcripts of a small sample of each agent’s calls on a weekly or monthly basis. They use QA scorecards or checklists to evaluate the interactions on consistent criteria, such as whether the agent used the proper greeting, verified the customer’s identity, or asked if they could provide further assistance.
Call centers typically complete manual QA evaluations for less than 5% of their conversations because it’s a time-consuming process. Fortunately, QA automation technology now makes it possible to automatically complete the objective criteria on QA scorecards across 100% of customer conversations. This allows managers to identify trends in agent performance at scale and provide fair, data-driven coaching.
What is quality control?
Quality control (QC) is similar to quality assurance, and the terms are sometimes used interchangeably. However, the term “quality control” may also refer to the set of processes a business uses to ensure its products or services meet a documented set of quality criteria. While quality assurance is a narrowly defined activity in the contact center, quality control is used more broadly. It’s also more commonly used within product departments: for example, teams may conduct quality control tests to ensure there are no defects in new products.
But that doesn’t mean quality control is irrelevant in the call center. Quality control may also refer to the operational activities call center leaders perform to maintain the quality of service delivery. It might include making changes to processes, systems, or agent training to reduce compliance risk, improve agent performance, and enhance the customer experience.
Call centers can also support product-related quality control by sharing customer feedback on product issues. Conversation intelligence software can help call centers to categorize and quantify the product issues customers are bringing up. By funneling these insights to the product department, the call center can help their company make informed product improvement decisions and catch potential defects quickly. One of our customers noted: “We now have experience insights that we can feed back to the business (product teams, marketing, etc.) in almost real-time instead of waiting for a survey response.”
What are the differences between quality assurance and quality control?
There may be some overlap between quality control and quality assurance activities in a call center, as both aim to ensure high quality standards. However, the main difference lies in their focus and approach. Quality control focuses more broadly on ensuring both the products and services a business delivers meet customer needs and expectations. Quality assurance (in the context of the call center) focuses on analyzing agents’ performance to ensure they’re meeting the expectations of the business in their service delivery.
Final takeaways
As a call center leader, you may not deal with product-related quality control regularly, and you might think that this conversation isn’t about you. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. QC and QA go hand-in-hand, and if you’re not sharing insights with the product team, you’re actually making things harder for your own team. A better product equals fewer customer issues—which means fewer calls for your team to handle and a better overall customer experience.
While quality assurance in the call center is important, your focus on quality shouldn’t stop there. You’re hearing directly from customers every day, and the call center can be a valuable source of product and service insights. You have the opportunity to help improve quality at every stage of the customer journey.
FAQs
How can I ensure QA evaluations are fair and consistent across different evaluators?
Develop detailed scoring guidelines with specific examples of what constitutes each score level. Conduct regular calibration sessions where all evaluators review the same interactions and discuss scoring discrepancies. Implement inter-rater reliability checks by having multiple evaluators score the same calls periodically. Consider rotating evaluators across different agent teams to prevent bias, and always provide evaluators with ongoing training on scoring standards and new processes.
How do I effectively use QA insights to drive meaningful coaching conversations with agents?
Make coaching sessions collaborative rather than one-directional by asking agents to self-assess their performance first. Use specific call examples and tie feedback to customer impact and business outcomes. Focus on 1-2 key improvement areas per session rather than overwhelming agents with multiple issues. Create action plans with measurable goals and follow-up timelines. Most importantly, balance constructive feedback with recognition of what agents are doing well to maintain motivation and engagement.
What's the best approach for integrating customer feedback into our quality control processes?
Establish systematic processes for collecting and categorizing customer feedback from multiple channels (surveys, social media, direct complaints). Create regular cross-departmental meetings where contact center insights are shared with product, marketing, and operations teams. Use conversation analytics to identify recurring themes in customer interactions that may indicate broader quality issues. Develop escalation protocols for urgent quality concerns, and track how customer feedback leads to process or product improvements to demonstrate the contact center's strategic value.
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