11 Tips on How to Improve Call Center Quality
Practical techniques to transform your quality operations — from intelligent scorecards to Speech Analytics and feedback at scale
Learn how to improve call center quality with various techniques that go beyond common quality monitoring. These tips work for monitoring teams with limited budgets to those who can invest significantly.
Create a monitoring scorecard that uses concept-based items
If most of your scorecard items have answers like:
- Yes or no
- Correct or incorrect
- Compliant or non-compliant
Try replacing as many items as possible with:
- Excellent, good, fair or poor
- Or other answers that have multiple ways to evaluate the agent
But why?
This way, you'll be able to separate exactly the excellent, good, fair and poor performers. This will be a big step toward creating improvement projects for fair and poor agents, and growth projects for good and excellent ones.
Check out our Free Customer Service Scorecard with concept-based items already configured.
Use different scorecards for different operations and service channels
It's extremely important to customize scorecards according to the service channel.
Phone scorecard items often don't fit chat items, and vice versa.
- Tone of voice
- Does the agent inspire confidence?
- Putting customer on hold without notice?
- Is the agent objective in conversation?
- Used assumptive words? (I think, probably, etc.)
- Left customer waiting for more than X minutes without returning?
By separating scorecards, you'll be able to find improvement opportunities and positive aspects of each customer service channel.
Use a tool that lets you know everything the agent did during the interaction
Many things happen with agents beyond what's being said or written in a customer contact, especially in work-from-home operations.
What might be happening without you knowing:
- Coding the system incorrectly
- Searching the knowledge base incorrectly
- Accessing non-work-related websites
- Using their phone during the interaction
- Performing tasks unrelated to customer service
All of this certainly impacts how the agent works, causing lack of attention and consequently a drop in service quality.
The solution: Screen recording
Available in CYF Quality, with screen recording you'll know exactly what the agent was doing when they:
- Asked the customer for a moment
- Gave incorrect information
- Showed lack of attention in service
- Suspected fraud
This is a spectacular feature for the quality team to have an almost 360-degree view of the interaction being evaluated.
Stop evaluating by sample
Evaluating by sample, as you already know, causes many good and bad things to slip past the quality team's eyes.
Typical scenario: Quality teams generally evaluate about 0.5% to 1% of contacts.
Numerical impact: In a scenario considered small, of 10,000 calls per month, about 500 contacts are evaluated, "missing" 9,500 calls.
Result: Imagine how many problems might have occurred in those other contacts?
The modern solution:
The quality team should rely on technology that helps optimize searches for these calls and provides monitors primarily with important contacts to be evaluated.
Start using a Speech or Text Analytics tool to tell you which calls were problematic or had opportunities.
What Speech Analytics identifies automatically:
- Complaint signals
- Profanity terms
- Contact reason classifications
- Most spoken words
- Silence time vs dialogue time
- Silence blocks in the middle of calls
- Reasons causing silence blocks
- Automatic quality scorecard filling
- Speech speed
- Dissatisfaction and mood changes
- Correct greeting and data confirmation
- More assertive sales scripts
Provide in-person feedback only for poor scores
If the answer is no, first focus on that, use a system that streamlines feedback to the point of providing it on 100% of evaluations.
Intelligent feedback strategy:
- Electronic feedback: For agents with good scores
- In-person or video call feedback: For evaluations with poor scores, focusing coaching and learning efforts on agents who actually need it
If you already use CYF Quality, we have a feedback workflow that automates all of this.
You'll set a cutoff score, and agents who score above the cutoff will receive feedback electronically and those who score below will need to receive feedback from their supervisor.
Simple as that. 😃
Allow appeals
If your goal is to improve call center quality, one of the main pillars is the agent understanding that they are the most important point in this process.
Therefore, at the time of feedback, I suggest you allow appeals.
This way, you'll know which agents are most interested in getting a good score and also create a culture of interaction between agents and monitors.
Once appeals are allowed, it's extremely important to measure valid vs invalid appeals.
Valid: Appeal was accepted by the quality team, resulting in a change to the evaluation score (to a higher score).
Invalid: Appeal was denied by the quality team, with no change to the final evaluation score.
Frequently study the items with the highest number of failures in your operation
Have an easily accessible report where you can extract items with the highest number of failures, like the offenders report you find in CYF Quality.
With it, in a few clicks you'll know exactly which items your agents fail most at.
You can do a Pareto analysis (also known as the 80/20 rule), where you basically focus your training and coaching efforts on items that represented 80% of total failures.
This maximizes the impact of your improvement efforts.
Train only the agents who need it
Many companies apply training to all agents, and this is very demotivating for good agents.
Imagine being trained on something you already know how to do... Boring, right?
Therefore, along with the report showing the number of failures, you'll need to know exactly which agents fail most within each item.
This way, you can define specific and surgical training to help these agents who are impacting your operation the most.
Create a learning culture
We know that developing organizational cultures is very difficult, but as we usually say...
If there isn't a well-defined coaching and training process, the monitoring team will only be measuring service quality, not actually improving quality.
Ways to create a learning culture:
- Coaching during feedback
- Frequent training for agents with many failures
- Reinforcement exercises
We created a new feature called knowledge game, it works simply:
You'll create questions within your scorecard items, and as you evaluate, questions are automatically sent to agents.
The differentiator: only questions from items the agent failed will be sent, not all questions.
Creating a very strong culture of learning and reinforcement.
Compare your NPS with quality
NPS (Net Promoter Score) is a satisfaction survey conducted with customers who contact your call center.
What often happens is high quality scores and low NPS.
- Lack of agent independence to resolve problems
- Lack of agent training
- Lack of coaching
- Quality team evaluating simply and "going too easy"
The fact is that having an NPS that doesn't match the quality score is a bad thing and needs to be studied more carefully to understand the real reason for this happening.
Cultivate agents' professional growth
One way to improve your call center's quality is by keeping agents motivated.
To achieve this, you'll need to work with more complex strategies, such as:
- Setting short, medium and long-term goals
- Creating growth programs
- Rewarding agents who reach defined goals
Practical growth ideas:
- Career opportunities: When opening supervisor, quality monitor and other positions, agents with the best average score in recent months will have the opportunity to compete
- Excellence awards: Give prizes to agents who maintained a 100% quality score for the month
- Gamification: Create an agent ranking by quality score and gamify it to promote healthy competition regarding service quality
The Complete 2026 Guide:
AI in Quality Assurance
Discover how QA leaders are using AI to cut 80% of manual evaluation time and boost consistency by 95%
AI Auto-Scoring
How to implement automated evaluation in your call center
Predictive Analytics
Identify issues before they happen with machine learning
Proven ROI
Real cases of companies that transformed QA with AI
Be the First to Get It
Sign up now and receive the complete guide for free as soon as it launches
🔔 Get the Free GuideConclusion
Several techniques mentioned in this content require you to have quick access to your team's information, so if you don't yet use a quality monitoring system, start now.
Improving call center quality is not such a simple task, as it involves many people to change the mindset.
Many of these techniques require effort to be implemented, so make an effort to create this culture in your call center so that in the near future, you will be rewarded for your effort.
Request your CYF Quality