As a CX leader, you know that having the best call center quality assurance software is a critical necessity for a modern contact center.
But how do you ensure the software you choose addresses the real issues that reduce performance rather than just analyzing interactions?
In this guide, we explore the best QA tool to help you solve inefficient processes, disconnected data, and the gap between QA, training, and agent empowerment to drive better performance.
TL;DR - Best Call Center Quality Assurance Software
Since there are so many call center quality assurance tools, you may be spoiled for choice. You can choose from leading software such as:
- Hear
- MaestroQA
- Balto
- Calabrio ONE
You'll need a platform that unifies quality, compliance, and coaching into one ecosystem to improve customer service and agent performance.
Hear fits the bill as an AI-powered call center conversation intelligence platform for automating quality assurance, monitoring compliance, and generating actionable insights.
With Hear, you can analyze every customer interaction to ensure your performance monitoring, coaching recommendations, and service quality are consistent for optimal customer satisfaction.
Book a demo today to see Hear in action and learn more about its transformative features.
Why Quality Assurance Matters in Call Centers
Quality assurance (QA) is important in functional, customer-centric call centers for several reasons:
- Ensures Consistency in Customer Experiences: With QA, you can ensure your agents deliver a consistent level of service regardless of who interacts with a customer. Your customers will know what to expect, and this reliability will make them trust you more.
- Aligns Service with Business Goals: A robust QA system ensures your agent-customer interactions align with your broader business goals. For example, you might be looking to boost sales conversions, improve retention, or increase first-call resolution.
- Upholds Brand Reputation: Usually, your call center is the most direct touchpoint between your business and its customers. QA ensures your agents speak the correct language, follow approved scripts, and represent your brand professionally to maintain its reputation.
- Drives Continuous Improvement: The structured evaluations and feedback in QA promote a positive culture of learning and development. Your agents know you support them rather than just supervise them, which boosts their morale and performance.
What Is Call Center Quality Assurance Software?
Call center quality assurance software is a type of tool or platform that call centers use to monitor, evaluate, and enhance the quality of agent-customer interactions.
The goal of the software is to ensure your agents meet performance standards, comply with internal and external regulations, and ultimately enhance customer satisfaction.
Call center QA software systems usually do the following:
- Monitor 100% of voice calls.
- Evaluate agent performance against your predefined criteria.
- Identify trends in agent performance and common challenges.
- Highlight areas for improvement and provide feedback you can use to coach your agents.
- Automate evaluation using artificial intelligence (AI) to improve efficiency and consistency.
- Monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) like customer satisfaction scores and average handling time.
Benefits of Using QA Software in a Call Center
We've already seen why QA matters. We can take an extra step and see how to make it scalable and efficient in high-volume situations through practical benefits:
- Automated and Scalable Monitoring: Most leading call center quality assurance software can review 100% of agent-customer interactions. Automation makes this happen at a fraction of the time it would take a human to do the same manually, saving time and labor.
- Actionable Performance Insights: Modern call center QA tools have built-in analytics and dashboards that uncover trends or patterns rather than just score calls. They offer actionable insights to help you make informed business decisions, such as how to improve the performance of certain agents.
- Smarter Feedback and Coaching: Instead of vague feedback, you can share exact conversation segments and performance metrics. The result is more targeted and constructive coaching that helps your agents improve faster.
- Better Compliance and Risk Management: Call center quality assurance tools can automatically flag violations such as mishandling sensitive data or missing disclosures. With this flagging and instant alerts, you'll stay compliant with internal and industry regulations to avoid costly penalties.
- Better System Integration and Operational Efficiency: Many QA platforms integrate with CRMs and telephony systems to unify customer data. Integrations also create a smoother experience for both agents and customers through more efficient workflows.
Core Features to Look for in Call Center QA Software
You'll want to prioritize the following core capabilities to ensure you comprehensively evaluate how your agents perform, adhere to compliance standards, and improve customer experience.
- Automated QA and Compliance Monitoring: Look for a tool that automates various call center QA processes, such as call scoring and compliance tracking. Monitoring compliance against regulatory or internal guidelines helps reduce legal risks and ensure you are always audit-ready.
- Speech Analytics: Ensure the software can automatically transcribe and analyze voice conversations to detect keywords, patterns, compliance issues, customer sentiment, and opportunities for sales or improvement.
- Sentiment Analysis: A good tool should measure the emotional tone of a conversation during a live call or post-call to offer insights into customer experience and any risks of losing customer loyalty.
- Risk and Alert Monitoring: Ensure you can get timely notifications during live calls or post-interaction reviews to note compliance issues, upsell signals, or customer frustration. These notifications help you and your agents take timely action.
- Comprehensive Reporting: Opt for a tool that analyzes your calls and generates reports tailored to your needs. Check for reports regarding customer feedback on products, first call resolution, churn intent, and call topic.
- Predictive Analytics: Want to embrace proactive planning? Look for software that uses predictive customer analytics to project future events, such as seasonal interaction spikes, customer churn, and high-performing agents.
- 100% Interaction Coverage: The software should monitor and analyze 100% of calls to promote consistent service quality and performance tracking.
- Agent Performance Tracking: Your preferred software should be able to track how your agents perform based on 100% of their interactions. You can use metrics such as first-call resolution, average handling time, and customer satisfaction score.
- Interactive Dashboard and Natural Language Querying: A good tool should enable you to explore data, run reports, and generate insights by simply asking questions in a natural language. These attributes make analysis fast and more accessible even to non-technical users.
Besides these elements, you can also consider aspects such as scalability, integration with CRM and telephony systems, and customer feedback collection.
Top Call Center QA Software
Let's check out some of the best call center QA software you can use for effective quality assurance.
1. Hear
Hear is your trusted partner for tailored services to turn your call center into an autonomous entity.
We understand the challenges you face as CX leaders. We go beyond just analyzing interactions and become part of your growth story by handling every aspect of your quality assurance precisely.
As more than just a service provider, we are a strategic partner that offers key benefits and solutions such as:
- Predictive analytics to identify performance trends.
- Covering 100% of interactions instead of random samples to ensure consistent performance tracking, coaching recommendations, and service quality.
- Automated QA scoring and compliance flagging for objective agent evaluations and proactive risk management.
- Conversational dashboard with natural language querying to make data, reports, and insights fast and accessible.
- Fast, no-code integrations with CRMs and telephony systems, saving you implementation time and ensuring smooth data flow.
- Boosting customer experience and retention by detecting sentiment and churn signals.
- Instant alerts for frustration or risks so you can act in time.
- Operational efficiency by reducing average handling time and increasing first-call resolution rates.
- Speech analytics to uncover compliance issues and help reduce churn risks.
- Surfacing insights and sales opportunities that benefit both customers and the business.
Our AI-powered platform is also user-friendly to ensure a better experience for both technical and non-technical users.
Transform your call center from a cost center into a value-generating hub with Hear.
2. MaestroQA
MaestroQA bridges the divide between agent-customer interactions and quality assurance through detailed agent evaluation and grading.
The conversation data platform combines modern QA and voice-of-customer (VOC) analytics to improve customer service strategies.
3. Balto
Balto is mainly an agent-facing QA tool focused on highlighting agent disputes and delivering performance grades with AI-based explanations directly to the agents. You can use the platform if you are looking to combine both AI and manual call scoring.
4. Calabrio ONE
As an integrated call center software platform, Calabrio ONE merges workforce optimization and analytics with automated QA management, but focuses more on call recording and screen recording capabilities.
How to Choose the Right QA Software
To choose the right software to improve quality assurance at your call center, you'll want to use the holistic approach below.
- Define Your Needs and Goals: Identify the most critical KPIs you want to track and improve. Next, establish quality standards for your interactions, such as adhering to scripts and problem-solving skills. Ensure the software is easy to scale and can accommodate your team's current and projected workload.
- Consider Core Features: Ensure the software has all or most of the essential features we've discussed above. Prioritize automation to free up time for your agents, supervisors, and other team leaders so they can focus on more strategic work.
- Evaluate Several Software Options: Consider top call center quality assurance software based on aspects such as user-friendliness, vendor support and training, cost and ROI, and integration capabilities.
Common Challenges and How to Overcome Them
The quality assurance process isn't always rosy. You can expect to encounter the following frequent issues.
- Limited Interaction Sampling: Traditional QA methods analyze only a small percentage of calls, which can lead to inconsistent service quality and missed opportunities to mitigate risks or improve your processes. You can implement a modern tool with automated QA capability to review 100% of your interactions for sentiment, specific keywords, and compliance violations.
- Poor Agent Training and Development: Inadequate or inconsistent training can lead to agent mistakes that negatively affect the overall quality of your service. To solve this, invest in comprehensive agent training programs that cover product knowledge, interaction handling procedures, customer service skills, and how to use your QA software effectively.
- Inefficient Workflows: Most call centers still rely on manual processes and disconnected systems for QA, resulting in time-consuming manual data entry, manual report generation, and increased risk of human errors. You'll want to use modern software to streamline and automate your workflows through centralized data storage, automated report generation, and integration with CRM platforms.
- Lack of Actionable Insights: You may not always get actionable insights for your agents and supervisors. It's not enough to simply identify areas of concern. You must understand why they happen and how to address them. The right software can provide targeted feedback and coaching insights based on detailed data analysis.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Let's wrap this up with quick answers to frequently asked questions about call center quality assurance software.
What Is the Average Cost of Call Center QA Software?
The cost of call center QA software varies widely depending on the vendor, features included, number of users, user experience, integration, and vendor support.
Generally, you can expect to spend below $10 for low-cost options and $65 to up to $175 or more for top-tier options on a per-user-per-month basis.
What Is the Role of AI in QA Scoring?
AI automatically analyzes interactions for tone, sentiment, empathy, compliance, and resolution effectiveness to assign a score.
The process ensures you evaluate agents objectively at scale, which reduces manual effort, provides actionable insights for coaching and improvement, and enhances overall service quality.
How Long Does It Take to Implement QA Software in a Call Center?
It can take a few weeks to several months to implement QA software in a call center, depending on the complexity of the software, the size of your call center, change management, and your specific needs.
The time is usually split between planning and preparing, installing and configuring the software, testing and piloting, rolling out, and ongoing optimization.
How to Measure the Effectiveness of QA Teams?
You can measure the effectiveness of your call center QA teams using preset goals and metrics. For example, you can require a certain service level, first call resolution rates, customer satisfaction scores, or average handling time.
You can set and measure specific expectations for your team against these metrics, including communication skills, adherence to procedures, and product knowledge.
Conclusion
Selecting the best call center quality assurance software is easy now that you know the features to look for and the aspects to consider.
With the right software, you can enjoy improved agent performance, better customer service, and operational efficiency.
As an AI-driven conversation intelligence platform, Hear helps you enjoy these advantages through turnkey solutions that benefit both your customers and the business.
You can analyze every customer interaction across voice, chat, and email and obtain practical insights to improve your processes or train your agents for better service delivery and agent performance.
Discover why top call centers use Hear for QA—book a detailed demo today.