Customer Service Quality Assurance: Guide & Checklist

Customer service is all about delivering a positive experience for a customer. According to Zendesk, 73% of customers would switch to a competitor after multiple poor experiences, and 79% stated they’d switch if offered a better overall customer experience.  

This puts support teams under pressure to resolve issues faster, with less effort required from the customer, while maintaining a high customer service level. 

What Is Customer Service Quality Assurance (QA)?

Quality assurance in customer service refers to the process by which QA managers monitor and review customer interactions with agents, using evaluation tools. The goal is to provide constructive feedback to team members and maintain high CX standards.  

Customer support quality assurance evaluates the communication between the agent and customer against predetermined benchmarks with the goal of delivering the best quality of support. 

This process often involves the calibration of tone, language, and accuracy, while ensuring relevant procedures are being followed to resolve issues with greater efficiency. 

By applying customer service quality assurance, you’ll be able to identify inefficiencies  and correct them before they can impact the service quality. 

Why QA Is Important

QA in customer service helps teams maintain a consistent quality of support, exceed expectations, and keep customer satisfaction levels high.  

So, why should you implement a quality assurance practice in your company?

• Better Agent Morale

QA provides recognition for good performance, increasing employee engagement and reducing burnout.

• More Effective Training

Reviews and evaluations provide material for coaching and onboarding, saving time and reducing errors.

• Elevated Support Quality

Quality monitoring and implementing adjustments go beyond improving FCR rates. They also help strengthen agent confidence, leading to better support delivery and, ultimately, higher  CSAT scores. 

• Stronger Compliance 

Regular review ensures adherence to internal policies and industry regulations, minimizing risk.

• Improved Customer Loyalty 

Consistent, high-quality support builds trust, directly impacting long-term customer relationships.

• Increased Profitability

The quality assurance program can directly increase the ROI of the company. By offering better service, your company will improve customer retention. And according to Custify, increasing customer retention by only 5% can boost profits between 25% and 95%. 

So, call center QA becomes a powerful framework to ensure continuous improvement and measurable results.

Quality Assurance in Outsourced Support

Customer service quality control can be conducted as part of outsourced support services. 

By entrusting your support QA to an outsourced provider, you can significantly enhance product/service success and even reduce overall operational costs. This is particularly true for smaller companies or startups that lack the resources to train a dedicated customer support team. 

SupportYourApp is a trusted outsourcing customer service company, providing personalized customer care with support consultants trained in the client’s product, tone of voice, and processes. In addition to support delivery, the company also offers support QA services to help businesses enhance performance and maintain high service standards. 

Benefits of Outsourcing Customer Service QA: 

• Resource-efficiency

According to Cleverix, businesses using outsourced QA services have reported up to 40-60% cost reductions, while predictable offshore expenses also enable internal teams to focus on core business tasks.

• Expertise

Providers have access to trained specialists with customer support QA knowledge, bringing skills that most internal teams lack.

• Higher CSAT

Outsourced teams offer faster setup and streamlined workflows, directly improving FCR and CSAT outcomes.

• Scalability

Outsourcing allows teams to expand or reduce capacity quickly, adjusting to customer demand without delays.

Internal vs. Outsourced Customer Support QA

Here’s a comparison table for you to decide whether you’d like to conduct QA in-house or outsource it.

Want to guarantee you have selected the right outsourcing partner? Download and complete this evaluation checklist with comprehensive evaluation criteria to consider when selecting a support partner. 

Setting Customer Service Quality Standards and Criteria

Companies often define “quality” in different ways, which means their goals vary as well. To measure and maintain their standards, companies typically rely on the following approaches:

KPIs

Tracking key performance areas like First Contact Resolution, Average Handling Time, and Customer Effort Scores, because they all influence CSAT. These metrics clearly show progress toward your predefined benchmarks.  

Customer Surveys
Collecting feedback directly from customers provides valuable insights into how your support is perceived. These surveys highlight satisfaction trends and reveal areas that internal QA might overlook.

Employee Surveys

By finding out how satisfied your agents are with the level of support they provide, you can identify new areas for improvement. This has proven to enhance overall employee engagement and team performance. 

QA Scorecards  

A QA scorecard is the most widely used tool in customer support quality assurance. It grades agents on tone, accuracy, empathy, writing style, and procedure across all communication channels.   

Templates of scorecards are widely available across the web. Below is one of the examples for email/chat evaluation. 

This sample QA scorecard evaluates five areas — each with a clear description and weight. It helps teams measure both soft skills and technical adherence to best practices. By applying weighted criteria, managers can ensure balanced, consistent evaluation of customer interactions. However, this particular scorecard lacks direct measurement of efficiency metrics such as resolution time or customer satisfaction after the interaction, which are also critical to support. Ultimately, each company should develop a QA scorecard tailored to its specific goals and needs.

Score Calculation

Building on the example above, the quality assurance scorecard (or rubric) helps graders translate observations into measurable results. It combines two key components: a questionnaire and a grading system.

Questions are usually grouped into categories such as tone, accuracy, and procedures, with each assigned a point value, often on a scale of 1 to 10. This approach keeps evaluations consistent, transparent, and comparable against clear benchmarks. 

Customer service and quality assurance go hand in hand — without aligning your criteria to real customer expectations, you may find that your QA scores are high while your customer satisfaction remains low. Customer feedback and support goals should be aligned to create the most realistic benchmarks possible, using the criteria such as: 

• Tone
• Accuracy
• Empathy
• Writing style
• Procedures and best practices

Number of Tickets to Review

Conducting ticket quality assurance requires striking the right balance. If you choose to review too few tickets, you may not receive the complete picture, but if you review too many, you will be wasting time and resources. 

Most teams review, on average, 10% of customer service conversations. This largely depends on the total number of queries received in a given period. Auditing 5 tickets per agent per week is considered typical, with extra focus placed on those with lower customer satisfaction scores.   

Analyzing QA Results and Feedback Loop

Raw data alone isn’t enough — QA for customer service becomes effective when insights are applied. By combining QA scorecard data with customer feedback, managers can create coaching sessions that close the loop.

Feedback Loop

The feedback loop is the ongoing process of collecting input, analyzing data, implementing changes, and reassessing results. Involving agents in review sessions and focusing on their strengths can lead to stronger engagement and sustainable improvements.

Customer Service Quality Assurance Software

The evolution of software has brought major advancements in how customer service quality assurance is carried out. A significant factor has been the rise of AI and automation, now embedded in most modern solutions.

QA software refers to specialized technology that helps with organizing and systematically evaluating, monitoring, and improving customer interactions and agent performance. These platforms integrate directly with ticketing systems, enabling managers to pull and score tickets without leaving their helpdesk. As a result, evaluations become faster, more effective, and less reliant on multiple programs.

According to LLCBuddy, nearly 80% of consumers would rather interact with an AI agent than wait in long queues. This explains why 40% of companies are prioritizing omnichannel self-service software.

AI automation also plays a crucial role in maintaining a higher customer service level. With service ratings ranging from unacceptable to trademark, the difference comes down to the effort invested in ensuring a consistently positive customer experience. And that starts with careful, effective quality assurance.

Some of the most popular customer service QA tools include:

• AmplifAI: Fully automated QA with AI-powered scoring for 100% of interactions, paired with real-time dashboards for seamless coaching.
  
• Klaus: A cloud-based platform offering automated reviews, AI-assisted quality scoring, and broad integrations—ideal for scaling QA with automation and collaboration.
  
• MaestroQA: Designed around coaching, offering custom scorecards, review suggestions, detailed reports, and insights—best suited for medium to large support teams.

Bonus: Customer Service QA Checklist

When scaling and improving customer service quality, a checklist is an invaluable tool for making sure that no key elements are missed. It also emphasizes critical soft skills that are essential to effective support. 

Here’s a sample checklist you can use as a reference.

Summary

Customers consistently expect their issues to be resolved faster and with less effort, and strong customer service quality assurance helps make that possible. Managers review customer interactions using a range of tools and software to improve the customer experience and raise overall satisfaction levels. This process is essential for maintaining high standards while also making coaching and training more impactful.

Outsourcing quality assurance provides additional advantages such as cost savings, greater efficiency, and access to specialized expertise—reasons why many companies now choose external QA partners. One of the most widely used methods in QA in customer service is the scorecard, which evaluates agents on a 1–10 scale against predefined characteristics critical to the support process. With the growing integration of AI and automation into CRM systems, these evaluations have become more streamlined and data-driven, allowing managers to identify gaps and close them more effectively.

FAQs

1. What Is Quality Assurance in Customer Service?

It is the process of monitoring and evaluating customer interactions to identify improvement opportunities, followed by coaching agents to meet predefined customer service standards. 

2. Why Is Quality Assurance Important in Customer Service?

QA ensures teams deliver consistent, high-quality support that meets or exceeds customer expectations, while also enabling more effective training and improving ROI.

3. What Is the Role of QA in Customer Service?

The role of QA is to make sure every customer interaction aligns with the company’s service standards and brand values, while continuously spotting areas for improvement in processes and people.

4. What Are the Metrics of QA Customer Service?

QA performance is often measured with a quality assurance score, assigned after agents are reviewed against a QA scorecard — a rubric that covers the most important aspects of a customer interaction. 

5. What Is an Example of High-Quality Customer Service?

A strong example is delivering a correct, efficient solution while maintaining a professional and polite tone that leaves the customer satisfied and valued.

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