5 Signs Your Contact Center QA Program Is Stuck in 2015

Contact center leaders are some of the most resilient, data-driven, and resourceful people in business. They manage massive complexity, constant pressure, and a workforce that is often under-appreciated.

But many of them are working with one hand tied behind their back. They’re running their quality assurance (QA) programs using a playbook that was written for a different era. An era before AI, before omnichannel, and before customer expectations went through the roof.

A QA program is the engine of improvement for an entire contact center. If it’s outdated, the whole operation will be stuck in low gear. A 2015-era QA program is not just inefficient; it’s a liability.

How can a leader know if their program is stuck in the past? Here are five signs that are seen all the time.

1. Still Relying on Random Sampling

This is the biggest red flag. If a QA team is manually reviewing a small, random sample of calls—typically 1-3%—the result is not a quality program. It is quality theatre.

Think about it. Would any business trust a financial audit that only looked at 2% of its transactions? Would it ship a product that was only inspected 2% of the time? Of course not. So why is this accepted for the most valuable asset: customer conversations?

A 2% sample is not statistically significant. It’s a guess. It’s a gamble. Decisions about agent performance, compliance risk, and customer churn are being made based on a dataset that is guaranteed to be incomplete and likely to be misleading.

The 2026 approach: Analyze 100% of customer interactions. Technology exists today that can automatically transcribe and analyze every single call, chat, and email. This is not a luxury anymore. It’s table stakes. GoZupees has seen companies find millions in savings and revenue just by moving from a 2% sample to 100% visibility.

2. The Scorecard is a Glorified Checklist

Open up the QA scorecard. What does it measure? Does it look like this?

• Did the agent use the customer’s name?
• Did they read the compliance disclosure?
• Did they offer the upsell?

This is a checklist. It measures compliance, not performance. It shows if the agent followed the script. It doesn’t show if the script worked. It doesn’t reveal if the customer was happy, if their issue was resolved, or if they’re likely to churn next week.

A great agent knows when to go off-script. They know how to adapt to the customer’s personality and situation. A rigid, checklist-based scorecard penalizes this kind of flexibility. It encourages robotic, paint-by-numbers interactions.

The 2026 approach: Move from a compliance scorecard to an outcome-based one. Instead of asking, “Did the agent follow the process?” ask, “Did the agent achieve the right outcome?” This means tracking things like first-contact resolution, customer satisfaction, and sentiment. It means connecting agent behaviors to business results.

3. Feedback Arrives Weeks Late

Let’s say a QA team reviews a call from three weeks ago. They score it, write up their notes, and schedule a coaching session with the agent. By the time the feedback is delivered, the agent has handled another 500 calls. The moment is gone. The context is lost.

Feedback that isn’t immediate is not effective. It’s archaeology. It’s digging up the past instead of shaping the future.

In a fast-paced contact center, agents need feedback in near real-time. They need to know today how they can improve on their next call, not be told what they did wrong last month.

The 2026 approach: Automate the feedback loop. With conversation intelligence, insights from a call can be available within minutes of it ending. Coachable moments can be automatically flagged and sent to supervisors. It's even possible to provide real-time guidance to agents during the call. This turns coaching from a monthly chore into a daily habit.

4. Different QA Systems for Different Channels

Customers don’t live in channels. They move seamlessly from chat to voice to email. But most QA programs don’t.

Most legacy QA systems were built for voice. They don’t handle chat, email, or social media well, if at all. This forces businesses to have separate QA processes for each channel, with different scorecards, different teams, and different reporting.

The result? A fragmented, inconsistent view of the customer experience. The whole journey can’t be seen. An issue can’t be tracked as it moves from one channel to another. The business is flying blind.

The 2026 approach: Adopt an omnichannel QA platform. A single system is needed that can capture and analyze conversations from every channel. This gives a unified view of agent performance and the customer journey. It allows the same quality standards to be applied everywhere, and for patterns that emerge across channels to be seen.

5. Agents See QA as a Punishment

This is the cultural sign that a QA program is broken. If agents groan when they get an email from the QA team, there is a problem. If they see coaching as a punitive exercise designed to find fault, real improvement will never be driven.

This is a natural consequence of a 2015-era QA program. When only a tiny sample of calls is being reviewed, the bad ones are more likely to be found. When the scorecard is a checklist, the focus is on what the agent did wrong, not what they did right. The whole process feels negative and adversarial.

The 2026 approach: Reframe QA as a tool for agent development, not a tool for punishment. When 100% of calls are analyzed, the good can be found as well as the bad. The moments where an agent went above and beyond can be identified and celebrated. Top-performer calls can be used as examples for the rest of the team. Coaching can be made a positive, collaborative process focused on growth.

It’s Time to Modernize Your QA Program

If any of these signs describe a company's QA program, it's not alone. The vast majority of contact centers are still using an outdated playbook.

But the technology has changed, and it’s time to catch up. The move to a modern, AI-powered QA program is the single biggest lever available to improve agent performance, reduce costs, and drive a better customer experience.

It’s time to stop gambling on a 2% sample. It’s time to move beyond the checklist. It’s time to give agents the feedback they need to succeed.

Ready to see what a modern QA program looks like? Request a demo of VerSight and see how to turn a QA program from a cost center into a growth engine.