Do your super-high quality scores really reflect stellar performance — or do they hide deeper problems?
Sometimes the highest quality scores are the strongest warning that your Quality Assurance process isn’t helping people improve.
This article is part of our Contact Center Management Series — a collection of articles that bring together practical guidance and insights to help Contact Centers run better and deliver stronger results.
I Tell This Story in Quality Assurance Classes
A client flew me in to help them improve their Contact Center service.
They had an unusual problem.
The internal quality scores they assigned to calls, chats, and emails were so high that they had to calculate them out to three decimal places just to differentiate performance across team members.
They laughed as they showed me the scores — 94.154, 92.872, and so on — because they knew something was wrong with their scoring approach.
More importantly, they knew the scores didn’t reflect the quality of service customers were actually receiving.
When you listened to a call that scored 98.648, you heard basic service behaviours — but nothing that justified such a high score.
This Center Suffered from Grade Inflation
The term grade inflation comes from education, where some teachers — and even some institutions — award grades that are higher than students actually deserve.
The same thing can happen in Contact Centers.
Grade inflation doesn’t do anyone any favours. In fact, everyone loses.
Customers suffer because they don’t experience great service quality.
The organization suffers because unhappy customers cost more to serve, share their unhappiness with others, and may eventually take their business elsewhere.
And employees suffer because they don’t learn and grow. Their performance falls further and further behind, all the while thinking they are doing a great job.
The moment you’re told you scored 95.913, it’s easy to conclude you’re already doing well.
Wouldn’t you?
So they stop improving.
Even as AI and automation remove more of the simpler interactions, leaving frontline professionals to handle increasingly complex and emotional conversations.
The Customer’s Perspective
Now consider the customer’s perspective.
Is a 95%+ call really that good from the customer’s perspective?
Would you feel confident presenting one of your 95%+ calls to your CEO as an example of excellence?
If the answer is no, our impressive scores are masking a deeper problem. Our people aren’t improving, and neither is the customer experience.
Where We Started
The first step was to deliver practical service workshops for the leadership team, focusing on communication behaviours and their impact on the customer experience.
After the workshops, the leadership team developed a clear service vision and redesigned their performance standards.
They also introduced weighting for the behaviours they believed mattered most to their customers, including empathy and positive language.
Change Management Mattered
As the leadership team implemented the revised standards and scoring logic, a new challenge emerged.
Call, email, and chat scores dropped across the board and across nearly every frontline professional. As you’d imagine, nobody likes seeing their quality numbers drop.
A score that had once been 93.887 was now 72.0.
Fortunately, the leadership team had anticipated this challenge and implemented a formal change management plan to help their frontline professionals stay motivated while working to improve.
The key to success? Exactly what you’d expect: ongoing communication.
They explained the reasons for the change in group presentations and reinforced the message through individual coaching conversations. Throughout the process, they never stopped talking about the importance of service, how to deliver it, and why it mattered.
The temporary drop in Quality scores wasn’t a sign that service had become worse. It was a sign that the measurement system had become more honest.
Within six months, Customer Satisfaction scores had jumped to the point where the CEO invited the Center Manager into a board meeting to share the Center’s story.
The Real Lesson
The purpose of Quality Assurance isn’t to produce impressive numbers.
It’s to help frontline professionals improve so customers receive better service.
And when those coaching conversations focus on helping people improve rather than simply discussing scores, performance follows naturally.
Related reading: When You Coach You’re Either Helping or Keeping Score
Thank You for Reading
I regularly share stories, strategies, and insights from our work across Contact Centers, Customer Service, and Customer Experience. If this article resonated with you, I’d be pleased to stay connected.
Feel free to get in touch anytime, or explore more of our work below.
Daniel Ord
[email protected] / www.omnitouchinternational.com
