By Kathleen McNair and Tonya Webber
Contact center quality assurance (QA) can do more than score whether agents followed required steps. It should show leaders where resolution is breaking down, what is driving it, and what the business can do about it.
Most leaders focus on resolution performance because customers are waiting and repeat contacts are adding avoidable costs. The frustration comes when the usual levers are already in motion, from supervisor coaching to agent feedback to deeper interaction review, and the operation still misses the target.
In our work with clients, we find the gap often goes deeper than frontline performance. A customer may move through extra steps because the workflow requires it. An agent may know the right answer but lack the authority or tool access to resolve the issue. A documentation requirement may protect the business while adding friction for the customer.
A well-designed contact center QA program helps leaders separate coaching opportunities from operating barriers, so the organization can see what is driving resolution failure and where to act first.
When Coaching Alone Cannot Close the Resolution Gap
For one North American B2B e-commerce client, leadership set a 75% resolution goal. The contact center kept missing it, and the natural response was to put more pressure on agents and supervisors.
COPC Inc. looked at the unresolved contacts differently. Instead of treating every gap as an agent performance issue, we separated issues agents could influence from those created by policies, processes, tools, and resolution paths.
Even after giving the team credit for every issue agents could realistically improve, the operation still fell short of the 75% goal. Assessing the data with a different lens, the data showed that most of the resolution gap was not a people problem. It was a policy, process, and tools problem.
Coaching still mattered. Agents needed clear expectations, useful feedback, and support from supervisors. The business also needed to address the barriers outside the agent’s control, including written-request rules, transfer requirements, knowledge gaps, and tools that made resolution harder than it needed to be.
Where Contact Center QA Becomes Business Intelligence
Contact center QA graduates from reporting to providing business intelligence when it shows leaders where the resolution gap exists, why it exists, and what it is costing the business.
In the B2B e-commerce work, one of the biggest barriers was a written-request requirement. The rule may have protected documentation, reduced risk, or supported compliance. It also created extra work for customers, which was a barrier to resolving their issues the first time they contacted the company.
Those customers came back through calls, chats, emails, escalations, and every other available channel. Starting with 100,000 initial contacts, unresolved issues pushed total contact volume to 136,972. That added roughly $147,888 in annual avoidable costs.
Leadership now had a business decision to make instead of another inadequate QA report. Is the written-request rule still worth the repeat demand it creates? Would automating the request, changing the workflow, improving the handoff, or giving agents a better path reduce cost and customer effort while still protecting the business?
To learn how AI quality monitoring helps quality teams turn data into root-cause findings and business decisions, read the full article, AI Quality Monitoring in Contact Centers: How to Turn QA from Cost Center to Strategic Intelligence.
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About the Authors
Kathleen McNair, CEO, Americas Region
Kathleen leads the COPC Customer Experience Consulting, Certification, and Training practices in the Americas. She is responsible for all service delivery and P&L. With deep expertise in vendor management, contracting, and performance improvement, she has led transformational projects across operations management, BPO sourcing, and customer journey design for large-scale global operations. Kathleen has a proven record of building multichannel programs spanning sales, customer service, and technical support, helping clients scale both assisted and digital customer experiences.
Tonya Webber, Director of Consulting
Tonya brings over sixteen years of CX leadership experience, specializing in operational transformation, process optimization, and performance improvement. She partners with COPC clients to strengthen customer engagement operations through process gap analysis, knowledge management, governance frameworks, and data-driven improvement initiatives. As former Director of Operations at SaaS provider RealPage, Tonya led teams of analysts to drive efficiency, support product launches, and close critical process gaps. Skilled in project management, quality, and strategic vendor relationship management, she is recognized for applying root cause analysis and continuous improvement practices that deliver measurable business impact.