What’s holding your QA strategy back? Six fixable barriers contact centres can solve today

Contact centres invest a huge amount of time, effort, and money into QA. Yet many leaders still say the same thing:

“We track quality, but we’re not seeing real improvement.”

QA is supposed to help you reduce risk, lift performance, and ensure compliance. But for many centres, it becomes a reporting loop - score the call, log the result, flag the issue, repeat. What’s missing is the follow-through. And without it, QA becomes just another thing to manage, rather than a meaningful driver of better outcomes.

In our work with regulated contact centres, we consistently see six common QA barriers - all fixable. Here’s what they are, and how YakTrak + GRIST help leaders turn QA from a compliance task into a capability-building engine.

Barrier 1: You’re sampling too little to see the full picture

Most QA teams still rely on manual assessments, reviewing just 1-2% of calls. That leaves the majority of customer experience unseen - and performance risks hidden.

AI-powered QA is changing this. Contact centres are rapidly moving toward 100% call assessment, driven by Ai automation in CCaaS platforms. But more data does not automatically lead to more insight and action.

That’s why YakTrak is investing now to help contact centres prepare. While most organisations still work with sample-based QA, YakTrak already supports remediation at scale, ensuring every flagged issue has a clear, trackable pathway for resolution. And as full QA coverage becomes the norm, YakTrak’s workflows and upcoming CCaaS integrations will ensure leaders know what to prioritise, who to coach, and how to act - quickly and effectively.

Barrier 2: Inconsistent scoring creates distrust and confusion

When scoring criteria aren’t clearly defined - or when calibrations vary across QA analysts - agents lose trust in the process. That undermines both performance improvement and engagement.

GRIST solves this by defining micro-behaviours: specific, observable actions that can be coached and measured consistently. Instead of relying on abstract standards like “sound confident” or “build rapport,” QA teams and AI driven automated assessments score to clear, agreed criteria. And YakTrak ensures those criteria flow through into coaching conversations and follow-up.

The result? More consistent feedback, more confident leaders, and fewer arguments over what “good” sounds like.

Barrier 3: QA data isn’t followed up with coaching

This is one of the most common and costly gaps: QA scores are recorded, reports are shared - but no structured coaching happens as a result. Sometimes it’s due to time. Other times, it’s because the system doesn’t make it easy.

YakTrak solves this by linking QA outcomes directly to goal setting and coaching workflows. If an agent is flagged for a recurring behaviour - say, poor expectation setting - YakTrak prompts the team leader to coach on it, track the conversation, and set a clear behavioural goal.

It creates a closed loop: from QA insight to coaching action to change in behaviour and performance.

Barrier 4: Coaching focuses on scores, not behaviours

It’s not enough to tell someone their QA score is low. What they need to know is why - and what to do differently next time.

That’s where GRIST’s behaviour-based approach makes the difference. We define what great customer interactions sound like, using behaviours that are repeatable, observable, and in the agent’s control. For example:

• Instead of saying “your empathy score is low,” a leader might coach: “Let’s practise how you acknowledge frustration before jumping to the solution.”

YakTrak ensures these goals are tracked, not just set, and linked back to QA improvements over time.

Barrier 5: Behaviour change isn’t tracked

Many contact centres struggle to answer a basic question: “Is our coaching actually working?”

YakTrak solves this by measuring goal quality, goal completion, and coaching activity at a team and organisation level. Leaders can see not only who’s receiving coaching, but whether it’s driving improvement. This is where development becomes scalable - not reliant on memory or instinct.

It also helps identify coaching blind spots, so high performers keep growing and emerging risks are caught early.

Barrier 6: Remediation isn’t audit-ready

In regulated industries, what happens after a QA breach matters just as much as the breach itself. Regulators don’t just want to know that something was flagged - they want to see that it was addressed.

YakTrak enables full visibility into remediation actions: who coached, what was coached, what goals were set, and whether follow-up occurred. This creates an auditable, time-stamped workflow that supports operational risk teams and ensures compliance teams aren’t chasing data across multiple systems.

It gives leaders peace of mind - and auditors confidence that QA are breaches are being remediated and mitigated consistently.

QA is a starting point - not the end goal

Too often, QA is seen as the destination: score the call, send the report, check the box. But the truth is, QA should be the beginning - the start of a smarter pathway to development, improvement, and reduced risk.

YakTrak and GRIST help contact centres close the loop between insight and action. With structured behaviours, scalable workflows, and CCaaS-ready integration, QA becomes more than a scorecard. It becomes a system for better conversations, better service, and better performance.

Want to move beyond monitoring to meaningful QA? Let us show you how YakTrak + GRIST make QA the first step in smarter capability development.