At the heart of every call center is a heart that beats with the imperative for quality: Quality service provided by quality agents to drive quality interactions and produce quality outcomes. Everyone talks quality. Everyone wants quality. But how can you know if quality actually happens? The solution is agent quality assurance evaluations or QA for short. Agent QA evaluations take a strategic look at a periodic sample of agent calls to score them against a standard. When consistently conducted on a regular basis, the result is a quality assessment for each agent, as well as an aggregate for the entire call center. Now call center quality becomes quantifiable, trackable, and reportable. Implementing a sustainable QA strategy, however, presents challenges, from accessing call recordings, using the scoring tool, managing results, and generating reports. This process often requires a mishmash of data sources and tools, which makes the straightforward goal of QA evaluations, anything but straightforward. Fortunately, a call center management portal can provide all the data sources and tools in one easy-to-use dashboard, with everything integrated and aligned. This allows call center QA managers to spend more time conducting evaluations and less time bogged down with the various tools and complexities needed to do their job. When using a comprehensive call center management portal to conduct agent quality assurance evaluations, managers have the simplicity of a one-stop interface to do their work. Perform QA Evaluations: With a call center management portal, the otherwise arduous work of performing QA evaluations is streamlined. From one console, QA managers can access call recordings with ease. With the click of a button, an integrated call-scoring tool allows them to rate the call against their call center’s standard of expectations. Then, with the results of the evaluation completed, the QA manager can quickly move on to the next call for the next agent. Review QA Evaluations: Conducting the QA evaluations stands as the first step in a comprehensive QA program. Next comes reviewing agent results, both from a management prospective and for agent education. An evaluation conducted without circling back to the agent for coaching and affirmation results in an incomplete process and a job only half done. Agent reporting is essential. In addition, the portal makes it easy to merge the QA results for individual agents to produce a unified report. The final piece is aggregated reports to look at the composite results for multiple agents to produce an integrated summary for a particular day, shift, or the entire operation. Follow Agent Evaluations: An agent QA evaluation provides a snapshot of agent quality for that one point in time. Looking at a series of QA evaluations for one specific agent allows for trend analysis. Is the agent improving? Remaining consistent? Or slipping? Consider individual agent results over a span of time to produce a better understanding of agent quality, as well as the trajectory of their work. While this is all doable without a call center management portal, it results in a time-consuming, labor-intensive process. A call center management portal speeds agent QA results and empowers ongoing improvement. Call Center Sales Pro showed their call center management portal, CCSP Fuzion Portal, at this year’s NAEO conference. Contact them if you missed the demo or to learn more. Janet Livingston is the president of Call Center Sales Pro, a premier contact center consultancy that offers telephone answering services their exclusive CCSP Fuzion Portal, the next-gen portal for actionable analytics. Contact Janet at contactus@callcenter-salespro.com or 800-901-7706 to learn more.Peter Lyle DeHaan is a freelance writer from Southwest Michigan.