Glossary
The call centre QA & BPO glossary
Plain-English definitions of the quality assurance, compliance and contact-centre terms that matter — from QA scorecards and fatal errors to CSAT, FCR, POPIA and PCI DSS.
Quality Assurance
Call Centre Quality Assurance (QA)
Call centre quality assurance is the process of evaluating agent interactions against a scorecard to measure quality, ensure compliance and drive coaching.
QA Scorecard
A QA scorecard is the weighted checklist of criteria evaluators use to score a call, grouped into sections with pass marks and fatal rules.
Fatal Error (Fatal Fail)
A fatal error is a critical failure — like a missed compliance disclosure — that automatically scores the entire evaluation zero, regardless of other criteria.
Auto-Fail Criterion
An auto-fail criterion automatically requires coaching or escalation when failed, without necessarily zeroing the whole score like a fatal error.
Auto-QA (AI QA)
Auto-QA uses AI to score interactions automatically from a transcript, either fully or as a draft for a human evaluator to review and approve.
Call Calibration
Calibration is the process of aligning evaluators so they score the same call consistently, removing evaluator bias and drift.
Inter-Rater Reliability
Inter-rater reliability measures how consistently different evaluators score the same interaction — the statistical backbone of fair QA.
Metrics
First Contact Resolution
First contact resolution is the percentage of customer issues resolved on the first interaction, without follow-ups or transfers.
Customer Satisfaction
CSAT measures how satisfied customers are with an interaction, usually via a short post-contact survey scored as a percentage.
Net Promoter Score
NPS measures customer loyalty by asking how likely customers are to recommend you, scored from -100 to +100.
Average Handle Time
AHT is the average total time an agent spends on an interaction, including talk time, hold time and after-call work.
Voice of the Customer
Voice of the Customer is the practice of capturing and acting on customer feedback and sentiment across every channel.
Occupancy
Occupancy is the percentage of logged-in time agents spend actively handling contacts versus waiting for them.
Schedule Adherence
Schedule adherence measures how closely agents follow their planned schedule of shifts, breaks and activities.
Compliance
Compliance Score
A compliance score measures adherence to regulatory and legal requirements on a call, independently of the overall quality score.
POPIA
POPIA is South Africa’s Protection of Personal Information Act, governing how organisations collect, use and protect personal data.
GDPR
GDPR is the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation governing the processing of personal data of people in the EU.
PCI DSS
PCI DSS is the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard governing how card data is handled, including on calls.
Operations
Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis uses AI to detect the emotional tone of an interaction — positive, neutral or negative — from speech or text.
Speech Analytics
Speech analytics transcribes and analyses calls at scale to surface keywords, compliance phrases, sentiment and trends.
Conversation Intelligence
Conversation intelligence applies AI to interactions to extract insights, score quality, and guide agents and coaching.
Escalation
An escalation is a flagged issue routed to a supervisor for urgent action, often triggered automatically by a fatal fail or repeated failure.
Agent Attrition
Agent attrition is the rate at which contact-centre agents leave — a major cost driver, often 30–45% annually in BPOs.
Business Process Outsourcing
A BPO is a company that runs contact-centre and back-office operations on behalf of other businesses, usually across many clients.
Contact Centre as a Service
CCaaS is cloud-based contact-centre software (routing, telephony, channels) delivered as a subscription service.
Workforce Management
WFM is the practice of forecasting demand and scheduling agents so the contact centre is correctly staffed at all times.
Multi-Tenant (Multi-Tenancy)
Multi-tenancy is software architecture where one platform securely serves many isolated clients, each seeing only their own data.
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