What is Fatal Error (Fatal Fail)?

A fatal error (or fatal fail) is a critical breach on a call that automatically scores the whole evaluation zero, no matter how well the rest of the call went. Fatal criteria usually cover legal, regulatory or brand-critical requirements — for example a missed mandatory disclosure, a data-protection breach, or reading card data aloud.

Fatal-fail logic exists because some failures are not "partial" — they expose the business to real risk. Separating fatal criteria from ordinary scoring ensures these breaches are caught, escalated and remediated immediately.

In QUALICORE, triggering a fatal criterion zeroes the QA score, can register a compliance breach, and auto-raises an escalation to a supervisor.