Agent quality score
Contact centers use agent quality score as a performance metric for customer service agents that covers multiple dimensions. These scores provide snapshots of how well a customer service agent is doing while also providing insights on areas for improvement. Many call centers, help desks, and digital support teams use agent quality scores to ensure customers receive high-quality, accurate support.
What does an agent quality score include?
A well-rounded agent quality score is usually made up of three key components:
Supervisor review—This component can account for up to 50% of the score and judges agents on how well they:
- Use product or service knowledge
- Apply soft skills like empathy, tone, and active listening
- Follow internal processes and protocols
- Meet key performance targets like call volume or resolution speed
- Follow compliance regulations and manage sensitive information with care
This criteria-based assessment ties directly to a contact center’s operational goals and quality benchmarks.
Customer feedback—This component is based on real-world experiences from customers and collected in post-interaction surveys. Through surveys, customers rate the support they received based on:
- Overall satisfaction with the conversation
- Whether the issue was fully resolved
- The agent’s helpfulness, attitude, and professionalism
Customer feedback is vital because it ties an agent's performance to the actual customer experience.
Agent self-review—Human agents evaluate their own performance on things like motivation, self-awareness, and workforce engagement. This component is good at identifying misalignments between perception and performance that can be corrected in training.
How to calculate agency quality score
The agent quality score is typically calculated using a weighted formula that blends the three components defined above:
- Manager review: 50%
- Customer feedback: 30%
- Agent self-review: 20%
Each component is broken down into individual criteria or questions, often scored on a scale (e.g., 1 to 10). Each area is scored, and those scores are averaged and combined based on how much each component is weighted. The final agency score is usually on a 0-100 scale.
The importance of agent quality score in customer experience (CX)
Agent performance directly impacts CX, making agent quality score an essential tool. When agents are kind, empathetic, and helpful, customers are usually more satisfied. But poor support can hurt your brand and cause customers to leave.
As customers expect faster, more personalized service, it's important for businesses to understand how each agent impacts the overall experience. Agent quality scores help provide that insight, guiding better decisions about hiring, training, promotions, and rewards.
The role of AI in agent quality scoring
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly used in customer service to streamline workflows and improve the customer experience. With agent quality scoring, AI may assist with the actual scoring by analyzing customer interactions, automating analysis, providing real-time feedback, and reducing bias in scoring.
Alternatively, businesses that use AI agents for customer service may use agent quality scoring to evaluate the performance of these agents in traditionally human roles. It's transforming how contact centers measure, monitor, and improve agent quality. Traditionally, scoring required managers to manually review calls, chats, or emails—a time-consuming and inconsistent process. AI now makes this faster, smarter, and more objective in several ways:
The agent quality score is an important metric for modern contact centers, combining both internal and external evaluations for a comprehensive picture of agent success.
