For many contact centers, the challenge is no longer collecting data; it’s doing something meaningful with it.
QA platforms now deliver unprecedented insight across voice, chat, and automated channels, but too often that intelligence stalls at the dashboard stage.
It’s like having a shed full of every tool imaginable, but not being able to locate the Phillips head screwdriver you need to change the batteries in your TV remote.
Or a pantry jam-packed with a delicious array of produce, but you haven’t got the recipe to help you put the ingredients together.
While CX leaders can analyze the data for patterns, agent behaviors, or policy inconsistencies, they often still struggle to translate these insights into organizational action.
According to Derek Corcoran, CEO and Founder of Scorebuddy, this isn’t due to a lack of understanding or effort from QA leaders. The real issue is bandwidth.
“Day by day, they’re focused on service delivery,” he says.
“That’s their primary focus. Sharing insight upward, and doing so consistently, is still a relatively new expectation.”
While the information is there, “the responsibility of the C-suite” is to recognize QA’s transformation and actively ask for those insights.
Corcoran notes that some more advanced customers now create executive-ready dashboards that are “automatically shared with the C-suite.” This increases visibility, sparks dialogue, and ensures strategic decisions reflect what customers are actually experiencing.
Why Reporting Isn’t Enough
QA programs often underperform not because the team lacks skill, but because the organization hasn’t defined how QA should influence coaching, policy, or CX design.
When insight remains siloed within the QA function, it loses its ability to shape decisions.
As Corcoran explains, “If I’m head down, day by day, focused on operational matters, it’s hard then to engage in that conversation at a strategic level.”
Building the loop requires elevating QA beyond its historically operational remit.
One theme Corcoran returns to repeatedly to help address this issue is the importance of the “human in the loop.”
He argues that you can’t just have evaluators validating AI outputs; you need agents taking part in the quality process, too.
As AI-driven evaluations grow more common, their impact becomes personal. They influence bonuses, performance perception, and career progression.
“You need to have confidence in the mechanisms,” Corcoran says, and agents must be able to challenge AI-generated scores.
For example, Scorebuddy includes a structured “challenge loop” so that if an agent believes an AI evaluation is “way off the mark,” it routes back to a human reviewer.
This maintains fairness, but it also reinforces a culture where feedback flows both ways. As Corcoran puts it:
“The AI will always answer the question, but not necessarily in the right way. Human oversight becomes the safeguard that keeps QA credible.”
Will Human Oversight Fade Over Time?
Whenever AI is mentioned in the customer service or experience space – and it’s brought up fairly often these days – the conversation inevitably reaches a point where someone asks, ‘Is AI going to replace agents?’
Corcoran doesn’t see that happening anytime soon.