Quality Assurance in contact centers has come a long way.
From room-sized switchboards and hand-scored “courtesy” checklists to AI-driven performance platforms, it’s tempting to think we’ve outgrown our past.
But here’s the thing:
The roots of QA still shape the future of CX.
Let’s take a walk through time—and uncover what yesterday’s call centers can still teach us today.
📞 1920s – The Era of the Switchboard Girl
“Number, please?”
- The First Call Centers: Primarily telephone operators—women, often trained for perfect diction, calm tone, and politeness under pressure.
- Quality Standard: Courtesy and clarity. Monitored by floor supervisors, often with a stopwatch and clipboard.
- Fun fact: Misbehavior (like “chatting with callers”) could get you fired. Efficiency ruled.
💡 Takeaway:
QA began as behavioral performance, not metrics. It was about tone, empathy, and control under pressure—traits still critical in modern CX.
📻 1940s–50s – The War-Era & Post-War Call Boom
“Keep it calm. Keep it moving.”
- Role Expansion: Call centers supported war bonds, military inquiries, and early forms of government support. Post-war, companies began using them for sales and service.
- QA Focus: Script adherence, efficiency, politeness. Monitored via listening rooms and “mystery callers.”
- Tools: Rotary phones. Pen and paper scoring. Call monitoring was manual and limited.
💡 Takeaway:
Even before dashboards, mystery shopper-style QA gave businesses a view into the customer experience. The outside-in perspective still matters today.
📼 1960s–70s – The Rise of Call Monitoring (and the Tape Recorder)
“Let’s listen to that call.”
- Technological Shift: Magnetic tape allowed for recording and review. Supervisors could now listen after the fact.
- QA Gains Power: Scorecards emerged. Calls were rated for tone, resolution, and adherence to policies.
- Drawback: Feedback was still slow, centralized, and top-down.
💡 Takeaway:
Recording transformed QA from memory to evidence but it also introduced the problem of delayed feedback, which we’re still solving in 2025.
📞💻 1980s–90s – Call Centers Go Corporate
“Let’s scale support.”
- Enterprise Era: Outsourcing exploded. Call centers grew into industrial-scale operations.
- QA Standardized: Formalized scorecards. First QA software. Agents graded on “monitoring sheets.”
- Problem: QA became compliance-driven. Quantity over quality.
💡 Takeaway:
QA scaled but lost the human touch. The challenge became balancing consistency with connection, a tension still alive today.
🌐 2000s–2010s – The Digital Customer Arrives
“Can I speak to someone on chat instead?”
- Omnichannel Era Begins: Email, live chat, and social support disrupt voice-only models.
- QA Must Adapt: New criteria for written tone, spelling, multitasking.
- Analytics Boom: Data from CRMs and call platforms begins to inform QA—but interpretation still lives with humans.
💡 Takeaway:
QA had to become channel-aware, but many orgs still applied voice standards to digital conversations. Relevance matters more than rigidity.
🤖 2020s – AI Enters the Conversation
“The bot will now rate your tone.”
- Automation Explosion: AI scores soft skills, flags sentiment, and pre-sorts coaching opportunities.
- Modern QA Tools (like Leaptree!): Combine human insight with machine efficiency.
- Shift: From compliance → performance → experience design.
💡 Takeaway:
AI assists... but human judgment still rules. The goal of QA is no longer “catch errors” but to build better experiences.
📈 2025 – QA as Strategic CX Engine
“What’s the story this data is telling us?”
- The Best Teams Today:
- Use real-time QA to coach in the moment
- Personalize scorecards per agent or channel
- Tie QA data to business outcomes (like revenue, churn, and brand loyalty)
- The Role of QA: No longer a side function—it’s at the heart of CX strategy.
- Use real-time QA to coach in the moment
💡 Takeaway:
Today’s QA leaders aren’t clipboard carriers—they’re experience architects.
🎯 Final Thought: QA Isn’t Just Evolving—It’s Returning to Its Roots
We’ve come full circle.
From the switchboard girl’s perfect tone to the AI-assisted sentiment analysis of 2025, one thing has never changed:
🧠 Quality is about people.
It’s about how we listen. How we coach. And how we turn every interaction into a moment of trust.
The technology is different.
The goal is the same.
Let’s not forget what the past still teaches us:
🕰️ Empathy, clarity, trust, and skill will never go out of style.
Want to see how Leaptree brings 100 years of QA wisdom into one modern performance platform?
Let’s talk. No tape recorder required. 😉
📚 References
- Amabile, T. M., & Kramer, S. J. (2011). The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work. Harvard Business Review Press.
- Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
- Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional Intelligence. Bantam Books.
- McKinsey & Company. (2022). The Value of Customer Experience, Quantified. Retrieved from www.mckinsey.com
- Gartner. (2024). Future of Customer Service: From Reactive to Predictive. Retrieved from www.gartner.com
- Miller, G. A. (1956). The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information. Psychological Review, 63(2), 81–97.
- Stanford University Libraries. (n.d.). History of the Telephone Switchboard. Retrieved from library.stanford.edu
- U.S. National Museum of American History. (n.d.). Telephony and the Evolution of Customer Service. Smithsonian Institution Archives.
- Forbes Insights. (2019). The Evolution of the Call Center into the Experience Hub. Retrieved from www.forbes.com
- Taylor, P. & Bain, P. (1999). An Assembly Line in the Head: Work and Employee Relations in the Call Centre. Industrial Relations Journal, 30(2), 101–117.
- MIT Sloan Management Review. (2023). Customer Experience Is Everyone’s Job. Retrieved from sloanreview.mit.edu