How any business can call audit in 4 steps

So your team members are taking customer calls. Great! But making sure those calls meet your standards? That’s where it gets tricky. Because even if you do have guidelines for call handling, it’s hard to know if every customer is getting the same level of excellent service.

That’s why savvy small businesses turn to call auditing to monitor past conversations and find ways to improve. And no: call auditing isn’t just for big call centers. Small businesses can (and should) audit calls to deliver consistent experiences, improve customer service efficiency, and, most importantly, keep customers happy.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to run a call audit in four steps, how to take action on what you find, and why small businesses use tools like Quo to deliver better customer experiences at scale.

What is a call audit?

A call audit is where you listen to past calls to figure out what’s working (and what’s not) with your customer service. 

Once you’ve finished your audit, you can create an audit report that lists key findings, trends, and ways to improve, so you can:

• Train your team more effectively
• Fix recurring issues before they cost you business
• Make smarter decisions about how you handle customer calls.

Think about the last time you called the vet when your pet was sick and the person on the other end stayed calm, helpful, and clear. Calls like that don’t happen by accident. They’re usually audited behind the scenes and shared internally so customers get that experience each time they call.

How to perform a call audit (without the call center budget)

Call center blogs make call auditing sound intimidating and complex — especially if you have to sift through jargon like “BPO optimization” and “QM calibration.”

But auditing calls can be simple and doable for small businesses. It just requires listening to calls, scoring them based on a checklist, and pulling out key takeaways to spot bigger patterns.

Here’s the four-step process you need to get started:

1. Pick a few sample calls 

Reviewing every business call can take quite a bit of time — and as a small business owner, you probably don’t have much time lying around. So start with something less intimidating: samples of calls from across your business. 

Here are some suggestions for picking good samples:

• A mix of everyday inbound and outbound calls — selected at random — to capture a range of typical customer interactions
• Calls from unhappy customers to spot service gaps
• Sales team call recordings to find missed upsells or coaching opportunities

The number of samples you should aim for depends on the size of your team. That said, around three to four calls per team member per month is usually a solid start.

You also don’t have to listen to every call to pick samples: call tags can give you the context you need. For example, you can track customer sentiment, call drivers, or specific scenarios. Then, filter calls by tags to narrow down topics and build a well-rounded review set.

Quo users can also tap into call views to filter calls by team member or date. That way, you can pick samples from a diverse pool of coworkers over the past days or weeks.

We cover the nuts and bolts of this in our guide on how to filter calls for managers.

2. Use a simple QA scorecard 

A Quality Assurance (QA) checklist is basically a scorecard of what “good” looks like on a call. It keeps ratings unbiased and prevents favoritism from creeping in. Plus, it adds a clear structure to each session so you can evaluate all recordings by the same standards for call quality.

Here are a few basic (but impactful) things to score:

• Greeting: Was it friendly and professional?
• Security checkpoints: Are team members handling customer data securely?
• Issue handling: Did they solve the customer’s problem?
• Upsell/cross-sell (if relevant): Did they identify an opportunity to offer additional relevant products, services, or solutions?
• Closing: Did they end the call politely and make sure the customer was happy?

💡 Pro tip: Be sure to base your customer service Quality Assurance checklist on the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that matter most to your business. For example, if one of your goals is fewer callbacks, score whether team members fully resolve customer issues the first time.

Want even more suggestions for rating your calls? You can check out our guide to call monitoring forms.

3. Listen and score

Now that you’ve got your samples and scorecard, it’s time to go through your call recordings. You can easily pull these from a business phone system like Quo. Just make sure you’re following all best practices for legally recording phone calls.

Short on time? Use call transcripts and AI summaries to get up to speed faster and reference specific parts of a conversation as needed.

And one more thing: don’t sweat the small stuff. A slight fumble probably isn’t worth docking points over. Instead, you should focus on patterns and the customer experience so your feedback feels valuable and actionable rather than nitpicky.

💡 Not sure how to quantify your customer’s experience? You can read our call disposition guide about how to categorize the outcome of a call.

4. Spot patterns across multiple calls 

Once you’ve completed a few call reviews, take a step back and look at your scorecards. What trends or topics keep popping up? Are there things you need to fix with customer service coaching?

For example, maybe your team nails the “friendly service” guideline but tends to miss follow-ups. Or maybe new hires keep forgetting to mention your cancellation policy, which could become a bigger problem if clients need to reschedule.

Keep in mind the goal is pulling out themes and patterns, not necessarily recording individual scores. You’re looking for the root (not the symptoms) of problems so you can address them with customized training or clearer processes.

Which leads to our final point:

Next steps: How to take action on your audit results 

So you’ve combed through recordings, filled out scorecards, and found recurring patterns across multiple calls. All that’s left is to make a plan of action.

Here’s how to put those call audit outcomes to good use:

• Update scripts, FAQs, or website copy. If customers keep asking the same questions over and over, you might add more entries to your FAQ (or a dedicated audio recording to your IVR or phone menu). You could also tweak call scripts to make them more accessible, like simplifying language around pricing and billing.
  
• Make coaching plans: Adjust your call coaching approach to individual employees. For example, if a new hire is jumping into promotions too early, you could have them focus on solving the customer’s issue first during the next five or so calls.
  
• Host call calibration sessions: This means getting everyone on the same page regarding what a great call sounds like — so customers get a consistent, top-notch experience with every team member.
  
• Schedule future audit sessions in your calendar: To ensure consistency, you might add recurring audit sessions to your calendar each month. Have multiple phone numbers to juggle (like sales versus customer support)? You could try delegating to a call auditor to get extra bandwidth.
  
• Share wins with your team (not just issues): Your team deserves to know what they’re doing well just as much as what they need to improve. If you’re an Quo user, you can use internal threads to highlight great calls and tag team members with real-time praise.

Quo: The easiest way to manage call audits for small businesses

Call auditing is a secret weapon for any growing business looking to scale without losing service quality. You don’t need expensive software to get started, and you certainly don’t have to tackle your entire call history. Auditing just a few calls per month can lead to better customer service management. Which can lead to happier callers and more business.

Here’s how Quo makes call auditing easier for growing businesses:

• Call recordings: Your team can capture on-demand and automatic call recordings, then reference them later in customer conversation threads or by sorting through call views.
• AI call transcripts and summaries: Instead of listening through hour-long recordings, you can read transcripts or summaries to get the highlights at a glance.
• AI call tagging: You can use AI to analyze calls and automatically categorize recordings based on keywords, context, or sentiment (think “Billing issues” or “Positive sentiment”).
• Call views: Quickly get an overview of all your calls, then filter down to find the ones that require priority responses.
• Internal threads: Comment internally on calls to give feedback, highlight wins, or create action items for individual employees.

This, of course, barely scratches the surface. 

You can test each of these features (and many more) by signing up for a seven-day free trial of Quo.

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