By Mukundan Sivaraj · AIM Media House
Forrester found that Net Promoter Score fell in 20 out of 39 industry-country combinations in 2025, suggesting that customer expectations are outpacing service improvements. Yet 92% of contact centers have quality assurance programs in place. The problem isn't measurement. It's what happens after.
Dave Giblin, Head of Customer Success for Zendesk APAC, says to AIM Media House : "Measurement alone is observability.
What changes the outcome is the loop between signal and fix, running continuously." Zendesk announced Quality Score at its Relate conference in May, the ability to automatically measure 100% of customer conversations. The announcement arrives as enterprises struggle to evaluate AI-driven customer support at scale.
Traditional quality assurance systems were designed around small samples of human conversations. AI agents changed the volume entirely. What becomes visible when every interaction becomes measurable? The 2% Problem Call centers have sampled 2-5% of interactions forever. When teams were small, the math worked.
You'd review a handful of calls, spot problems, coach agents, improve. The samples averaged out reasonably well. AI agents handle thousands of conversations per day. A 2% sample of that volume is statistically meaningless. It represents 0.001% of what's actually happening. You can't spot patterns in invisible data.
More crucially, companies measure what's easy to measure. Response time. Volume deflected. Cost per interaction. These metrics look excellent on a spreadsheet.
They don't measure what actually matters: whether the customer's problem got solved, whether the experience felt human, whether someone walked away satisfied or frustrated. Klarna learned this in public. What Klarna's Numbers Hid In January 2024, Klarna deployed an OpenAI-powered chatbot across 23 markets.
The move replaced 700 human agents with an AI assistant.
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