Recording is universal. Contentment is not.
Call recording is used by 96% of respondents, but 19% of them want to replace or upgrade what they have. Services, public sector, retail and finance are the most restless, almost certainly because they are adding AI-enabled speech analytics on top of the recording layer.
89% of recording users are already cloud-based; the rest plan to move within two years. Penetration among small operations sits at 97%, because cloud pricing has closed the gap.
| Insurance | Use now, no plans to change 100% |
|---|---|
| Manufacturing | Use now, no plans to change 100% |
| Transport & Travel | Use now, no plans to change 86%; Use now, want to replace/upgrade 14% |
| Finance | Use now, no plans to change 76%; Use now, want to replace/upgrade 24% |
| Retail & Distribution | Use now, no plans to change 74%; Use now, want to replace/upgrade 26% |
| Services | Use now, no plans to change 50%; Use now, want to replace/upgrade 50% |
| Medical | Use now, no plans to change 93%; Will implement within 12 months 7% |
| TMT | Use now, no plans to change 80%; Use now, want to replace/upgrade 13%; Will implement within 12 months 7% |
| Public Sector | Use now, no plans to change 58%; Use now, want to replace/upgrade 33%; Will implement within 12 months 8%; No plans to implement 1% |
| Outsourcing | Use now, no plans to change 90%; Use now, want to replace/upgrade 10% |
| Average | Use now, no plans to change 77%; Use now, want to replace/upgrade 21%; Will implement within 12 months 1%; No plans to implement 1% |
| Small | Use now, no plans to change 74%; Use now, want to replace/upgrade 23%; Will implement within 12 months 2%; No plans to implement 1% |
|---|---|
| Medium | Use now, no plans to change 77%; Use now, want to replace/upgrade 19%; Will implement within 12 months 1%; No plans to implement 3% |
| Large | Use now, no plans to change 80%; Use now, want to replace/upgrade 20% |
| Average | Use now, no plans to change 77%; Use now, want to replace/upgrade 21%; Will implement within 12 months 1%; No plans to implement 1% |
Source: ContactBabel, US Contact Center Decision-Makers’ Guide 2026, Figures 1–2.
Record everything, or record what matters
72% of recording users capture every call. The other 28% record selectively, and the rules they use say a lot about where compliance risk actually sits.
100% recording
Random & scheduled
On demand
What triggers the decision to record
| Call profile | Used by 67% |
|---|---|
| Dialed number (DNIS) | Used by 38% |
| Caller number (ANI) | Used by 30% |
store recordings offsite, inside a cloud recording platform or a dedicated backup facility within a wider DR plan. The figure grows every year.
Most operations of every size still keep dedicated secure on-site hardware too; a minority of smaller sites store recordings on general-purpose hardware, the weakest link in the chain.
‘Call recording’ stopped describing what the technology does
Interaction recording synchronizes the agent’s screen with the audio channel, and extends to after-call work, email and web chat. Quality management runs as an iterative cycle, and every step in it is now a candidate for automation.
- 01
Record the interaction
Audio, screen, after-call work, email and chat, all captured and synchronized.
- 02
Monitor and score
Manual evaluation or automated analytical processes applied across every interaction.
- 03
Feed back and coach
Identify issues, then coach, train and route agents into targeted e-learning.
- 04
Report at an integrated level
Agent, team and center performance rolled up for supervisors, managers and executives.
- 05
Act and measure
Identify areas for improvement, act on them, and measure whether the change held.
A dashboard shows an agent closing calls fast. The recording shows the agent can’t help and is quietly passing customers to colleagues.
It is impossible to listen to every call manually, so operations increasingly transcribe and analyze all of them, then listen only to the interactions with genuine coaching value. That moves the supervisor from monitoring to analysis: understanding not just what happened, but why.
Above the team, the same records feed compliance and dispute resolution, business-process optimization, Voice of the Customer programs, and recruitment and training decisions in HR.
QA is strong at fixing agents. It is weak at informing the business.
More respondents are lukewarm about their QA outcomes than enthusiastic. Only one purpose, evaluating agent performance and training needs, draws more ‘very effective’ than ‘fairly effective’ ratings. Insight leaks before it reaches the rest of the organization.
| Evaluate agent performance and training needs | Very effective 65%; Fairly effective 35% |
|---|---|
| Enable regulatory compliance and auditing | Very effective 42%; Fairly effective 52%; Ineffective 6% |
| Provide insight used in the contact center | Very effective 38%; Fairly effective 50%; Ineffective 12% |
| Provide insight to improve CX | Very effective 35%; Fairly effective 58%; Ineffective 7% |
| Improve internal processes and metrics | Very effective 25%; Fairly effective 55%; Ineffective 20% |
| Provide insight used in the rest of the organization | Very effective 12%; Fairly effective 48%; Ineffective 40% |
Digital channels are still a QA blind spot
Inbound telephony scores best, and even there only 40% call their evaluation very effective. Email, offered to customers for well over a decade, manages 15%. Social media is worse. Back-office work draws more than twice as many ‘ineffective’ verdicts as ‘very effective’.
Hover or focus a channel to read its split. Source: Figure 5.
| Inbound calls | Very effective 40%; Fairly effective 45%; Ineffective 15% |
|---|---|
| Web chat | Very effective 33%; Fairly effective 45%; Ineffective 22% |
| Outbound calls | Very effective 30%; Fairly effective 35%; Ineffective 35% |
| Social media | Very effective 20%; Fairly effective 22%; Ineffective 58% |
| Emails | Very effective 15%; Fairly effective 58%; Ineffective 27% |
| Back-office work | Very effective 15%; Fairly effective 50%; Ineffective 35% |
It isn’t priority. It’s capacity.
73% of respondents lack the time to analyze and use their quality data, and 38% call it a major problem. Almost nobody says quality is a low priority: 80% report no problem there at all. The systems and the people simply can’t keep up.
Only 10% say their staff lack the skills. But 40% say, strongly, that their current technology does not support what they want to do. That is a tooling problem, not a talent problem.
For mid-sized operations the sharpest concern is having nobody available to deliver coaching, even once QA has identified exactly who needs it.
| Technology doesn't support quality & performance management | Major problem 40%; Minor problem 30%; No problem 30% |
|---|---|
| Not enough time to analyze data | Major problem 38%; Minor problem 35%; No problem 27% |
| Not enough time or resource to coach and train | Major problem 38%; Minor problem 42%; No problem 20% |
| Staff do not have the skills to analyze data | Major problem 10%; Minor problem 25%; No problem 65% |
| Performance and quality are low on our priority list | Minor problem 20%; No problem 80% |
Four moves the leading operations make
Operations driving quality forward tend to run the same four plays, and hold themselves to three success factors that keep QA honest.
- Separate compliance from customer satisfaction. Process adherence is vital, but it does not by itself make customers happy.
- Put the customer first. Customer feedback mechanisms are what drive success, not internal convenience.
- Align QA to strategic goals. Measuring something that doesn’t move the strategy is a pointless exercise that steals focus.
Three upgrades the market is asking for
Better data and reporting
The most frequent request: higher-quality data feeding management information, reporting and the wider analytical processes built on top of it.
Real multichannel capability
Recording has moved out of voice-only territory and needs the same richness across every channel, exactly where QA effectiveness is weakest today.
Ease of use for supervisors
Supervisors and trainers are the daily users. Time lost to the tool is time not spent coaching.
The major change to quality management will come from AI-enabled analytics that take 100% of interactions into account.
That surfaces the outliers, good and bad, and assesses every one of an agent’s calls rather than a sample. Today analytics still tells you where to look and relies on QM expertise to act; the next generation has to automate more of the manual work, and finally close the gap on non-voice channels as their share of interactions keeps growing.
ContactBabel is the contact center industry expert. The US Contact Center Decision-Makers’ Guide is the major annual study of performance, operations, technology and HR in US contact center operations, now in its 18th edition. This page presents the Quality & Call Recording chapter, sponsored by Enghouse Interactive.
Every figure on this page is drawn from the published white paper, including the vertical-market and operation-size breakdowns in full.
Download the PDF →Extract from “The 2026 US Contact Center Decision-Makers’ Guide (18th edition)” © ContactBabel 2026, published March 2026. All information believed correct at time of publication.