QA for AI agents

QA for AI agents is designed to monitor and evaluate interactions between customers and chatbots to ensure they meet quality and accuracy standards. It helps teams understand how effectively their chatbots resolve conversations and whether these interactions align with expected customer-experience benchmarks. 

QA for AI agents also evaluates voice conversations through Voice QA, summarizing calls and transcriptions automatically and speeding up the QA process. These evaluations often work hand-in-hand with advanced tools, such as conversational intelligence software, which analyze patterns and insights across large volumes of interactions.

QA for chatbots allows teams to uncover signals like negative sentiment, churn risk, looping behaviors, and knowledge gaps. With tools like Zendesk QA, teams can evaluate AI agents' performance, analyze results, and use these insights to refine AI configurations and overall service workflows. This quality assurance process ensures that the output of any advanced AI assistance, such as an AI copilot, is always accurate and on-brand.

More in this guide:

• Why QA for AI agents is important
• Key capabilities of QA for AI agents
• How Zendesk QA for AI agents works
• Business impact of QA for AI agents
• Customer story
• Frequently asked questions
• Deliver exceptional customer experiences with QA for AI Agents

When agentic AI agents operate without quality assurance, organizations face the risk of inconsistent responses, frustrated customers, and even compliance issues. These problems can quietly compound at scale and compromise the overall customer experience.

Chatbot QA is essential for the AI experiences customers rely on every day. Like a continuous feedback loop in manufacturing, AI-led interactions require rigorous retrospective evaluation. By analyzing past performance and real-time data, teams ensure that every interaction is accurate, reliable, and safe.

Poor QA for AI agents (or the lack of it) allows issues like incorrect answers, looping behavior, missed escalations, and negative sentiment to go unnoticed. Plus, given the volume and diversity of conversations bots manage, these issues have the potential to severely impact the health of a business. They can drive down CSAT, increase churn risk, and undermine brand trust.

To sum up, QA for AI agents streamlines and automates the evaluation process, addressing tone deviations and manual QA challenges, while ensuring every chatbot conversation is monitored for quality and performance.

Agentic AI agents are a core component of modern customer service. According to the 2026 Zendesk CX Trends Report, 86% of consumers say that fast responses and accurate resolutions highly influence whether

they purchase a product or service. AI agents are responsible for dealing with a significant part of daily customer interactions. So, considering the importance of ensuring the quality of these interactions, Zendesk QA extends its powerful QA capabilities to AI agents.

Here are key QA for AI agents capabilities that ensure high service quality across AI-led interactions. 

Analyzes 100% of AI interactions

Zendesk QA allows customers to analyze every single AI-led interaction, so they can have deeper visibility into bot performance, message quality, and human reactions. This gives teams competitive advantage through richer metrics and automated scoring that surfaces exactly where bots need support. 

With its AutoQA tool, Zendesk QA evaluates 100% of AI agent conversations against predefined or custom criteria. Examples include tone, empathy, comprehension, spelling, grammar, and readability. This minimizes time spent manually sifting through large volumes of tickets.

Such broad coverage analysis enables support teams to: 

• Identify conversation issues.
• Detect positive and negative sentiment immediately.
• Use real-time quality insights to automatically route critical conversations to humans, and trigger notifications and other workflows.

Everything takes place within one unified platform, so teams can build, run, review, and continuously improve their bots while driving higher resolution rates and service quality.

Detects critical risks and hidden customer insights

There are risks associated with automated customer interactions, and it's important to proactively manage them before they create customer frustration.

This is possible using Spotlights, a Zendesk QA tool tool that provides both pre-built and customizable detection to ensure no impactful interaction goes unnoticed. The tool's features include:

• Pre-built Spotlights for immediate risks: Automatically pinpoint looping bots stuck in repetitive cycles, allowing you to fix logic errors quickly. It also surfaces churn risks and escalations by analyzing sentiment and patterns that require immediate human intervention.
• Custom Spotlights for business-specific insights: Since AI won't manually report back on specific business goals, you can build custom Spotlights to detect the insights that matter most to you. This includes:

  • Customer insights: Automatically flagging product feedback, competitor mentions, or specific regulatory compliance phrases.

  • Conversation risks: Identifying unique outliers, such as abandoned conversations or interactions that take unusually long to resolve.

Compares AI and human service quality 

Your brand voice must remain consistent across human and AI agent customer interactions. 

This is why Zendesk QA's dashboards allow managers to track AI agent performance next to human agents. This helps teams understand:

• Where AI agents are excelling or falling short relative to their human counterparts.
• If service quality is consistent across different agent types and channels.

• Which knowledge gaps can be filled by refining bot instructions or through targeted training for human agents.

Refines AI agent instructions to improve service quality

Root cause analysis, driven by AutoQA's 100% interactions coverage, provides the clarity needed to optimize your AI performance. When the platform detects issues like dead air on calls or specific knowledge gaps, teams gain actionable insights into what causes dissatisfaction or lack of resolution.

This information can be directly used to refine AI agent instructions and prompts, leading to immediate improvements in service quality, higher resolution rates, and ultimately, better customer experiences.

As a complete AI solution, Zendesk offers a closed-loop system that manages the entire lifecycle of automated support. Using specialized tools, Zendesk powers customer interactions and evaluates their performance. This creates a seamless transition into Zendesk QA for AI agents, which provides the automated, qualitative feedback loop necessary for continuous bot improvement. 

Instead of analyzing purely quantitative metrics like average resolution time and first time response, Zendesk QA analyzes the actual content and quality of AI-led interactions. The core AutoQA tool instantly scores every text-based bot conversation against human-like quality metrics, such as empathy, sentiment, and comprehension. The Spotlights feature proactively scans for critical outlier conversations, flagging issues like churn risk, escalations, or looping bots. 

With these deep qualitative insights into bot performance, Zendesk QA enables teams to quickly identify knowledge gaps, refine AI agent instructions, and push resolution rates higher.

Some of the core features that make Zendesk a unique solution are:

Native QA solution

Zendesk's QA stands out for being a built-in solution that seamlessly integrates into the Zendesk platform—something no other solution provides. This brings sophisticated AI capabilities and automation directly into your customer service quality assurance environment, ensuring a comprehensive overview of service quality without the need for complex external systems.

Works right out of the box

Zendesk QA requires no coding or AI model training to get started, so you can use it right away. After turning on QA features, customers receive insights into bot performance almost immediately—it's a plug-and-play experience.

Customizable AI-powered automated quality scoring

Zendesk QA offers powerful AutoQA capabilities for quality scoring and conversation discovery. Although you can rely on the platform's out-of-the-box quality categories, it also allows you to create your own criteria. The conversation insights feature, Spotlight, is fully customizable, so you can uncover insights specific to your business needs.

AI prompting in human language

User-friendly UI and AI prompting in human language are outstanding features of Zendesk QA. They make it easy for teams to interact with the QA tool and quickly refine criteria without needing specialized technical skills.

Supports both human and AI agents across all channels

Zendesk QA is built to manage the quality of your entire support ecosystem, comprehensively supporting both human and AI agents across all channels. It provides a unified view of quality, allowing you to track and compare AI agent performance against human agent benchmarks for consistent service delivery.

Real-time QA (EAP)

Real-time QA detects critical concerns in live ticket conversations as they happen. The tool scans ongoing messages for predefined risks, including privacy breaches, customer vulnerability, agent abuse, churn risk, and unresolved issues. By identifying these outliers in real time, teams can intervene instantly to prevent escalations or compliance violations.

Implementing Zendesk QA for AI agents significantly impacts ROI. Automating quality management ensures 100% quality analysis, so businesses can proactively detect and resolve issues. This transforms the support quality and improves the overall customer experience, boosting CSAT levels. 

Additionally, some key benefits related to leveling bot performance to human benchmarks include:

• Customers receive the same high-quality service—whether they’re interacting with a human or an AI agent.
• Human traits like empathy and sentiment are measured in AI interactions, moving beyond basic process metrics.
• AI agent performance is compared against human benchmarks to identify areas where your bots need instruction refinement or where humans need coaching.
• AI performance trends are measured across all channels, giving you a unified view of your automated service health.
• AI agents are evaluated on style, tone, and custom criteria that align with your brand standards and specific business goals.

NOBULL utilizes Zendesk QA (quality assurance) software to gain instant insights into the customer support performance of its AI agents, just as it does for the company’s human agents. This allows Bhav Raju, Director of Customer Service at NOBULL and her team to compare AI agent performance and see how it aligns with human agent performance to continuously make service improvements.

“Our agents are helping us grow our revenue through customer service. They’re spending time on more complex conversations that actually lead to sales.”

—Director of Customer Service at NOBULL