Key takeaways
- Quality monitoring has long made the evaluated person a passive subject. Contesting a criterion gives them their voice back.
- Contesting a criterion means, for the advisor, proposing the value they believe is fair on a criterion of their own evaluation, and justifying it.
- The manager arbitrates: they validate, and the proposal applies, or they reject, and the score stays unchanged. Every arbitration is traced.
- Contesting a criterion is not deactivating a whole evaluation: here, you discuss a specific score, not the scope of monitoring.
- The AI analysis stays visible: the advisor's request and the manager's decision are added next to it, never instead of it.
- This is human oversight made very concrete: giving a right of reply to the evaluated person.
In quality monitoring, the evaluated person was long a mere subject
In most quality monitoring setups, the evaluated person never really had a say. A score lands, sometimes commented, rarely discussed. The advisor receives it, full stop. This asymmetry has a well-known cost for managers: people do not buy into an evaluation they merely undergo.
AI conversational analysis changes things on a decisive point: it offers everyone the same base, objective and consistent, applied the same way to every conversation. What remains is to give the evaluated person the means to respond. That is exactly the role of the right to contest a criterion: letting the advisor make their point heard, and the manager settle it, while keeping a trace of everything.
Giving a right of reply, without destabilising the system
The risk of a "right of reply" would be to open an endless complaints box. Contestation is designed the opposite way: structured and targeted.
The advisor does not contest their score as a block. They take a specific criterion, propose the value they think they deserve, and explain why: an element of context, a light shed on the exchange, a piece of information the analysis did not have. The common base produced by the AI is not called into question: it serves as the anchor for a discussion on the few points where the advisor's lived experience adds something.
The advisor proposes, the manager arbitrates
A contestation is not a remark that gets lost: it is the start of a decision. The advisor proposes a value and justifies it; a manager arbitrates.
The arbitration is simple and unambiguous: validating means accepting the value proposed by the advisor, which then applies to the evaluation; rejecting means keeping the original score, while explaining why. Each contested criterion follows its own cycle: pending arbitration, validated, or rejected. As long as nothing is settled, the score does not move.
Where modifying an evaluation is a direct decision by the manager, contestation comes from the advisor. Two complementary paths to the same fair and shared score: one comes down from the manager, the other rises from the field.
Contesting a criterion is not deactivating an evaluation
The nuance matters, because the words look alike. Contesting a criterion means discussing a score inside an evaluation. Deactivating an evaluation from your monitoring is something else entirely: removing a whole conversation from quality monitoring, because it should not count (unusable recording, GDPR request, out of scope).
One is about the quality dialogue, the other about data governance. The two coexist, but do not overlap.
What the right of reply changes in the relationship
Giving the advisor the option to contest turns quality monitoring from a top-down exercise into a shared practice. The advisor knows their point of view counts and will be examined; the manager has a clear framework to settle matters, rather than handling informal contestations by email or in meetings.
The result is buy-in. A score that is discussed and arbitrated is better accepted than an imposed one, even when the arbitration does not side with the advisor. Contestation thus fits the same movement as the coaching debrief: making the evaluation a topic of conversation, not a verdict.
Who can contest, who arbitrates
The roles are clearly separated: you cannot be judge and party.
| Action | Administrator | Supervisor | Advisor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Contest a criterion of one's own evaluation | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Arbitrate a contestation (validate / reject) | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ |
The advisor can only contest the evaluations they are the subject of, and only a manager within their team scope arbitrates. Everyone knows who proposes and who decides.
Every arbitration leaves a trace
A validated contestation creates a new version of the evaluation, with its reason, its overall score, its date and its author. The advisor's request and the manager's decision stay viewable, alongside the AI's original analysis.
This traceability is not just a convenience: it is what lets you explain a score, to the advisor as much as to an auditor, and show that a human kept control of the final decision, in the sense of the human oversight expected from a responsible use of AI.
The right of reply, a sign of mature quality monitoring
An evaluation system is also judged by the room it leaves to the evaluated person. By giving the advisor a structured right to contest, and the manager a clear and traced arbitration framework, you move from undergone quality to shared quality, on a common analysis base produced by the AI.
Raisetalk evaluates 100% of your conversations and gives everyone, manager and advisor alike, their rightful place in the decision. To see how, discover automated quality monitoring or request access.