Why Random Sampling Alone is Not Enough to Ensure Contact Center Quality

Having worked in the contact center industry for many years, I’ve become very familiar with how important random call sampling is to quality assurance.

It’s a practice that most, if not all, contact center leaders rely on to measure agent performance and ensure quality customer service. Still, it’s also rather limited in what it can tell you about the overall state of your contact center.

Random Sampling is no longer viable

With traditional quality assurance programs, interactions are selected for review based on certain qualities, such as the longest or shortest call, or—you guessed it—completely at random. Sometimes, a quality evaluator will catch something in a sample, such as an agent going off script, but 99 percent of the time the sample is clean and doesn’t offer insight to improve contact center operations.

The best way to experience a bigger impact to your contact center performance is to supplement your random sampling with a powerful contact center analytics tool such as Calabrio Analytics. Through sophisticated analytics engines and machine learning algorithms, Calabrio Analytics automatically categorizes interactions and can even run Predictive Call Scoring on every customer conversation.

Check all interactions for predefined words or phrases, providing evaluators with a better sample for quality analysis in the following areas:

• First Contact Resolution (FCR). With analytics, evaluators can pinpoint which agent interactions are resulting in repeat calls, focus in on what is prompting the customer to call back, and coach the agent on how to better serve that person in the future; which results in a better customer experience.
• Managing Escalations. By leveraging phonetic and/or speech-to-text transcription technology, evaluators can pinpoint customer interactions in which the customer asks to speak to a supervisor. By isolating these interactions, analysts can uncover coaching opportunities and even policies or product issues that are creating frustration for customers.
• Compliance and Liability. Noncompliant customer interactions can have alarming consequences for businesses, including high fines, intrusive audits and, in some cases, legal action. They can also diminish customer trust if the compliance issues are related to customer protection, such as making calls to ensure medical prescriptions are correct before shipment to the customer. Analytics can help keep businesses out of regulatory trouble by picking up and tracking noncompliant interactions, saving businesses time, money, and their customers’ loyalty.

By leveraging analytics technology concurrently with random sampling, contact center leaders can ensure they are keeping up quality standards. Learn more about how analytics is helping organizations improve customer satisfaction.

Mary LaFosse

Passionate about the customers’ experience, Mary brings over 21 years of contact center operational experience to Calabrio as a Speech Analyst. Mary began her contact center career sitting in the agent seat during the earlier years of the industry. Over the next two decades, Mary cultivated her expertise across all functions of operations, emerging as a seasoned subject matter expert – contributing the value of a holistic portfolio of operational & industry knowledge that she garnered from first-hand experience and best practices networking.