Quality Assurance Staff to Agent Ratio

Quality Assurance Staff to Agent Ratio

I am looking for best practices on determining the amount of QA staff to consider to the amount of agents? While I understand that there are many factors to consider in this ratio, I am looking for a starting point. What logic worked for your call centre?

Question asked by michelle

No Industry Guidelines

There are no industry guidelines for determining the QA evaluator to agent ratio or number of calls that should be monitored per contact centre on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. This number varies based on total number of agents, type of contact centre (multi-channel or multi-skill) and transaction volume.

One way contact centres address QA resource limitations is to split the number of agent evaluations that need to be completed among supervisors and quality reviewers.

While it’s important to have dedicated QA resources, it’s also essential for line supervisors or managers to keep informed about their agents performance. Evaluating agents is a great way to stay apprised of what’s happening with agents and the contact centre.

The goal of a quality assurance program is to provide a statistically significant analysis of service delivery and the quality of customer interactions.

To accurately measure service quality and establish credibility and reliability for the quality assurance process, randomly captured calls should be evaluated consistently for all agents, on a regular basis.

Unfortunately, most contact centres do not have the resources to conduct QA on a statistically valid sample of transactions. Instead, management generally specifies a number of calls/emails/chat sessions to evaluate on a weekly and/or monthly basis.

This number is based on the number of QA resources budgeted by the contact centre. (To determine the number of QA sessions that can be performed in a day, calculate the amount of time it takes to do an evaluation and deliver a coaching session. Then divide this number by the working hours available per day, which is generally 6.5.)

Here is a strategy that some contact centres use to determine the number of evaluations to monitor per agent/month.

Start by evaluating 10 calls per agent for a month to obtain a baseline figure. Each subsequent month, reduce the number of evaluations for each agent by 1 and compare the results/findings to the prior month.

Continue this process until the variance between the results is significant. At that point, the number of calls evaluated is as low as it can go. (The most common number of calls evaluated for agents on a monthly basis is 3 to 5.)

With thanks to Amardeep

Author: Jonty Pearce
Reviewed by: Robyn Coppell