Video: What’s the Best Sample Size for Quality Scoring?

Garry Gormley, Founder of FAB Solutions, outlines the best sample size for quality scoring if you don’t have specialist tools.

How Many Calls Do QA Need to Listen To?

For those of you that don’t have specialist tools like speech analytics, I would say the most representative sample, or the ideal sample, size for measuring quality assurance probably starts with either five or six assessments.

I think five or six is probably the optimum number, for a number of different reasons that I’m more than happy to share.

When you think about the score that a lot of people aim for with quality, sometimes it starts around 80%, and generally if you’ve got less than five it might start to become a little bit more problematic for agents to actually achieve that score.

Which is why I say as a minimum five, ideal probably six.

Why 5-6 Calls Is the Sweet Spot

We’ve talked about the sample size being five or six, so why would it be, I suppose, negative, or have a potentially negative consequence if it just go higher or lower?

If we go too low, that obviously means that we’re not really sampling enough of the pot to give a representative sample of how the agent’s QA scorecard is, or how the performance of that individual is.

That can have two impacts, I suppose. One, you’re not sampling enough of the good stuff, so you’re not able to give some of that really fair and accurate rationale to how they’re performing.

At the same time, if we are going too high, it really takes a toll on the resource that you need to actually do that.

If your calls are typically what we might see in the contact centre maybe anywhere between 10 to 15 minutes long sometimes, if you’re then doing more than five or more than six, and in some cases I’ve seen people doing it up to 20 audits on an agent.

It really requires a significant volume of resource, and it’s not necessarily going to give you any additional insights doing that volume of audit.

That’s where I suppose you’ve got to get that balance in terms of the appetite for risk, and the appetite for investment on resource.

With thanks to Garry Gormley, Founder of FAB Solutions, for contributing to this video.

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Author: Garry Gormley
Reviewed by: Robyn Coppell