Measuring call quality

By understanding the relationship between what happens in the conversations with customers, and the consequences of those conversations in terms of customer behaviour, customer satisfaction and customers’ future intentions, it is possible to define measures to assess those conversations that will positively help and drive your call centre to be able to deliver a better quality experience to customers.

As a general rule, the more confidence a call centre has in the objectivity and accuracy of a performance measure, the more willing it is to link performance to payment and/or service credits. For both of these reasons, specialised and independent consultants are often the best way to manage the quality assessment programme.

The conversations selected for analysis must be representative of all the calls taking place in the centre, they must be recorded and retrieved unobtrusively so that agent behaviour is not affected by the process, and the sample must be drawn in a way that ensures its integrity.

Whilst the sample must be rigorously specified in order that it can form the basis for robust conclusions to be drawn, the absolute size and scale of the quality assessment exercise need not be enormous. The well-known and understood principles of statistical sampling theory can be applied in order to determine the appropriate size and form of the sample. Sampling theory, properly applied, allows robust conclusions to be drawn from relatively small sample sizes.

Even in a large contact centre handling hundreds of thousands of calls each month, a properly selected sample of 400 – 500 calls can deliver results that are accurate to within plus or minus 5% or better, and rather larger sample sizes provide even greater confidence in the accuracy of the results.

Callrica measures call quality by creating typical call scenarios. These call scenarios are typical reasons why a customer contacts the organisation. It could be a query about a delivery or a new customer wishing to open an account.

Each call scenario tests the organisation's ability to provide the caller with the appropriate level of service and information.

Together with the organisation, Callrica will define and weight critical call scenarios. Once the scenarios are defined, Callrica prepares calling scripts that present the scenario to call centre agents. Using a team of call auditors, Callrica will track the response received. The responses are then tabulated and reported on.

Whilst in principle understanding and applying this model of call quality is not particularly complex, in practice it requires considerable expertise and specialized resources.