Number of Calls Analysed

How Many Calls

How many calls per agent per month do you analyse for quality purposes?

I was expecting the average answer to come out in the region of 4-6 calls per month.

However the survey is showing a different answer.

The most common answer (36%) showed was that they are monitoring more than 10 calls per agent per month.

What do you find to be the best number of calls to monitor?

Question asked by Jonty

8% of your total Inbound Calls

My personal experience is to rate at least 8% of your total inbound calls to gain a true reflection of the level of service currently being offered. Yes this may be a logistical nightmare depending on the size of the business however it will prove beneficial in the long run.

Your thoughts?

With thanks to Sanman

10 Calls per agent per month

We are client lead in terms of the quantity monitored but would advise at least 10 calls per agent per month with more (possibly 3-4 times the set amount) for those agents with identified quality issues.

The more investment in back-end quality checking, the better the service provided however, as Sanman has already mentioned, this can depend on logistics and cost.

With thanks to Ant Marketing

15 calls per month for each

We have a 50 seat call center, and I analyse 15 calls per month for each. I am the only QA person for this call center.

With thanks to Ann Onimous

Numbers of calls they monitor

I always find it interesting that people talk about numbers of calls they monitor as if this is an indicator of how effective their QM programme is. To me it’s another example of let’s measure the thing that’s easy to measure!

I’ve not yet come across anyone who can really give me any logic behind why they monitor the number of calls they do. The argument normally goes along the lines of “industry best practice”. I reckon though that the industry doesn’t really know what the correct amount of evaluations should be.

I’m not too sure about the question raised in the poll “how many calls per month do you analyse for quality purposes”. This really depends on what you want out of your quality programme. If the purpose of a QM programme is to assess how well an organisation / contact centre is performing as a whole then a random sample of calls across all agents will give this information (assuming that what is actually being measured is correct; but that’s a whole separate discussion). Also you don’t actually need to assess that many calls to get this view as few as 400 calls can give you a +/- 5% accuracy based on accepted sampling theory.

However, once you get into the realms of individual agent quality and making assumptions of how good / bad they are and what they are doing that needs attention, typical sampling theory doesn’t apply. You need to get much smarter and more targeted on what calls you are assessing and why. For example, as Ant Marketing have mentioned, the number of calls you need to monitor per agent should vary based on an agent’s current performance. Mind you this is only one factor that will influence the volumes.

Sorry for the rant, but this has always been a question that gets me agitated! In my opinion a catch-all metric of “x number of calls per agent per month” is an irrelevant measure which at its worst can tie up expensive resource for little operational gain.

With thanks to JGatenby

Debatable Topic

This has always been a debatable topic. On average, I have seen 4-8. However, I do agree that in some cases it is driven by the client of the quantity monitored.

With thanks to jlodgequality

I use to analyze 100+ calls each day

We have a 60-70 seat call center, and I use to analyze 100+ calls each day as I was the only QA person for this call center. But now I have a team of 4, and we monitor 50-60 calls per agent per month!!! Well, I know its a lot, but this is what we are doing!!!

With thanks to

85% of all sales calls completed

We used to assess 85% of all sales calls completed which was a very daunting task. Currently we assess 4 sales and 4 unsuccessful sales calls per agent on a weekly basis.

With thanks to HASTUR

Assess 85%

We used to assess 85% of all sales calls completed which was a very daunting task. Currently we assess 4 sales and 4 unsuccessful sales calls per agent on a weekly basis.

With thanks to HASTUR

4 to 8 calls per month

About 4 to 8 calls per month, per agent.

In my opinion if you start receiving frequent ‘negative’ feedback the monitoring frequency should be increased.

With thanks to mahes77

Our Target

The target we work towards is one monitoring per agent per week, plus they have what we call a PEP – a 1-2-1 session with their line manager to discuss performance and so on, which would be 4 per agent per month. However, targets like this don’t really take into account how many calls an agent actually handles, 1 monitoring per agent per week doesn’t really mean a great deal if they answer 50 plus calls a day, so in a way I agree with the theme of JGatenby’s post. I’m sure there is a great deal of room for improvement in this area for most of us if we are honest – but again that all depends on how much bandwidth we have as managers to carry-out such tasks, costs need to come down in these tough economic times so it might be a while before some of us, particularly those in an outsourced environment, will see dedicated Quality Monitors whose job is to monitor agents, when it would be reasonable to expect a greater number of monitoring’s completed per agent per month.

With thanks to Bunnycatz

8 to 10 calls per day

I’m monitoring 8 to 10 calls per day. I believe by doing so we can easily track down the areas where the attention is needed & address those issues before they turn in to a hot pan. Leaving a bad call record for a month without monitoring may lead in to several operational issues. But then again it all depends on the volumes you receive..

With thanks to Srikanth

quality monitoring form

I am monitoring 10 calls per agent per month using a quality monitoring form. There is a lot of information in those calls that sometimes needs to be verified and or clarified and followed up on. I think it would be impossible to monitor 10 calls per agent per day. What do you do with all that data?

With thanks to jodahoff