What call sampling misses

How many calls a team actually hears

In most support teams quality assurance looks the same: a handful of calls per agent per month, picked at random or after a complaint. At a thousand calls a month that is under one percent of contacts.

That is the basis for judging a person's work and for deciding what the whole team should fix.

If you review one percent of calls, you are reviewing chance, not the team's work.

What the sample leaves out

The things that vanish in a sample like that are usually the interesting ones:

• calls where the customer gives up halfway through
• a recurring problem every agent solves differently
• one category of enquiry where handling time has crept up for a month

None of these is visible in five calls. All of them are visible in all of them.

What full coverage changes

Once every call is scored against the same criteria, the quality conversation stops being a conversation about excerpts. Instead of asking "was this call good", you can ask "which calls show the same problem" — and get an answer the same day.