The Danger of Quality Scores

The two articles at the beginning of this newsletter (about the misuse of KPIs and the math of quality monitoring sampling) point to a dangerous practice in today’s call centers. As pointed out in Bill Durr’s article, it’s highly unlikely you are reviewing enough calls to have a statistically relevant sample of someone’s performance. The random sampling used for many of these call reviews is pretty haphazard in terms of a representative sample.

One problem associated with this small sample is simply the incomplete picture of what is happening on the phones. This can lead to nit-picking instead of meaningful coaching. The end result is employee disengagement with the process and no real improvements in performance.

The other problem associated with this small sample size is the practice that contact centers have of using quality scores as a significant portion of an agent’s performance scorecard. Many centers use this performance score to reward agents with pick of schedules, pay raises, or other types of bonuses or prizes. Be careful about this process, since agents can present a legal and valid argument that these scores are not statistically significant enough to warrant compensatory changes.