Call monitoring - every call or random?

When you are selecting a call center quality assurance system, you need to decide which method of recording is best for you: total recording (100% of all calls), a random sample (10 calls per agent per month) or on-demand (Click to start and click to stop).

Most call centers may require a combination of recording methods. Some industries mandate 100% recording, especially where there are liability concerns. Some companies don't have the budget to tackle 100% recording, as it can require multiple recording channels and possibly multiple servers. For most mid-sized call centers, random sampling is enough to get a baseline of agent performance.

Once the data is captured, no matter what the quantity is, there will be the opportunity to evaluate and score the calls, and then provide feedback to the agent to improve their performance. This can equate to hundreds of thousands of dollars in productivity gains over a years' time.

When the focus is on performance improvement, random sampling will work for you. When liability is a concern, you should record 100% of the calls. On demand recording can be a good feature to go along with random sampling. Typically random sampling and on-demand recording can be achieved with a 2 or 4 channel system.