The ultimate WOCAS-Guide
Defining the scope & estimating the sample size
Before starting your WOCAS® implementation there are a few important questions to be answered in the first place:
- In which area do you want to implement WOCAS®? Customer Care? Technical Support? etc.
- What is the minimum sample size of Contacts for a thorough analysis?
Let’s have a closer look at these one by one!
Defining the Scope
Have you already made a decision regarding the area for the WOCAS® implementation? Would you like to analyze the Contacts in the Customer Care team or rather find out more about what is going on in the Technical Support team?
If you did – congratulations! You can skip the first part of this chapter and move on to our recommendations regarding an optimum sample size at the bottom of this page.
If you didn’t – let the following guidance questions help you with your scope:
- Are there certain hotlines/areas which are unknown territory for you concerning the topics of contacts?
- Do you have areas with many issues but need help with prioritizing?
- What is the area with the highest contact volume?
- What customer segment/product drives the contact volumes?
- In which area do you expect the strongest effect on customer experience?
- Are there topics/contacts/products your organization is particularly interested in?
- Where do you have direct communication with your customers?
Hence, some general recommendations:
- Start with main products with the highest numbers in customers, contracts, revenue, contacts etc.
- Consumer customers typically have more common issues than business or corporate customers.
- Start with bidirectional channels first: inbound telephony, then chat before you move to e-mail and whitemail.
- Frontline is the best starting point before you dive into 2nd levels.
Estimating Sample Size
When it comes to sample size, there are a lot of aspects to be considered and it’s quite tricky to determine the “perfect” sample size.
In general, it can be said that a sample size of at least 1,000 Contacts is required for a consolidated Customer Intent Structure on the first level. But, a higher sample size is required as soon as you would like to have a reliable view on details on the second level.
It seems that a sample size of 2,000-3,000 contacts captured over a period of six weeks could be enough to identify a Custumer Intent structure up to the second level. However, if you want to conduct more detailed analyses and quantify identified issues, a larger sample size would be necessary.
The key is to have a continually well-balanced sample size. Why? Here are the reasons:
- Speed of iterative analysis: For iterative analysis you need to have a good sample size continually each week
- Reasonable effort: The effort of advisors to document in WOCAS® and for coaching and quality assurance has to be considered
- Relevance: The relevance of Issues needs to be identified
- Pragmatic significance: The results have to be reasonably significant – not the last decimal place but meaningfully accurate
Experience from many projects shows that 1,000-1,500 contacts per week for one focus area is a well balanced sample size for
- Inbound Telephony
- Frontline advisors
- Telecommunications, Utilities or Insurances
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