Everyone defines success differently. Some measure it by accumulating money and material possessions, while others may look for respect from their peers or family as a form of success.
Whether you’re measuring your success or the success of your contact center, there are specific metrics that every business should monitor. These include:
Key Performance Indicators
While numbers can be helpful to metrics to help guide a company toward success, they aren’t the only factor determining it. In a broader sense, true success is about feeling happy and fulfilling your life purpose–whether at work or home. While measuring personal goals like happiness may be challenging, business-focused goals can easily be measured with more concrete call center metrics.
While the metrics that matter most for a call center can vary widely from one business to another, there are a few common indicators to consider when evaluating customer service performance. For instance, a customer satisfaction (CSAT) score is a valuable indicator of how well your customers feel about your business, which can be gauged with simple surveys that prompt a rating from one to five.
Other important call center metrics include agent occupancy, adherence to schedule, and wait times. For example, high agent occupancy indicates that agents are overwhelmed with calls and may require more training or support. Adherence to schedule measures how well call center employees stick to their shifts, which is critical for maintaining consistent customer experience. Lastly, wait times indicate how long callers must wait before connecting with an agent, leading to frustration and dissatisfaction.
Finally, customer experience (CES) is a valuable metric that can be gauged with survey questions asking how easy it was to resolve their issue and find information. This can be an effective way to identify problem areas that need improvement across departments.
Agent Performance
One of the most critical call center performance metrics is agent performance. This measure tells you whether or not your agents are productive and able to keep up with customer demand. If your agents are struggling, you can look into ways to improve their productivity. For example, you can encourage your team to use self-service tools or implement a faster ticketing system to help customers quickly find the necessary information.
Another helpful metric is average handle time, which measures how long an agent spends with each customer on a phone call or other contact. This can help you determine if your agents are moving through calls quickly or spending too much time on each call. If your average handle time is too high, you may need to consider improving the training and support your team receives.
Other important call center metrics include first call resolution (FCR), which measures how often your agents can resolve a customer issue on the first try. This is an important metric because it shows how well your team handles customer needs and whether your business has the resources to provide excellent service.
It’s also essential to monitor agent availability, which reveals how long your agents can take customer calls. This metric can help you understand when your agents are most busy and may need extra help from management.
Customer Satisfaction
A business’s financial metrics are an essential indicator of success, but it isn’t the only metric that matters. Many things that aren’t easily quantified can still contribute to a sense of success, such as personal happiness, meaningful relationships, and a feeling of accomplishment.
A customer satisfaction (CSAT) score is a crucial metric to measure customer satisfaction with your products, services, and customer service. CSAT scores are based on feedback from simple surveys sent to your customers that ask them how happy they are with their experience.
While delivering a great customer experience is the goal, it isn’t always easy to balance that with the need for operational efficiency. This is especially true when it comes to your call center. Studies show that 61 percent of consumers will switch to a competitor after one bad experience, so keeping a close eye on your customer satisfaction metrics is essential.
In addition to tracking call center metrics and KPIs, implementing quality assurance (QA) scores is an excellent way to understand your agents’ performance. QA scores are determined by listening to agent conversations and evaluating them against internal standards. This gives you a more comprehensive picture of your agents’ performance and can help you identify issues before they become significant problems.
Reputation
A key measure of success for many businesses is how many customers remain loyal to the brand. One bad customer experience, especially in a call center, can send them running to competitors. That’s why CX leaders watch over proven metrics to understand if their contact centers are meeting expectations.
Among those metrics, first-contact resolution (FCR) is widely considered to be the most important. It measures whether a customer’s problem is resolved on the first contact, which can reduce customer churn and increase long-term revenue.
Other KPIs to monitor include average call waiting time, which indicates how long customers must wait for an agent to answer their call. The goal is to minimize the number of calls that are blocked, as this can be a sign that your call center is understaffed or your technology cannot support current call volumes.
Another metric is average talk time, which measures an agent’s time speaking with callers. This metric can reveal whether agents rush customers off the phone without resolving their issues, which could lead to a low FCR, or whether they have trouble using their desktop tools to resolve customer issues, resulting in a high talk time. It’s also a good idea to track how long it takes for an unresolved query to remain open, as this can indicate the effectiveness of your back-office processes.
