The Top 15 Call Center Performance Metrics to Improve Productivity
More often than not, front-line employees like your call center support team are going to be your new and returning customers’ first point of contact.
Call center agents can and should be prepared to cover pretty much every base, from answering frequently asked questions to address serious concerns and issues.
Call center quality assurance has to be your number one priority for front-facing employees. With the influx of calls and interactions your team will get, there will be no shortage of information to gather and analyze.
But how do you know what data is worth analyzing?
The data you gather by monitoring everything from inbound call interactions to your call center agents’ personal metrics are known as key performance indicators.
There are many call center key performance indicators to choose from. We’ve selected 15 of the top call center performance metrics to improve your business’s productivity.
1. Call Abandonment Rate
“The customer is always right” — you’ve heard that before. Keeping that mantra in mind when providing customer service is crucial, but it will get you nowhere if your customers don’t stay on the line long enough for you to help them.
The average call abandonment rate measures the number of callers who hang up before you can address their questions.
You won’t get specific information about a particular caller, but this metric will give you a good feel for how your agents are doing collectively.
If the call abandonment rate is high, there could be something going on that is preventing your agents from getting to their calls, something that can be fixed.
This is a vitally important metric for your call center metrics analytics and reporting.
2. Forecasting Accuracy
If you think you don’t need to have an idea of the number of calls you’ll get at certain times of the day and for certain days of the week, you’re wrong. Poorly predicted call influx leads to understaffing.
Understaffing leads to being very unprepared to help your customers, which in turn leads to very unhappy, unsatisfied, and potentially angry customers.
The forecasting accuracy metric allows you to both predict the call load and measure it against the actual call load. With this data, you’ll be better able to know how many employees to hire and what your busiest times are.
3. Waiting Time
Inbound call center metrics are another overarching area you need to keep in mind. A call center metrics dashboard needs to include data on the average waiting time for a customer.
This metric is calculated simply:
Just divide the number of callers waiting in the queue by the total number of calls answered.
The goal is to help as many customers as possible. If your numbers are lower than you’d like, train your agents on how to be more efficient in answering customer questions.
4. Number of Calls Blocked
Sometimes customers won’t make it through to a caller at all. We’ve all experienced that sound on the phone indicating the line is busy.
Good call center quality assurance implies that a company will always be available (during specific hours) to help customers.
If the percentage of calls blocked is high, your agents are spending too much time on the phone.
Figure out if that’s a company-wide issue that can be resolved.
Otherwise…
Push the efficiency point again; the faster agents answer questions, the faster they can move on to the next customer.
5. Answer Speed
Going hand-in-hand with the previous two call center agent metrics is the metric on answer speed. This is a great measurement of the average time your agents spend on the phone.
If the number is too high, your agents are taking a long time to answer questions.
6. Adherence to Schedule
Call center performance metrics statistics can be easily improved when you focus on keeping to a schedule.
Adherence to schedule means how well your agents are meeting the required amount of time (set by the company) to be available to answer questions.
Each company’s expectations for this are different, but after you’ve set how many minutes in a given day your agents should be ready to answer questions, you can measure how well they stick to that.
7. Service Level
Service Level Agreements are made between vendors and clients.
They detail what each party needs to do to meet the agreement. Unplanned service outages, agents that are often absent, as well as a high ticket or call volumes can negatively impact service level agreements.
8. Average Call Transfer Rate
How often your agents need to transfer their calls is important to keep track of.
You may find that you need to rework the system so that certain questions go to certain people, or that you need to further educate your call center agents so that they can answer your customers’ questions without having to be transferred to three different departments.
9. First Contact (Call) Resolution
Was the customer helped thoroughly and accurately the first time they called?
Or did they need to call back for clarification?
The more customers you have calling back with further questions, the more you know you need to make some changes.
10. Average Handle Time
The average handle time metric is very useful. By monitoring how long it takes the average customer to get their questions answered, you’ll have a very clear understanding of a particular call center agent performance scorecard. If they’re taking too long to help a customer, they may need additional training. If their calls are too short, they may not be helping enough.
11. Occupancy Rate
This metric measures how much time your agents spend on calls, waiting for calls, or doing things related to calls. If an agent’s occupancy rates are low, they aren’t spending a lot of time actually doing their job.
12. Self-Service Accessibility
Some types of questions can be easily answered without having to talk to someone over the phone.
Self-service is great, but it’s important to check on the accessibility of self-service options and make sure whatever self-service interfaces you’re working with (such as interactive web applications) are doing their job and getting questions answered.
13. Contact Quality
What are the interactions between your agents and your customers like?
Record the calls your agents get on and have a comprehensive form ready for a supervisor to fill out. You can even have your agents fill out their own forms after listening to themselves on calls. This is a great way to make sure your customer service quality is high.
14. Customer Satisfaction
The happier your customers are, the more likely it is that your employees are happy and that your company is doing well.
There’s a direct correlation between customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is the best metric to determine if your call center agents are doing their job well.
15. Customer Retention/Return
If you’re keeping a lot of customers, then your call center agents are doing a great job.
Conversely, if you’re losing a lot of customers, then it might be a good idea to reevaluate your call center agent performance scorecards.
The best metrics for your call center metrics dashboard are the ones that deal with customers. Because at the end of the day, if you’ve left your customers happy, then you’re doing something right.
