The key to success for any business is making your customers happy. Now, call centers act as a point of contact with your customers.
That’s why evaluating call centers’ performance is vital for every company. There are various call center metrics, aka KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that help assess the overall accomplishment of a call center.
These metrics are quantifiable measures that companies use to track whether the goals are being met. As Peter Drucker once said, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”
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After the objectives are defined, these KPIs are set to help measure the overall performance as well as various operational aspects of a call center.
There are various call center metrics, but here are a few significant ones you should consider evaluating.
Call Center Metrics to Track Customer Success
1. Time in Queue
Time in the queue, or average wait time, is the measure of the time your customers have to wait before their call gets connected to an agent.
No caller likes to wait in a queue for a long time. Keep track of your customer waiting time to ensure that your customers get a quick and efficient response. If you have a high waiting time, it simply indicates that you are understaffed.
As a call center manager, it’s your responsibility to find ways to reduce the waiting time as much as possible. This will lead to satisfied and happy customers.
2. Call Abandonment
The abandonment rate is the number of calls that were dropped or terminated by the customers. It tells how satisfied your customers are with your service team in terms of both customer experience and waiting time.
In fact, the TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act) compliance has made it mandatory to maintain the abandonment rate under 3%. Therefore, make sure all marketers must follow the TCPA consent requirements checklist.
This call center metric helps identify whether your calling system is outdated. Sometimes despite having a high customer satisfaction rate, you see an increase in call abandonment as well. It could be that the system is inadvertently dropping calls.
3. Percentage of Calls Blocked
The percentage of calls blocked is the percentage of calls that received a busy tone when customers called. These are because of one of the following reasons –
There are no available agents to receive the call, and thus, they get directed to voicemail. Or, it could be that the software used in the center can’t handle the call volume adequately.
A blocked call is a missed chance to interact with a customer.
4. Customer Satisfaction
As the name suggests, customer satisfaction means how your customers feel about the call experience with your company. To find out, companies generally conduct surveys using tools like Net Promoter Score (NPS). Here, customers rate their experience from 0-10, where 10 is the highest number.
It helps them quantify customer satisfaction levels and determine whether customer service is effective or not.
5. Service Level
Service level is the percentage of calls answered in a given time period. Every company has its own set goals. For instance, a customer service center would aim to attend 70% of the calls within 50 seconds.
A higher service level means that your customers are spending less time waiting to speak with an agent. In short, service level indicates whether your company has enough resources to fulfill your customers’ needs.
6. Contact Quality
The quality control specialist is responsible for ensuring that the call center’s reps maintain their courtesy and professionalism, impart correct information, and more. They do this by measuring the metric contact quality. They record calls and analyze random call recordings to check and keep quality in control.
7. Voice Quality
Voice quality is measured using the MOS (Mean Opinion Score). It employs a scale from 1 to 5, with five being excellent and one, the worst. It uses a batch of human testers that has predefined speech samples sent over the network.
The quality control specialist monitors the quality of call traversing your VoIP network. Thus, you can easily diagnose the cause of voice quality issues and troubleshoot them.
8. Average Handle Time
Average Handling Time (AHR) is the number of times customers spend on each call with your sales services team. Having a low AHR implies that reps are efficient, and you may not need more staff.
9. Cost per Contact
In simple terms, cost per call is the cost that the call center bears for each call made. It is a crucial metric to track as it helps executives make informed and better financial decisions. It is a key part of the cost-benefits analysis.
Now that you are aware of some of the vital metrics to track, let’s understand the best practices for call center metrics.
Call Center Metrics Best Practices
1. Set a Goal
Begin by defining your goal. This is essential to determine which call center metrics you need to track and analyze to find the information you are looking for.
2. Analyze Both Quantitative and Qualitative Metrics
It’s essential that you gather and analyze data of calling time, including both quantitative and qualitative information. Sometimes, a call may last a little longer than the standard average time. But in the end, if the customer is satisfied with the service, the time is irrelevant.
So, the numbers might not always give you the true picture of how your agents are performing.
3. Review Findings With Your Team
Bringing transparency within the organization is of utmost importance. Once you have your findings, share them with your teammates. It will help them have a stronger understanding of their performance. In fact, these call center metric findings might act as a motivating tool for your reps.
These call center metrics best practices will help you derive compelling takeaways from your data analysis.
Wrapping Up
Familiarize yourself with metrics relevant to your organization, and monitor those on a daily basis. Keeping track of these metrics will help your call center determine what needs improvement and take a step closer to your business goals.
Supriya is a highly skilled content writer with over 8 years of experience in the SaaS domain. She believes in curating engaging, informative, and SEO-friendly content to simplify highly technical concepts. With an expansive portfolio of long-format blogs, newsletters, whitepapers, and case studies, Supriya is dedicated to staying in touch with emerging SaaS trends to produce relevant and reliable content.
