Did you know that for 64% of customers, a bad experience is a stronger reason to leave a brand than the satisfaction they get from using the product? A call center shapes customer experience and helps create a positive brand image, enhancing loyalty and trust in the company.
Contact center KPIs offer a way to measure effectiveness and are a vital part of any improvement strategy. Knowing KPIs, you can identify parts of workflows that worsen customers' experience or do not match the business's standard, and fix them. Stay with us to learn more about KPIs and their role in operational quality control. We will review the KPIs meaning for the inbound call center and the list of the most crucial metrics.
KPIs (key performance indicators) help monitor the effectiveness and performance of customer support teams. With a clear and measurable target, a team can evaluate its success and create a strategy to achieve the desired goal. Performance indicators can also serve to check current progress and highlight areas that require increased attention and improvement. KPIs can also be part of a service-level agreement, demonstrating the service quality the company expects from outsourcing partners.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are significant in performance tracking and customer satisfaction evaluation. They can demonstrate how easy it is to reach a call center representative and how quickly an issue can be resolved. Businesses leverage metrics to see if customers are happy with their products and services and check where improvements are required. We can divide all KPIs into three main metric directions: agent productivity, contact center operations, and customer experience.
These call center key performance indicators evaluate how productively each agent works to maximize individual efficiency and performance, maintaining the highest service quality. They serve to identify top assistants and apply timely training for low-performing agents. Agent productivity metrics like abandoned call rate (ACR), blocked call rate, and post-call work time can help optimize workflows and improve load distribution. It also simplifies the detection of bottlenecks in processes.
The main goal of operational contact center KPI metrics is to determine whether all center workflows are efficient and meet business objectives. Parameters like first-contact resolution (FCR), agent utilization, or employee satisfaction rate (ESAT) can show how effectively the contact center handles customers' demands and manages staffing and resource allocation. With proper operational metrics tracking, call centers can control spending costs smartly.
Customer experience contact center KPIs focus on measuring customer satisfaction with your product or services. These metrics will tell you if callers had a pleasant experience interacting with the contact center representative. CX indicators, such as net promoter score (NPS), retention rate, or customer effort score (CES), can show how easily customers can solve their problems with your company's assistance. Controlling them can drive loyalty and overall brand perception, building a solid foundation for long-term business health.
First, you need to understand that KPIs are not just report numbers; they are advanced tools that grasp every weak point of a call center's performance and highlight it for your attention.
KPIs can help you identify performance gaps and work on fixing them. For instance, if you see high handle times or low first contact resolution, it may be a sign of extra training needed or a knowledge base update. With targeted improvements, you can reduce the number of blind spots and raise the entire service level.
Contact center performance metrics measure your agents' productivity and can help you understand how employee satisfaction affects their work. You can recognize top performers and train low performers based on the results. Paying attention to staff needs and feelings can increase motivation and efficiency.
By studying the effort metrics, you can see which processes are too difficult and find ways to make them easier for customers and agents. Such improvements may include smarter call routing or hiring extra people for optimal staffing.
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Key performance indicators can significantly improve call centers' service levels, but where should you look, and what KPIs should you choose? We will review some of them one by one, exploring which part of the work process they can highlight.
CSAT is a customer satisfaction indicator, one of the most valuable KPIs for quality assurance. With the help of a satisfaction survey, companies can find out if the interaction with the agent brought joy to customers and if they are satisfied with the service quality. You can get this call center KPI value if, after the interaction, the customers get a pop-up with the request to evaluate their impression, for example, by giving a mark from 1 to 5.
The customer effort score measures how easy it was for the customer to reach help and resolve their issue. The score may include self-service efforts, such as how long it takes to find the solution in the company's knowledge base. It enables customers to let the brand know if anything should be improved and informs them about failed attempts to reach the goal.
Net promoter score is also a crucial CX contact center KPI, as it lets you know if customers are happy to recommend your brand to others. For 74% of customers, word of mouth is the most influential factor when they choose products. It means they can advertise your brand or bury it with negative reviews and recommendations to avoid it.
First-contact resolution (FCR) should be one of your primary assistance goals. The percentage shows how many callers found help from the first conversation. Using our best practices for FCR, you can avoid additional call transfers, increasing the chance of providing a solution within the first contact with the customer.
Retention rate evaluates the percentage of customers that stick with the company over a specific period. In simple words, it tells you how loyal the customers are. High rates are a good sign of high-quality customer service and overall satisfaction.
Quality assurance scores can demonstrate how well your agents follow the company's procedures. The simplest way to measure interaction handling is to monitor the recorded calls regularly. It will show how close your teams are to the brand's standards.
This call center KPI shows how fast the teams react by showing the percentage of calls answered within a specific period. Naturally, contact centers aim to reach a 100/0 ratio, but in reality, the results are lower. SL can show if your agents meet the response time goal and match SL targets.
Another call center KPI example is the average speed of answer (ASA), which is, in simple words, how quickly your agents pick up the call. ASA indicates workflow efficiency and customer access to assistance. It may look similar to service level indicators, but this type shows the time required to wait in the queue before the call is answered.
This one looks very similar to ASA, as both demonstrate how long the caller had to wait in the line, but queue time has a more individual and deeper approach. It evaluates the experience per caller, including those who gave up waiting and hung up. It helps calculate the average queue time for both answered and abandoned calls.
This call center KPI measures how long customers are willing to wait until they hang up. High indicators demonstrate the requirement to spend too much time in a queue and signal extremely poor queue management. The higher the indicator, the more likely your customers are to get frustrated with the service and think about switching to competitors.
This KPI for customer service call centers explores the percentage of customers who give up waiting before they reach the desired assistance. With abandonment rates, you can see how efficiently the center operates and how well you handle the staffing.
This KPI is vital for those who work with interactive voice response systems, as it shows how well it routes customer requests among the specialists. Correctly routed calls improve customer satisfaction by lowering the number of transferred calls. It also highlights how many callers get the correct response with the help of the IVR system and the ratio of users who solved their issues thanks to the IVR.
Among call center KPI examples, utilization is an efficient way to analyze and optimize staffing levels. It checks the amount of time agents spend handling calls vs. being idle. The empirically obtained optimum is approximately 70-80% of the agent’s total work time spent on communication.
Similar to utilization, the occupancy rate helps evaluate how busy the operators are during the workday. You also need balance here, as high occupancy expresses the risk of agents burning out caused by too much work. Low occupancy, meanwhile, shows that the teams are overstaffed.
AHT, or average handling time, is the average duration of a conversation with a customer, including the call itself and after-call work. Speed and quality are equally important for call center success, and the AHT metric makes it easier to find a balance.
This rate calculates the percentage of calls that are escalated and require the assistance of higher support levels. The escalation KPIs can help you evaluate how often the calls are transferred to other departments and see if agents require additional training. Lower rates usually reflect that staff training was efficient, and the team members demonstrate higher autonomy and ability to solve issues themselves.
Among call center KPI metrics, this one is extremely valuable for understanding how well your teams feel about their job. Employee satisfaction level highlights the staff's happiness with the work performed and process efficiency. ESAT surveys check if call center teams feel supported in personal development and promotions, and reach a work-life balance. This rate is as important as customer satisfaction because happy employees are more likely to offer higher service quality and cause lower turnover.
The answer is simple: focus on your business goals. Once you decide what to achieve with call center activities and which parameters are instrumental, you can review the KPI list and mark those that suit you best.
So, what are call center metrics? Key performance indicators are powerful tools for measuring efficiency and work simplicity. They can be your guide during improvement strategy planning and the beacon for desired outcomes. You can study the company's bottlenecks through surveys and accurate KPI analysis and change them to make the work routine easier for staff. This way, the business will constantly improve service quality, retain loyal customers, and create high-level customer support.
At Simply Contact, we specialize in creating personalized customer support solutions that drive business growth and customer satisfaction. Let us help you elevate your customer experience and stand out from the competition.
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