Did you know that 59% of customers acknowledge that they have higher customer service expectations than they did even a year ago?
Rising consumer expectations mean that businesses must take their call center operations seriously. While some businesses have been excelling at this for years, others may not even know where to start.
Call center metrics are the first step to bettering your customer service; you can’t improve if you don’t know where you currently are. Similar to keeping up with sales quotas and marketing statistics, you should be keeping up with your call center metrics if you want to improve your call center itself.
Let’s jump into the best metrics to start with.
The Best Call Center Metrics You Should Be Tracking
It’s important to understand that every industry is going to have a little bit of variety when it comes to call center metrics. While the metrics will generally stay the same, target numbers are going to vary by industry.
Make sure to find out the average times for your specific industry before setting up metrics for your employees to aim for. Creating target goals that are too high off the bat can set performance levels up for failure, which can ruin the point of having metrics to begin with.
Average Wait Time
If you want to make a sale, then the last thing you want to do is have potential customers waiting. In order to prevent that from happening, you’ll want to make sure that there aren’t any waiting times your calls need to go through.
For example, if you have a salesperson making a call, then he or she needs to have every bit of information ready to go before picking up the phone. While it’s natural to want to call a lead immediately, it’s more important to make sure that the potential customer isn’t stuck on the phone while being transferred or being put on hold while an employee is finding out crucial details to a deal.
Abandon Rate
Having a lead hang up in the middle of a call is something you want to make sure isn’t happening. He or she may hang up for a variety of reasons, but you can keep track of how often this happens by monitoring the abandon rate of calls.
Callers who are hanging up during calls are a huge problem, but it’s hard to know how to fix this problem without knowing the situations people are hanging up in. By monitoring this, you can ensure that you’re not letting leads fall through the cracks.
Answer Speed
Waiting time and answer speed are a bit different. The answer speed applies only to the time a caller waits before getting touched the first time, while the wait time applies to the entire time during a call a customer is waiting. This typically comes to play with transfers.
You want your answer speed to be quick so that customers know you care about their call, especially when you have leads calling in. This goes a long way when it comes to making a sale.
Handling Time
While you want to work with a lead as long as necessary, you don’t want your salespeople to overkill a potential customer. There’s a sweet spot when it comes to selling a product, and you can pinpoint that down and measure how calls are adding up here.
First Call Resolution
Every call that comes in shouldn’t require being transferred. All this does is frustrate your customers while not providing you with much value. You can track this by keeping up with how many calls are being satisfied without being sent off to another employee.
This might not work with the process you currently have. Some companies use one person to answer phones and direct them where they need to go. If that’s the case, then you can track the resolution by the second person answering the phone.
Customer Satisfaction
Last but not least is customer satisfaction surveys. This can have a few different looks to it, but the main goal is to have customers directly rate the call they had. This can be an automated questionnaire at the end of the call or even an emailed survey to fill out.
Keep in mind that customer satisfaction surveys aren’t a perfect measurement of how well calls are going. Every caller has his or her own standard that’s going to affect how they view the service they received. On top of that, doing this with sales calls can yield a ton of different results.
How to Use Call Center Metrics Correctly
Before you can jump in and start holding your employees accountable for metrics, you’ll need to do a few things first. If you haven’t already, you need to establish clear guidelines and procedures for your employees to follow. While this might sound silly to some, it’s an important thing that not all businesses do.
You’ll also need to measure your current results in order to see how your business should do. Researching similar industry KPIs can also be helpful, but you want to make sure your targets are obtainable.
After metrics have been put in place, make sure to revisit your target numbers regularly. Many various factors can affect customer behavior, so you want to make sure your goals are still relevant.
Don’t Lose Business Because of Bad Call Center Techniques
Establishing clear call center metrics and keeping up with them will lead to better business, so don’t brush your call center off to the side. You’ll also be creating a healthier work environment and establishing clear expectations for employees; there are too many benefits to ignore.
At Pipes, we specialize in optimizing the sales process, and eliminating inefficiencies in the handoff process of leads from marketing to your call center. To learn more about how to generate more sales, book a demo to see how Pipes can help you accelerate your leads.
