Call centers are a complex yet essential element to a successful business. Call center agents field inbound and outbound calls to help manage call volume while providing a positive customer experience through the facilitation of customer complaints or queries. This is important, as customer experience is becoming increasingly crucial to a company’s success. The only way to ensure your company’s efforts are effective is to measure call center metrics, analytics, and reporting.
By tracking the effectiveness of customer experience, call initiation, operational efforts, and agent productivity, you can determine what areas your call center is excelling and what needs improvement. Call center metrics and call center KPIs (key performance indicators) can provide the insight you need to improve customer satisfaction and build customer loyalty for sales growth and revenue generation.
What Does Metrics Mean in a Call Center?
Call center metrics and KPIs reveal evolving industry trends. You can see what customers want now and predict what they’ll want in the future. This allows you to adjust your products and services as necessary to meet those demands. As a result, you can stay ahead of your competitors and set yourself apart for your customers.
Call center metrics also reveal the effectiveness and efficiency of a call center’s operations. Looking at inbound call center metrics and outbound call center metrics, you can confirm whether your customer service team is helping your business reach its goals.
Call centers accept volumes of information from numerous platforms that revolve around different areas of your business. Call center metrics help monitor this information and provide the insight needed to develop effective strategies for optimal success. You must analyze quantitative and qualitative call center metrics to measure your customer satisfaction, profitability, and productivity.
How to Measure Call Center Productivity
Assessing your call center’s productivity is to understand how much work is done within a certain amount of time. To determine the productivity of your call center workforce, use the following call center productivity formula:
(Total Output / Total Input) x 100 = Labor Productivity
Total Output is the time each worker spends on tasks. Total Input is their work schedule, or the available time to complete those tasks. For example, if a call center agent works an eight-hour shift but only spends six hours on their work, their productivity is:
(6 / 8) x 100 = 75%
This agent spends 75% of their daily shift focusing on work-related tasks. This information is helpful in understanding their overall productivity, but also helps to create goals that improve and streamline the customer experience process and track it by certain call center metrics and KPIs.
Top 5 Customer Experience Call Center Metrics and KPIs
One of the most important roles of a call center is to provide a positive experience for a company’s customers. Studies show that businesses that focus on bettering the customer experience see an 80% increase in revenue. Here are five customer experience call center metrics and KPIs to track for happy customers and optimal results.
1. Customer Satisfaction
This KPI comes from various sources. Call centers earn these scores through customer surveys with standardized levels of expectation. However this feedback is obtained, customer satisfaction is an essential element for calculating call center productivity. Understanding how a customer perceives your business and their overall experience with your brand can help determine the effectiveness of your call center.
2. Customer Effort Score
This metric measures how much effort it takes a customer to resolve an issue, fulfill a request, return a product, or receive an answer to a question. Customers tend to be more loyal when a product or service is easy to use. By asking consumers to rate their experience on a scale from “very easy” to “very difficult,” you can gain an understanding about the efficiency and ease of your processes.
3. Customer Retention Rate (CRR)
CRR uncovers the percentage of consumers who remain customers within a given timeframe. This information not only helps you see how many customers you’re keeping. It also reveals how many new customers you’re obtaining during that same period. Simply decide the timeframe you want to explore (annually, quarterly, weekly, etc.). Then, collect the number of customers at the start (S), total customers at the end (E), and new customers added during that time (N).
Use the customer retention rate formula to find your retention rate:
[(E-N) / S] x 100 = CRR
Tracking CRR helps you realize lifetime customer value and quantify the effectiveness of your customer service programs and marketing strategies.
4. Customer Churn Rate
Basically the opposite of Customer Retention, Customer Churn is the rate at which your company loses customers over a given amount of time. This attrition could be people who stop shopping your site, stop visiting your location, or subscribers who cancel a membership. Either way, the higher the churn rate, the fewer customers you have purchasing from your company. The lower the churn rate, the more customers you keep.
Understanding the rate at which you’re losing customers can help identify reasons why people no longer shop with you, thus giving you the information you need to improve your campaigns, processes, or customer service.
5. First Contact Resolution
The percentage of incoming calls that are resolved during the initial contact with a customer is First Contact Resolution. The ability to meet the customer’s needs from the onset means there’s no need for a follow-up contact. This lessens the workload for IT Support and reduces customer frustrations, which boosts customer satisfaction and builds trust and loyalty. All of this helps with customer retention and overall sales.
Top 5 Call Initiation Metrics and KPIs
Call Initiation is when a consumer first makes contact with your call center. This is the moment that sets the customer journey in motion. What happens next can be the reason a prospect does or doesn’t convert to a customer. Measuring these metrics is essential to understanding the effectiveness of the process of intaking calls. Track the following aspects of Call Initiation.
1. First Response Time
This KPI measures how long it takes from the time a customer first presents their problem to when a call center agent actually responds to it. This measure of time is calculated by dividing the total of first response times by the number of resolved cases.
FRT = total FRTs during that period / total resolved tickets
First response time is essential to providing a positive experience that keeps customers coming back for future purchases.
2. Active Waiting Calls
When a call center receives multiple calls at once, there could be any number of active waiting calls at a given time. By investigating this aspect of your call center, you can identify where backlogs are taking place, and develop necessary training for your agents to better manage their intake volume. As a result, you can improve response time which can minimize abandon rate. All of this leads to a more positive customer experience and increases the likelihood of higher conversion rates.
3. First Call Resolution Rate (FCRR)
People will often contact a call center because they have an issue to resolve. The FCRR reveals whether that issue is corrected during the customer’s first phone call. By keeping FCRR low, you save the customer time and frustration with repeat phone calls. This boosts satisfaction and reduces wasted resources spent on resolving an ongoing problem. FCRR is a critical metric to track because it provides invaluable insight into customer service, retention, referrals, and cost. It also presents more opportunities for sales.
4. Abandonment Rate Based on Call Volume
The longer a customer waits on hold before talking to a live person, the greater the chance they’ll leave the call. Abandonment Rate indicates how efficiently your agents answer their calls, and how quickly they’re able to resolve an issue. This metric shows you how many unhappy customers you have, and also the productivity level of your workforce. An acceptable call center abandonment is 5% to 8%. Anything beyond 10% is concerning.
5. Longest Hold Time Rate
When a call center is overwhelmed with calls, it’s likely callers will have to be placed on hold or find themselves waiting in a queue. This can be a major pain point for customers, so it’s important for you to know how long people have to wait before they can talk to an agent. Find the Longest Hold Time Rate by determining the most amount of time it takes for any single customer to leave the call. Once you know what that amount of time is, you can take measures to shorten it and improve customer satisfaction.
Top 3 Operational Call Center Metrics and KPIs
A call center’s operations also need to be tracked to ensure optimal performance over time. Operational metrics and KPIs help businesses pinpoint peak hours, determine evolving call center trends, and forecast staffing demands. Take a close look at the following aspects of your call center.
1. Call Arrival Rate and Calls Handled
To truly understand how smoothly operations are going, you need to know how many calls your center receives in a given time period and how many calls agents field in that timeframe. These metrics help you realize abandonment statistics and identify room for improvement for more efficient processes. They also help you recognize trends and predict call volume so you can prepare your agents accordingly.
2. Cost Per Call
Ensure you’re maximizing your resources by measuring Cost Per Call. This shows you how much it costs your company to process an average call through your center. You can set your ideal Cost Per Call and then implement processes to help you reach and maintain those goals.
3. Average Age of Query
Average Age of Query lets you know how long a single issue is unresolved. If an issue is not solved on the first attempt, it remains an open query. This can lead to customer frustration and lack of trust in your company’s ability to provide good customer service. Maintaining a low Average Age of Query helps reduce the costs associated with an ongoing problem resolution issue and increases customer loyalty.
Top 7 Agent Productivity Call Center Metrics and KPIs
Agent performance is an important aspect of your call center proficiency. As your company representatives, it’s their responsibility to resolve issues, provide excellent customer service, and connect with your customers on a deeper level. Here are 7 agent productivity metrics to help measure performance.
1. Contact Quality
Contact Quality is one of the most common ways to measure call center agent productivity. By evaluating randomly recorded calls, you gain valuable insight into an agent’s professionalism, courtesy, and overall customer service capabilities. This is highly important for customer satisfaction and conversion rates.
2. Average Call Length
This metric shows how long each phone call takes and measures amount of time between calls in a given time span. This information helps determine efficiency and productivity, and it can be beneficial in setting goals and expectations among your workforce to help them better manage their workload.
3. Average After-Call Time
An agent’s responsibilities don’t end the moment they hang up the phone. After a call, they still have to process the conversation, fill out paperwork, and document the call for quality assurance purposes. Average After-Call Time uncovers how much time they spend on these duties and how efficient they are in completing a customer resolution.
4. Agent Attrition Rate
You need to know how frequently your call center agents resign from their position. The higher the attrition rate, the less effective you are in serving your customers. Replacing call center agents takes time and money, not to mention their absence leads to a higher call volume and longer wait times. Learn from these exits and find ways to entice your agents to stay.
5. Average Handle Time
For a full comprehension of productivity, you need a solid grasp of how much time call center agents spend answering the phone. Average Handle Time isn’t about keeping calls brief, because you want to be sure agents are managing issues properly. However, it’s about making sure calls are efficient and productive. Provide the training and resources necessary to enable your team to respond to callers quickly and effectively.
6. Agent Utilization Rate
A strong indicator for agent performance is Agent Utilization Rate. This metric reveals the average amount of time an agent spends on a call in a given timeframe compared to their total number of work hours. The higher the utilization rate, the more effective that agent is.
7. Schedule Adherence Rate
To ensure your call center agents are maximizing their work time, you must analyze their Schedule Adherence Rate. Every employee must follow a schedule to be sure they’re maintaining workflow. However, they can’t work nonstop or you’ll risk burnout. Schedule Adherence Rate ensures that workers arrive to work on time; don’t spend too much time addressing personal issues; or take unscheduled breaks. Maintaining a schedule is important to keeping a steady and efficient workflow and continued productivity.
The Importance of Improving Agent Productivity
Ultimately, agent productivity is the key to running an efficient and successful call center. It impacts every aspect of your business, from customer satisfaction to your bottom line revenue. Call center metrics and KPIs enable you to consolidate data, identify areas for improvement, learn about operational disconnects, and provide the necessary training for your workforce for an effective and efficient call center.
By improving agent productivity, you can improve all aspects of your operation and provide the best customer experience possible. This earns loyal customers who return for future purchases and help spread the word about your business.
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