Take charge of-your data 7 key contact center kpis explained
How to raise and track effectively Call center KPIs and Metrics in 2021 [ULTIMATE GUIDE]
What Are the Important KPIs for a Call Center and how to perform goals?
What Are the Industry Standards for Key Call Center Quality Metrics?
How to Ensure That Each Standard is Met?
What Are the 5 Key Performance Indicators?
How to Improve Call Center Metrics?
Kick Your Sales Business Into Hyperdrive Today
When used correctly, call center KPIs can serve as a form of communication and can be used to improve the quality of customer service (CX).
For call centers, it is a common mistake to accept standard call center KPIs without configuration. And the option to reflect the unique needs of their businesses. Each crucial call center KPI must be timely presented to the team.
Presenting in an easy-to-understand fashion guarantees the results from an employee. When agents follow: rules, policies, instructions, it gives the brand and CX image.
What Are the Important KPIs for a Call Center and how to perform goals?
Here are some of the best key call center performance metrics to focus on to help you personalize your customer experience and increase brand loyalty today.
Productivity
- Call Volume
- Abandon Call Rate
- Call Completion Rate
- Call Handle Time – Average Call Time
- Average Wrap-up Time (also known as After Call Work Time)
- On-Hold Time
- Service level (SL)
- % Repeat Calls
- % Call Transfers
- First Call Resolution (FCR)
- Missed calls
- Agent occupancy (also known as Agent Utilization)
- Sales Conversion Rate, Average Sales per Agent
- QA scoring or Call quality analysis
Productivity
Each contact center approaches measuring call center productivity metrics in its own way. Here are the most outbound and inbound call center metrics: Call Volume ‒ the sum of calls that all agents have received ‒ the entire volume of incoming and/or outgoing calls that the agent has processed. These standard call center metrics compared to an individual plan of each agent. Abandon Call Rate ‒ all conversations that did not take place because the customer ended the important call before the agent answered. For example, if the number of lost calls is 10 out of 100, it turns out to be 10% of calls. It shows the percentage of lost conversations. A crucial feature in long-term consideration is a cost per call. Cost Per Contact – this is the amount of dedicated budget call centers spend annually on each contact. The less money we spend on each contact, the more cost-efficiency. To define this parameter, we need to perform simple mathematical action. If we divide the dedicated budget by the number of each contact, we’ll achieve an average cost per contact Call Completion Rate ‒ this is one of the crucial contact center metrics, which shows the percentage of repeated calls, due to lack of conversation. For example, the conversations can be interrupted by a bad connection. Average Handle Time ‒ these call center efficiency metrics can be a little tricky. Although you want to provide your customers with a solution as quickly as possible in order to respect their time, you also want to make sure that you provide them with an effective service, and not just “get them on the phone.” The shortest TTR (Time-to-Resolution) is the goal of each technical support group. The main goal is to solve a customer’s problem. If the problems and concerns of the clients are solved within a talking time, everything is fine. Yet, if there is a big amount of unresolved issues or talk time with clients is too short, this is the reason to check the records of this operator and understand the cause and effect of these conversations. Average Wrap-up Time (also known as After Call Work Time) ‒ wrap-up time is the time that the agent spends on after-call work (ACW) once the conversation with a customer is over. ACW is a crucial component of AHT. You should measure wrap-up time for several reasons. First, ACW sheds some light on the length of agent-customer interaction. Add the wrap-up time to AHT, and you’ll see how much time is invested by an agent. Separate it from AHT and you’ll see the length of time that is invested by a customer to solve his or her needs. And next, these typical call center metrics help you understand whether the call pace is optimal for your agents and identifies the need to reorganize the processes. If the call requires long post-processing by the agent, you might want to consider automating the process and transferring the key points of the issue to specialists who will then address it. At the same time, you don’t want your agents to have too little time between calls because it’s a sure way to burn out. On-Hold Time. Putting a customer call on hold for a long time to find out some details and give a complete answer is never a good idea. The customer can get off the phone and stay unsatisfied. Appreciate the customer effort to reach you.Service Level
The service level is your ability to deliver the standard of service promised to your customers by Service Level Agreement (SLA). Your SLA holds you accountable for your promise. It typically looks at the % of calls answered in X seconds. The successful call centers use the call center KPI benchmark and 80/20 call center rule. This rule means that your agent team answers 80% of calls within 20 seconds. The higher the SLA, the less time your customers spend waiting to speak with one of your agents. Although the call center SLA benchmark is an industry-standard, it can differ from organization to organization (for example, it can be 90/10 for incoming calls in banks). To check how close your contact center is to this rate, check SLA reports of each of your inbound lines. Crucial note: you need to look at it in dynamics. Namely, if SLA goes down at particular hours, you should re-organize agents’ shifts to achieve the desired number. Use the Erlang calculator to determine how many inbound line agents you need per shift. Percent of repeated calls (% Repeat Calls). This is the number of repeated incoming calls for a certain period of time. Depending on average speed, It helps to assess the speed of answer of your operators. Percentage of calls that are redirected (% Call Transfers). These are the calls, which transferred by your agents to their more qualified colleagues. What to look for? When this figure is too high, it might mean that you’ve chosen the wrong call handling strategy, and/or your agents might lack information for high-quality processing of requests on the first line. First Call Resolution (FCR) is a metric that tracks how many customer issues are resolved on the first call or first interaction. This call center KPI’s is crucial for ensuring a high level of customer satisfaction. The sooner your agents resolve customer issues, the happier your clients become.Call Center Performance Quality
Each company should have a call center agent performance metric and instruments for assessing a set of KPIs. These depend on the specifics of their work (for example, sales reps and their technical support colleagues have a different set of desired characteristics). Therefore, all departments make their own list of criteria by which they can assess the quality of work of contact center agents. Agent occupancy (also known as Agent Utilization). Agent occupancy (%) is the percentage of total logged-in time that the support agent spends on call-related activity (i.e. talk time, hold time, and after-call work). Agent occupancy is sometimes confused with “utilization”, which is the total time that the agent spends at work. It’s crucial to mind the distinction between agent occupancy and utilization because utilization time includes everything an agent does in the call center, like meetings, training sessions, etc. You don’t necessarily need to measure utilization, but you might want to measure the time spent on handling calls. Sales Conversion Rate, Average Sales per Agent. This is one of the top call center metrics that indicate results. Call center managers need to monitor the average sales per agent to understand how effective they are at closing deals and meeting company goals. Comparing the sales average to a set target also helps call teams gauge their call agent performance metrics. QA scoring or Call quality analysis. Call quality is the evaluation of call recordings by the supervisor on things like professionalism, courtesy, compliance, adherence to company standards (greeting, following the script, refuting objections, etc), and more. This is a popular call center metric regardless of industry.
Source: Most Contact Centres Monitor Less Than Six Calls Per Advisor Every Month
Supervisors usually choose random calls for such quality reviews in a call center statistic. These call center metrics best practices are very useful in the context of coaching and training. It also helps to build a consistent tone and message, which is crucial for the company’s digital image.Customer Satisfaction & Recommendations
Building on our previous point, the overall customer satisfaction level is vital to call setup success rate regardless of its size. It’s the beating heart of your entire operation, so monitoring and reacting to call center metrics of this kind is essential.
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Customer Satisfaction, inevitably linked to the Quality of Customer Support, will give you a clear insight into what your customers think about you and your ability to support them with their needs. Despite the fact that your day-to-day operation could be efficient enough, there might be some problems that have escaped your notice – repetitive issues that can prove detrimental to the perception and future of your organization. If your customers face the same problems over and over again, it will reflect poorly on them. And they will don’t buy from you. The better your Customer Satisfaction score, the more successful you will be. Once you create a call center service level standards, you will take appropriate action by rolling out digital customer feedback surveys and integrating a writing box into your customer service journey so that customers can leave detailed feedback.Customer Retention
One of the most valuable contact center performance is customer loyalty. Retaining consumers is of vital importance because it costs a business much more to acquire new customers than to retain already existing ones. This is a typical customer KPI that you can use for your call center. This metric is measured by dividing the number of customers making repeated business or purchases by the total number of active customers. Keeping a happy customer costs less than inciting a new prospect to your business, and by being able to view your retention levels, you can ensure that your call center helps the business to become as effective, economical, and profitable as possible. The exact specific value varies depending on the nature of your business. For example, a car dealership has the potential for growth despite having a poor level of customer retention. On the other hand, an online retail store needs to maintain a high retention rate and secure sustainable commercial success. A thriving retention rate is the main aim for most businesses, and as such, it should be one of your primary call center metrics. An exceptional brand image as a customer service metric in a call center coupled with a superior satisfaction score will serve to boost your customer retention rates, in turn, boosting the overall success of your business.What Are the Industry Standards for Key Call Center Quality Metrics?
Instant and effective estimation of service benchmark
The traditional level of service in the contact center is to answer 80% of calls in 20 seconds. However, many contact centers have been trying to improve the level of service, and call center benchmark statistics, trying to answer 90% of calls within 15 seconds. Here is a list of the usual service levels for the contact center channels provided by Call Center Helper:- Email – 95% of emails answered within four hours (the better contact centers are aiming to respond to 80% of emails within 15 minutes);
- Live Chat – 80% of chats answered within 40 seconds;
- Letters – 95% of letters answered within three days;
- Social Media – 80% of contacts answered within 20 minutes;
- SMS/Messaging Apps – 80% of messages responded to within 40 seconds.
First Contact Resolution (FCR)
70–75% The industry standard for this one is around 70-75%, but there are many different ways to measure the resolution rate. Depending on the method you prefer, the result will be different. This is the reason why it’s extremely difficult to measure FCR. Especially, when you are using multiple information channels.Maximum Occupancy
83.3% (based on 190,702 entries into Erlang Calculator) Contact centers should aim at 85-90%. This is a common percentage for processed inbound calls with a very high value of the lost inbound call. When you detect that some of the agents start to tire, you need to perform actions. To protect your team from burnout you need to slow down the intensity of work, and that’s what successful call centers do. Agents can’t perform if the intensity is too high. For example, agent occupancy of 70-80% is an optimal percentage for telemarketing call centers.Quality Assurance (QA) Scoring
75-90% (scoring of 4 random calls per month) Most contact centers score up to 2 agent-customer interactions per week. However, researches show that many contact centers don’t meet this standard.How to Ensure That Each Standard is Met?
It’s possible to improve the quality characteristics of the agents’ work through sales training, workshops, presentations, processing cold contacts, etc. Apart from that, there are also a couple of changes that you can implement in your call center workflow to start seeing better results faster. Service Levels across channels Be proactive and plan in advance There’s always a time of the day when call volumes are at their peak. Encourage your agents to balance their response time and plan activities for the day ahead on the shift (for example, plan callbacks for the less busy hours). Also, consider implementing things like IVR, channel prioritization, and intelligent call routing. This will help your team be more efficient. First Call Resolution Take personalized approach You’ll be better off if you find individual FCR for different call reasons. The more FCR reasons you determine, the more accurate insights you will get. You might have surprising findings. For example, you might notice that some reasons are hard to deal with for your customers, whereas others are hard to resolve for your agents. Similarly, implementing skill-based routing can do wonders for your call center. By sending customers to the right agent from the get-go, you’ll significantly reduce the number of escalations. Maximum Occupancy Optimize workflow Without a doubt, you need to have an efficient dialing system, yet many other activities eat up a lot of your agents’ time. Hopefully, you don’t use Google spreadsheets anymore, and if you do, consider switching to a decent CRM system that will integrate smoothly with your dialing software, or purchase a call center solution that has a built-in CRM already, like Nexgies Cloud. It minimizes routine work and helps your agents stay really productive. Make sure your agents have just enough work to do. Turn the idle time into productivity, without stressing too much. Quality Assurance (QA) Scoring Provide sufficient feedback Most contact centers use random call scoring, and some of them make one common mistake – they don’t follow up with the analysis and feedback. If you want to improve your agents’ work, help them fix their weaknesses. You can dedicate some time to each agent individually or organize peer-review sessions. Test different approaches and see what works for your team.What Are the 5 Key Performance Indicators?
You certainly don’t want to dig into charts, blueprints, and diagrams to find out the KPI that suits your situation. Moreover, you want to understand them in an easy-to-read fashion. Here are the most valuable call center KPI metrics for sales teams:- Conversion rate. This is the most valuable indicator that shows the call center is working properly. The sales or a conversion from a prospect into a customer is the most effective indicator of success.
- Monthly sales growth. This is a KPI, which you can use for tracking your month-to-month growth. By tracking your results in sales, you can measure the effectiveness of a call center.
- Average Wrap-up time. This indicator shows how fast your agents can make a notice about a particular prospect or customer. You don’t want to press wrap-up time, but understanding how much time each agent needs to devote to noticing routine is important.
- Call volume. The call volume reflects on the number of calls that each agent proceeds. Despite the fact that not all of the conversations will be ended with the closing of a sale, the sales agents work productively when they work more. All of the agents got to have a certain minimum of calls in a day, week, month. The more you tell, the more you sell.
- Abandon call rate (ACR) for inbound and outbound calls. This KPI is a good experience to change or maintain a sales strategy. This metric shows how many calls were successfully operated by agents. If ACR for inbound and outbound calls continues to occur, this is the issue that requires solving.
How to Improve Call Center Metrics?
Now you are acquainted with the call center metrics list and what contact center KPIs metrics in 2021. You have to remember that if you limit your performance and call center KPI to the most basic records and reporting, then you are likely to restrict the overall potential of your contact center. The business will most likely go right if you monitor the performance of your agents, and:- take into account what issues customers are shielding;
- request their feedback;
- pay attention to how their brand is discussed on social networks;
- actively measure the tendency of your clients to recommend their financial services to others.
- Conversion rate KPI;
- Monthly sales growth;
- Average wrap-up time;
- Call volume;
- Abandon call rate.
Kick Your Sales Business Into Hyperdrive Today
Start to grow your ROI today, by purchasing the advanced call center software from Voiptime. Nexgies company has all the necessary software for your call center, to skyrocket your sales. The software includes such features as:- Automatic Call Distribution and Interactive Voice Response system;
- Preview, Power and Predictive dialer;
- Call center CRM;
- Call recording and online call monitoring;
- Call center reporting. You’ll achieve a pack of detailed information, about: agent workload, call distribution, incoming and outcoming call data, e-mails, SMS, webchat handling statuses, and many more.
- Multichannel contact center software.
