The Top 10 Contact Center Metrics You Should Be Monitoring
“Ringing phones, incoming e-mails, never ending social media requests, live chats and non-stop complaints.”
You’ll see a combination of these only in a contact center. Contact centers can get really busy with all the calls, call agents and data that you track on a daily to monthly basis, and they can often leave you feeling lost.
With more KPIs tuning into the contact center world, you’ll find it harder to choose the essential KPIs.
As a contact center manager, you must be the eyes and ears of senior management. Here’s a key take away.
Let’s dive in to the top 10 contact center metrics you should be monitoring and learn how to make them a central focus of your contact center even during frantic days. The important KPIs will help you stay ahead of your competitors with all the data to assess the performance of your business and how to run it successfully.
1 . SLAs (Service Level Agreement)
The Service Level Agreement KPI measures your ability to deliver the standard of service agreed upon in the Service Level Agreement (SLAs) provided to your customers and your contact center’s promise of maintaining a certain standard of service to your clients, customers and typically speaking, the SLA will specify that your contact center is committed to answering a set percentage of calls within a certain number of seconds, such as answering 80% of calls within 20 seconds.
It’s important to monitor service level in real time, as it provides an active barometer of your contact center’s current performance. If service level is fluctuating, you need to know about it immediately in order to solve the problem. Service level may be influenced by a range of issues, such as unexpectedly high call volumes, unplanned service outages, or high agent absenteeism.
2 . Call Abandonment Rate
You want to deliver great customer service, but it will never happen if your customers don’t stay on the phone long enough to get assistance. Call abandonment rate measures the percentage of callers who hang up before they even reach an agent. For an instance, the graph above shows the number of abandoned versus active calls.
This metric won’t likely tell you much about an individual agent but it will tell you a lot about contact center agent productivity as a whole. If the average call abandonment rate is too high, look for problems that affect all your agents and see why they aren’t able to get to your customers in time.
3 . Customer Satisfaction Survey
Customer satisfaction survey (CSAT) is a comprehensive way to measure contact center agent productivity. The customer satisfaction survey is the most direct KPI to monitor and to tell if your contact center is providing the support your customers need.
Get a well-rounded look at how happy or unhappy your customers are with your business with customer satisfaction survey (CSAT) questions. Measure customer success, increase retention, and reduce customer churn.
4 . NPS Net Promoter Score
In today’s world, Net Promoter Scores count for a lot. By monitoring your satisfaction levels, you will be able to take measures to improve your NPS scores exponentially. Moreover, it’s possible to measure your NPS scores as a contact center KPI in its own right. By tracking and quantifying your NPS levels regularly, you can gain the ability to evaluate the power of your referrals.
On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us? That’s the burning question you need to ask your customers. If the score falls between 0-6, your customer is a detractor. If it sits in the region of 7-8, your customer is passive. You are lucky if it lands on 9 or 10; your customer is a definite promoter. Deduce the critics to the promoters, and you get your Net Promoter Score. Like satisfaction levels, NPS scores are a priceless loyalty metric. If measured correctly, they can help you scale and grow your business by using your customer service efforts as a key driving force.
5 . Agent adherence
The Agent Schedule Adherence KPI measures how effectively contact center agents manage their scheduled time for work activities. The metrics used in this KPI will differ depending on the type of contact center or help desk you are operating. A high adherence rate indicates that agents are being cost-effective with their time and providing responsive service to your customers.
Schedule adherence is an important factor in contact center performance, as low adherence rates may result in failure to meet SLAs and deliver a poor quality of service to customers. It’s important that adherence take into account necessary activities such as writing up call reports and necessary breathing time between calls. An adherence rate of 100% is unrealistic and most contact centers strive for around 80% adherence.
6 . Resolution Rate
Resolution Rate KPI can help you gauge how your company performs when it comes to customer experience, as well as show you how well each of your customer support reps perform individually. The metric above helps you track each customer service rep’s ability to resolve customer service requests and compare reps’ output side-by-side.
If you were a manager over this team, you should look into how your contact center agents managed to close all of their tickets, especially if they have done so successfully for several weeks. You could learn some of the resolution techniques they use and share them with the rest of the team to improve their performance. Viewing this data as a stacked bar chart helps you easily compare how many closed and open support tickets each rep has during a specific week.
7 . Call Arrival Pattern
Call Arrival Pattern helps managers identify the peak hours whether they are during the highest calls or lowest calls. With this KPI, managers get to identify when the busiest hour of traffic is and when is the best time for you to prepare and schedule enough call agents to handle the increasing number of calls during a specific time.
This KPI is truly essential for you as it tracks the number of calls coming in daily throughout the whole month and allowing managers to identify the patterns and which time of the day has the highest number or lowest number of calls.
8 . Quality Monitoring
Customer experience drives many business initiatives today because customers have so many choices available for the products and solutions they purchase. That’s why the contact center—the most direct link for customers—must provide the highest level of service and support. Interaction with a live agent is an emotional touch point in the customer journey. Customers take their cues about a business and its performance from the interactions they have with the contact center.
Monitoring the quality of agent interactions is a rich source of data and insight, particularly when combined with post transaction customer sentiment data. It stands to reason, then, that contact center QA should closely monitor its activities and employ the insights gathered to make improvements. Gathering customer experience data, analysing it, training contact center agents and employing new methodologies, all add up to a consistent quality experience.
The metrics applied to contact center quality monitoring can be varied based on the nature of the business and the contact center functions. However, the standard of using a scorecard containing the agreed-upon metrics will help guide the quality process and result in relevant, actionable information.
9 . First Call Resolution (FCR)
First Call Resolution is another KPI you should track to measure the rate of issue resolution in the first conversation. Your customers will appreciate having their issues solved right away and resolving them in a call eventually drives satisfaction. Calculate FCR by taking the number of issues solved in a single call by total number of issues raised per day.
The FCR KPI is one of the clearest ways to measure contact center agent productivity and effectiveness. If a customer has to call back multiple times, is transferred too often, or handed over to a supervisor to get their issues resolved, you need to see how to eliminate this so they can have their issue addressed the first time around. Proper training, setting metrics that aren’t counterintuitive to FCR and agent empowerment are all solutions to keeping a high First Call Resolution.
10 . Occupancy Rate
Occupancy rate is a way to measure contact center agent productivity across all their call-related duties. It’s the measure of how much time your agents are on live calls and finishing up work related to those calls. Simply put, if your agents’ occupancy rates are too low, they aren’t doing something work related. Use this metric to identify duties, events and situations outside the call-related work that need to be addressed.
Running a contact center is no easy feat. Even with the rise of social media, live messaging, and chat bots, people still like to use the phone to ask questions, request support, make purchases, and resolve issues. With so much activity and such little time, keeping tabs on support levels and running efficiency might seem impossible. By tracking the right contact center KPIs and metrics, you will be able to grow, develop, and fortify your contact center on a consistent basis, helping you to gain an all-important edge on the competition.
By using a comprehensive contact center solution with more features and CRM integration, you can manage your contact center more effectively. Measuring contact center KPIs that are associated with customer satisfaction, agent effectiveness and contact center efficiency should be the main objective of any manager seeking to optimize their contact center’s performance and keeping track of the aforementioned KPIs is a great place to start. If you’re currently using contact center software but aren’t able to get the visibility you need in these top metrics, contact us today!
