At the heart of any successful customer experience is an efficient and well-trained call center agent, which answers incoming calls timely, route them to the appropriate department or person, and otherwise enable an effective and quick solution to clients and customers’ calls.
According to a report, 97 percent of consumers globally say customer service experience influence their buying decisions and brand loyalty.
The job is more than just answering calls; it involves establishing customer relationships based on satisfaction and value.
Setting metrics allows a call center to know it is delivering high-quality service consistently.
The right key performance indicators (KPIs) or metrics helps a business to measure specific capacities effectively.
Generally, calculating success in a call center includes looking at different metrics, some of which are easy to gather, such as average handle time, the number of calls fielded, etc., and others are quite tasking to standardize, such as level of productivity of after-call work and off-call time, quality of an agent’s call, etc.
With these sets of call center metrics, businesses can easily understand agent performance at the team, agent, or center-wide level.
Managers and directors can use these insights to correct any deficiencies or motivate higher levels of performance.
Besides, this data can be used to reward top performers and celebrate team successes.
1. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
Customer Satisfaction is the level of satisfaction callers have with a company and its services and/or products.
Satisfied customers tend to stay longer, buy more, as well as share their experiences.
Your goal is to maintain high caller satisfaction while keeping service costs low.
Keeping employees happy, resolving calls the first time, and eliminating hold time are some ways customer satisfaction can be improved.
Keeping your team happy depends on several factors, including access to intuitive and user-friendly technology & tools, a robust company culture, and ensuring that staff have a voice inside your company.
Engaged staff who are fully supported with effective tools will ultimately help create satisfied customers.
The best way to improve customer satisfaction is by resolving a customer’s query the first time.
According to studies, customer satisfaction ratings will be 5 to 10 percent lower when they make a second call for the same query.
Not only does eliminating the need for callers to wait on hold increase customer satisfaction, but it reduces costs for contact centers as well.
It is easy to learn how your customers feel about your company’s services by conducting surveys through IVR, email, or SMS.
These surveys help businesses collect metrics such as customer satisfaction scores, net promoter score, customer effort score, and customer engagement score.
These metrics help you determine if customer satisfaction was actually increased or decreased.
With the right call center reporting, you can use the available data to constantly advance your business while also improving customer satisfaction.
2. Service Level
Service level is defined as the percentage of answered calls within a pre-defined number of seconds.
It is important you set your service level target at what you can reasonably achieve, given the expected call volume and your staffing level.
A vendor can sign a Service Level Agreement (SLA) or contract with a client to seal an agreement.
The SLA contains the standards and requirements in which the contact center operation is based on.
The Service Level metric measures an organization’s alignment with the targets and goals within the SLA.
Some factors that can affect the Service Level include the amount of an agent’s absenteeism, high ticket or call volume, and unplanned service outages.
The aforementioned factors have to be addressed to make sure a call center conforms to the stipulated terms in the SLA.
A 2016 survey has shown that 62.7 percent of call center managers see Service Level as the most critical call center productivity metric.
By utilizing a reliable call center reporting software, you can accurately measure performance-based results.
Real-time access allows the service vendor to identify problems and take the right action.
A call-back option is another way you can ease call volume spikes, by diverting calls to periods when your agents can handle more load.
3. First Call Resolution (FCR)
First Call Resolution is a percentage of customers that don’t need any further help from agents to their concerns.
The caller doesn’t have to contact the company again, nor does any agent need to follow up.
The FCR metric is one of the top metrics for customer experience as it looks at both effectiveness and efficiency.
According to a recent poll, more than 60 percent of contact centers track FCR as a KPI.
To improve this metric, you need to focus on three areas: product, process, and people.
If you are having quality issues or something continues to fall over time, listening to the types of complaints driving these repeat calls and examining your product, processes, and people can help you see what can be done to improve FCR.
Another way you can improve this is by sitting with your agents and watch how they handle calls.
They need enough information to resolve customers’ queries on the first call.
To speed your resolution rates, ensure your agents use high-quality troubleshooting skills, are firm on resolving the appropriate problem, and have excellent listening skills.
They have to sound confident, predict queries that customers might have, and be committed to resolving their queries.
Businesses with a high FCR score are known to see a higher CSAT score.
In fact, for every 1 percent in FCR, businesses see a 1 percent boost in CSAT, as well.
Additionally, businesses that focus on this KPI have higher employee satisfaction and lower operating costs.
4. Abandon Rate
The number of calls that hang up before connecting to an agent is the abandon rate.
This number doesn’t include those calls that get a busy signal.
When examining your abandon rate, it’s essential to know that there are some people who call a wrong number and hang-up once it is not the company they want to reach.
These false abandon rates are typically calculated within the first ten seconds, and in most centers, this is usually between 1 to 2 percent of the total calls.
Abandon rates are typically linked to how fast a call center agent answers a call.
Answering calls faster results in a lower abandon rate.
When the abandon rates are too high, it can lead to poor customer service and lost sales opportunities.
5. Average Handle Time (AHT)
Average Handle Time is the sum of average After-Call Work and Average Talk Time over a specific period.
After-Call Work is the average amount of time agents take to conclude a call.
Average Talk Time is the average amount of time an agent talks to a customer.
Average Handle Time is the average time spent by a call center agent in handling customer transactions and issues.
Effective coaching of your agents ensures that the methods, techniques, and skills learned in the course of the training are applied and practiced during interactions with customers.
This coaching shouldn’t only be limited to product knowledge and call handling but should be extended to tool familiarity.
According to a survey, 32 percent of respondents noted that interaction via phones was the most infuriating customer service channel.
Consequently, these metrics allow contact centers to better understand their service level by testing an agent’s efficiency and performance as far as exigency in resolving customer concern is concerned.
Another effective way to lower AHT is through automation.
A call center reporting software can help make things easier for your agents as it streamlines applications and processes for easy navigation.
Whether it is with floor walkers or well-written workflows, always strive to help your agents.
6. Adherence to Schedule
Adherence Schedule Rate (ASR)measures how agents are managing the work they are assigned to do.
A high ASR score means they are, and a low score means they are not.
Since agents can’t answer calls for 8 hours straight, it is impossible for the schedule adherence rate to be at 100 percent.
Call center managers can help their agents learn the best way to manage their time, streamline their tasks, while also remaining productive.
You can do this by looking for schedule adherence around the start and end of a shift as well as the edges of breaks.
7. Agent Occupancy
Agent occupancy is the amount of time a contact center agent is handling a call or performing after-call activities in the course of their shifts.
The report gives managers another way to track call center productivity.
It examines the total amount of time agents are logged in to the system and willing to help customers, whether they are in between interactions or actively engaged.
Many call centers try to keep their agent occupancy KPI between 70 to 80 percent in order to maintain an ideal balance.
If the number is too high, it means your contact center is receiving many calls, and your agents are mostly busy.
This may be a sign of burnout for some agents and managers have to hire more hands to handle the increased call influx.
8. Cost Per Contact
Cost Per Contact is a measure of how much a caller costs your contact center and is a vital part of cost-benefit analysis.
Each time an agent sends an email or picks up the phone, it costs the contact center money in operating costs and wages.
This metric is closely related to adherence schedule, AHT, and Call Resolution.
Monitoring this metric over time allows you to account for oddities and fluctuations in the data to measure the average cost per contact that is used as a benchmark.
This metric allows the contact center manager to measure efficiency.
Once a certain level of increased calls is reached, you may need to add workstations, supervisors, and agents.
To reduce costs and improve your call center’s efficiency, you must implement effective measures aimed at lowering your cost per contact.
Appropriate agent scheduling can help to reduce the cost per contact.
Considering factors such as an agent’s adherence level and peak call times while scheduling your agent’s shifts can reduce the cost per contact and improve customer service.
Another way of keeping your costs down is by maintaining high call quality.
Implementing live call monitoring is the best way to achieve this goal.
A call center reporting software can help with agent scheduling and live monitoring to make your customers’ experience flawless.
9. Call Resolution
The Call Resolution metric is a measure of the outcome of the calls handled by an agent to monitor how well your customer’s issues are resolved.
The objective of any call center is to resolve calls quickly to deliver high-quality service and to meet SLAs.
Resolving customers’ issues on the first contact is an indicator of call center efficiency and customer satisfaction.
The truth is that some issues may need several contacts or calls before they are resolved.
For example, a problematic technical issue may require a number of calls with several agents to resolve the problem.
Contact center managers must ensure that each contact method is tracked to ascertain each method’s effectiveness.
Once targets and benchmarks have been established for Call Resolution, using a call center reporting can be critical in monitoring this KPI.
10. Agent Turnover
Having a high agent turnover in your contact center can be damaging to your contact center’s bottom line and Employee morale.
So it is essential for contact center managers to take appropriate steps to reduce turnover within the contact center.
Also, it is crucial to have a holistic understanding of how to measure your agents’ turnover accurately, so the data can be acted upon accordingly.
Make the lives of your agents easier by giving them the call center reporting they need to succeed at their work.
Provide your team with an advanced reporting system that offers advanced features, a user-friendly interface, and easy integration with other tools.
When you measure the productivity of your call center continually, you get real-time information about what is happening in the call center.
A call center reporting software allows contact center managers to catch a glimpse of how the call center has performed over a period of time.
Operational managers and team leaders will be better able to make decisions and implement workplace innovations when they are able to access relevant information.
With informed interpretation, metrics, and the right tools, call center owners have the power to accelerate the company’s growth and provide top-notch customer experience.
The Reporting Engine is a call center application that allows managers or users to analyze complex data with ease.
The call center tool is a cloud-based software that is designed to reduce the costs of creating reports and eliminates dependency on a development team.
This allows your management team to spend more quality time with their people instead of wasting it on multiple reports.
Gain more Insight from Contact Center Reports today!