Before you start working on strategies to grow your call center, you need to analyze its current performance and figure out what you’re doing right, what needs improvement and how you compare to your competitors. But how do you do that? By tracking the right call center metrics.

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Article Roadmap:

• What Are Call Center Metrics and Why Do They Matter?
• Essential Call Center Metrics
• Using Metrics To Improve Performance
• Metric Tracking Tools
• Next Steps

What Are Call Center Metrics?

Call center metrics are objective data relating to the day-to-day performance of your call center. They give you the insight you need to assess how your call center is doing, as well as how to create good growth strategies moving forward.

A specific subset of metrics are called key performance indicators, or KPIs. All KPIs are metrics, but not all metrics are KPIs. While a metric can measure anything, KPIs are quantifiable measures of progress over time, focused on certain specific objectives. They help you set clear targets for your teams, and assess how well you’re meeting company goals and where you need to improve.

Why Do Call Center Metrics Matter?

Call center metrics can help you determine things like how productive your agents are, how satisfied your customers are and how efficiently your call center is running. You can also measure employee satisfaction through metrics like agent attrition rates.

With these data points in hand, you can make more informed decisions about your call center and your policies for both agents and customers.

However, not all metrics are equally important for all types of call centers. For example, if you’re an inbound call center customer effort score will be a more important metric to you while outbound call centers would focus more on conversion rates. The metrics you choose to focus on should be the ones most in line with your business goals.

Essential Call Center Metrics

With all that goes into running a call center, it can be hard to figure out where to put your focus. Here are some of the most important performance metrics for a call center to track.

Customer Experience Metrics

These are metrics that directly gauge your customers’ experience. They’re some of the most important metrics for any call center to track, because they directly reflect the quality of your customer relationships.

1. Customer Satisfaction

Customer experience has to be the foremost priority for any customer-facing business. The customer satisfaction metric tells you how happy or unhappy your customers are with the service they receive. If your call center falls on the lower end of this metric, you may need to consider ways to improve customer experience, like better agent training, taking measures to reduce wait times or adding more self-service tools.

You can use CSAT surveys to measure this KPI. These are short surveys that customers can take at the end of their call to rate their experience.

2. Customer Effort Score

The customer effort score is a call center metric that measures the amount of effort the customer had to put in to talk to an agent and get their issue resolved. Convenience is key to customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. Ensuring that your customers’ experiences are as convenient as possible can potentially increase your revenue.

Self-service tools like knowledge bases and community forums are a great way of lowering your customer effort score. These tools empower customers to resolve their issues on their own without having to contact your customer support team.

3. Average Call Transfer

This call center performance metric measures how frequently customers end up being transferred to a different agent or departments. A study by Twilio found that 15% of customers cited frequent call transfers as a reason for leaving a brand. Frequent call transfers also lead to wasted time and decreased agent productivity.

High rates of call transfer indicates inefficiencies in your call center system. Customers are not being routed to the correct department and your phone system is likely not very user-friendly. IVR systems and automated routing can help resolve these issues and reduce your average call transfer rate.

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4. Repeat Calls

This inbound call center KPI measures how frequently customers have to make a repeat call to get their issue resolved. High rates of repeat calls leads to an increase in customer effort and a decrease in customer satisfaction.

If you’re experiencing a lot of repeat calls, then you may need to reevaluate your agent training and performance. Agents need rigorous training to ensure they can adequately respond to customer queries and resolve them easily the first time itself. You should also review your operational procedures to catch any other inefficiencies or issues that lead to high rates of repeat calls.

5. Net Promoter Score

The net promoter score (NPS) is a metric measuring brand perception and loyalty. It’s generally calculated by directly asking customers to rate how likely they’d be to recommend your company, product or service to others once they get off the phone with your call center. If customers are more inclined to recommend your company to others, it indicates a positive perception of your brand.

It’s similar to the customer satisfaction score. The main difference is the survey length. While the CSAT survey is longer, asking a variety of questions about customer experience, the net promoter score survey asks just one question about recommendations.

Agent Performance Metrics

These metrics measure how your agents are performing, where they might be lacking and whether they need to be incentivized to perform better.

1. First Response Time

First response time is a performance metric that measures how long a customer had to wait before they could talk to an agent. Long wait times can seriously affect your customer satisfaction scores. In fact, Salesforce found that 83% of consumers expect to engage with someone immediately when contacting a company.

If your first response time is high and customers have to wait, you should consider strategies to streamline your operations. This could include automating parts of repetitive processes, expanding your staff or adding services like IVR and chatbots to reduce wait times. Call center solutions and help desk software can help you track first response time.

2. First Call Resolution

The first call resolution rate is a metric used to measure how often customer issues get resolved within the first call they make. Prompt service and quick issue resolution are critical to maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction.

In fact, a PWC report found that efficiency and knowledgeable service were among the top most valued components of customer experience.

Encourage your agents to try and resolve queries within the first call. Also, investing more in agent training creates more knowledgeable agents who are more capable of resolving issues quickly and efficiently.

3. Average Call Handling Time

Average call handling time refers to the time spent by an agent on a call. This metric accounts for total talk time, total hold time, time spent on follow up calls and the number of calls handled.

The ideal call handling time depends on your organizational goals. In general, for an inbound customer support call center, you’re looking for a call handling time that allows agents to resolve issues effectively without unnecessary delays. In an outbound marketing or sales call center you want the agents to keep the customer on call for a longer time to maximize the chance of conversion.

You can use this simple formula to calculate average call handling time:
(total talk time + total hold time + follow up calls) ÷ number of calls handled.

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4. Conversion Rate

This metric measures the rate at which an agent is able to convert leads into paying customers. To calculate conversion rate, you need to divide the number of sales made by an agent with the total number of calls made.

These metrics are most important for outbound call centers where the aim is to maximize conversion rates. Auto-dialers, especially predictive dialers, call center scripting software and other such tools are key to helping you improve conversion rates. You can also offer performance based incentives and commissions to your agents to encourage improving conversion rates.

5. First Call Conversion

First call conversion indicates the number of leads that were converted by agents in the first call itself. High first call conversion rates are indicative of excellent agent performance and call center productivity. Converting leads in the first call itself reduces the effort an agent has to put into making repeated calls to nurture leads and frees up resources and time.

6. Average After-Call Work Time

A call center agent’s work isn’t done once they hang up the phone. Average after-call work time is the amount of time agents spend working on each call after they hang up. This includes operational procedures, like logging the call and relevant notes into the database, and any other required actions.

Just like average call handling time, the ideal after-call work time can vary depending on your organization and industry.

7. Occupancy Rates

Occupancy rates are the percentage of time agents spend handling calls as compared to idle time. Call centers deal with massive call volumes. Any time spent not handling these calls can translate to lost revenue. The aim should always be to increase occupancy rates and reduce idle time.

Auto-dialers are a great tool to improve occupancy rates, especially in outbound call centers. Once an agent’s call ends, the dialer automatically dials the next number on the contact list, allowing agents to take calls back to back.

Call Center Performance and Operations Metrics

These metrics are related to your call center’s overall performance. They can help you identify inefficiencies in your call center’s operations and streamline procedures to improve things.

1. Average Abandonment Rate

The average abandonment rate refers to the percentage of callers who end up hanging up the call without talking to your agents. In outbound call centers, high call abandonment rate implies that your agents are not able to hold your customers’ attention and are losing leads. For inbound customer service call centers, it indicates a high customer effort score or long wait times.

Call center scripting software and auto-dialers like predictive dialers can help reduce your average call abandonment rate and improve lead conversion rates.

2. Percentage of Calls Blocked

This metric measures how many of your calls, on average, tend to be blocked by customers or automated spam filters. This can be a major issue for outbound call centers, especially those that use cold calling techniques.

Fears about scam calls that impersonate brands are a major reason customers might be blocking your calls. A study found that 20% of customers said they lost trust in a brand after receiving a scam call impersonating the brand.

Branded caller IDs that identify your brand to customers can be a great method for avoiding blocked calls and gaining consumer trust. Numbers with a caller ID are more likely to be picked up as compared to unknown numbers. It also protects your customers from being targeted by scammers and impersonators.

3. Answer Success Rate

This metric measures how often your agents succeed in connecting with a customer when making a call. A great number of cold calls end up unanswered which can affect agent morale and productivity. Using branded caller IDs, as mentioned in the point above, is one strategy for improving your answer success rates.

Another method of improving answer success rates is using predictive dialers. These tools use predictive analysis to select and dial numbers that have the highest probability of being answered. This helps reduce the number of unanswered calls and improves agent productivity.

4. Agent Attrition Rates

Attrition rate is a metric measuring how long agents work for a call center and how often they quit. Attrition is a major challenge in the industry. Call centers experience some of the highest employee turnover rates among businesses of all types.

Not only do engaged employees stay with companies longer, but they also do their jobs better. An Oxford University study showed that call center employees who are happier perform up to 13 times better at their job. So, if you’ve been noticing your agent attrition rate is up, and employee satisfaction is down, it might be time to invest more into your agents.

5. Customer Retention Rate

Good quality customer service is the key to customer retention. Customer retention rate measures how many customers make repeated purchases or continue to use your company’s services after a customer service experience.

Low customer retention rates indicate fundamental issues with your call center’s performance and customer service quality. If you’re struggling with customer retention, it might be wise to thoroughly review and overhaul your customer service processes, agent training and call center management.

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Using Metrics To Improve Performance

How do you use call center performance metrics to improve the productivity of your call center? Just having the raw data isn’t enough. You need to use the data to generate actionable insights. Let’s take a look at the steps you can take to use metrics strategically.

Step 1: Determine Your Goals

The first step is to determine your organizational goals. This will help you understand which metrics are important to you and which ones aren’t. Your industry niche, organization size and the type of call center you’re running will influence your goals.

For example, if you’re running an inbound call center as part of a help desk system, you would want to focus on improving customer experience.

Step 2: Delineate the Right KPIs for Each Goal

You’re likely to have more than one goal. The same KPIs won’t be relevant for each goal.

If the goal is to maximize agent productivity, you’ll need to track metrics like occupancy rates and average call handling time, ensuring they match the criteria you’ve set. Similarly if the goal is to boost customer satisfaction, reducing customer effort scores and maximizing first call resolution will be a priority.

Step 3: Track Metrics Over a Period of Time

You’ll need to track your call center metrics over a period of time to account for seasonal variations. Some metrics are better tracked short-term (weeks, months), such as occupancy rates and first response time.

Others are better tracked long-term (quarterly, annually), such as agent attrition.

Step 4: Analyze the Data

Your metrics can be quantitative, like first response time, or qualitative, like customer satisfaction scores. You need to properly analyze both kinds of metrics for effective strategy planning. You can use software to help you with this (more on that below).

You should analyze each metric individually and then compare them to each other to get a more complete picture.

For example, if your average call-handling times are high, you may be tempted to ask your agents to reduce them. But if you also have high customer satisfaction scores and first call resolution scores, it means your agents are being productive and high call-handling times are a net positive.

Step 5: Brainstorm Strategies for Improvement

The final step is to use the analysis from step four to brainstorm strategies for improving your call center’s performance. You should ideally share and review data between different teams and departments. Data from sales and marketing combined with your call center data can give you a robust foundation for creating a cohesive strategy for your organization as a whole.

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Metric Tracking Tools

Software can be a great tool for generating the actionable insights you need from your data. Here are some tools that can really help you gather data, interpret it and use it to create strategies for the future.

Call Center Software

Call center software is a comprehensive platform that can help you better manage the day-to-day operations of your call center. It usually comes with built-in reporting and data analytics tools that make it easy to visualize and interpret data and generate actionable insights.

Team and individual performance tracking and monitoring. Source

Tools like RingCentral, Avaya and Vonage can help simplify keeping track of your call center’s KPIs.

Data Analytics Software

Call center software comes with data handling and analysis tools, but if you want something more powerful, you can use specially designed data analytics software. These tools take raw data and metrics from your call center and turn them into actionable insight through business intelligence and statistical modeling algorithms.

Data visualization with data analytics software. Source

Software programs like Tableau and Board can help you create advanced statistical models and generate better growth strategies.

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Next Steps

There are a lot of metrics that go into measuring a call center’s performance. Tracking the right metrics can help you identify where you’re lacking and how you can grow.

If you’re interested in finding the right software to help you make the most of your call center KPIs, check out our free software comparison report to quickly and easily analyze the leading products’ features, implementation effort and analyst ratings.

What do you think of our list of call center metrics? Did we miss any? Share your thoughts in the comments below!