Contact centers are sophisticated operating facilities that employ a variety of tools and software to provide an exceptional customer experience at a low cost. Improvement in contact center performance is always critical to achieving, hence constant tracking of outbound call center metrics helps businesses, as well as clients, gauge constant growth and conversions for the businesses.
A contact center’s main purpose is to give valuable service to anybody who interacts with your company, regardless of the channel they use. Because of all the moving pieces involved, such as the complexities of underlying technologies and the diversity of personalities on your team, this goal is somewhat ambitious.
Contact centers should provide the business with visibility into all parts of their departmental activities and performance in order to fulfill consumers’ expectations. While KPIs and measurements are relatively easy to come by, generating the right set of contact center KPIs for each group of stakeholders is more difficult.
What are the contact center’s key performance indicators (KPIs)?
Managers utilize key performance indicators (KPIs) for contact centers to assess the success of their operations. These indicators reveal whether a call center is accomplishing its objectives and whether agents are providing a high-quality customer support experience in order to resolve customer issues.
There are 12 contact center KPIs that contribute to a positive customer experience
1. Average Response Time
The average time to answer, which is measured in seconds, is the average length of time from when an inbound call is received and when it is answered by an agent. This metric is based on agents being available to answer calls within a particular time frame, and it includes time spent waiting in line but excludes time spent navigating through an IVR system. The average time to respond is widely used by managers to assess their team’s efficiency and client accessibility. Define a service level objective, which is a specific goal for responding to a certain percentage of calls in a certain period of time.
2. Abandonment Rate Average
The average abandonment rate is the percentage of callers who hang up or are disconnected before reaching a live person. Although the abandonment rate is more of a reflection of call center performance than individual agent performance, it is tightly linked to customer happiness and success KPIs. This outbound call center metric indicates how many customers become frustrated enough to leave before receiving help, and it can provide valuable information into areas for development.
3. Resolving the First Call (FCR)
First call resolution (also known as first contact resolution or FCR) is a key metric in customer relationship management that assesses a call center’s ability to fix customer issues on the first call, with no need for a call-back or follow-up. The higher the agent’s personal first-call resolution rate, the better. However, because a customer’s problem may demand action by someone other than the agent, this might be difficult to quantify. As a result, FCR should be assessed with caution and care at all times.
4. Rate of Transfer
Some contact centers, in addition to FCR, use transfer rates to gauge the efficiency of customer contact. This percentage shows the number of calls an agent must transfer to someone else to finish, such as a supervisor or someone from a different department. The reasons for the transfers fluctuate, but they may include an agent or representative error, a specific consumer request, or faulty call routing. In an ideal world, the FCR percentage would always be higher than the transfer rate.
5. Handling Time Average
The average handle time (AHT) is the time between when an agent answers the phone and when they hang up. Call handling is heavily influenced by the intricacy of the customer’s problem, which is why it’s critical to average response times across multiple conversations to get the most accurate picture of agent effectiveness. Average handle times are one of the most often used contact center KPIs since they are intimately tied to caller satisfaction, customer loyalty, and, most significantly, client retention.
6. Hold Time on Average
Optimizing average handling time entails concentrating on other aspects of the call, such as average wait time, that can have an impact on issue resolution. As the title suggests, the period of time an agent keeps a call on hold during a call adds to the total call length. A caller may be placed on hold while an agent checks information out or finds a solution to the caller’s query from superior or subject area specialists in the office. To guarantee that hold time is maintained within a proper range when compared to talk time, this metric is calculated by dividing the total time callers wait on hold by the total number of calls answered by agents. The average hold time is a great measure of whether or not a team is offering outstanding service to callers.
8. Blocked Calls as a Percentage of Total Calls
The percentage of calls that are blocked is another contact center KPI that has a big impact on customer satisfaction. This indicator measures the percentage of inbound callers who experience a busy tone due to a lack of accessible agents, queues that are already full, or contact center software that can’t handle the volume of calls. It is an important signal to pay attention to because even one blocked call is a lost opportunity to communicate with a customer, provide an outstanding customer experience, and build customer satisfaction.
9. Phone Etiquette
It is feasible to score the quality of an agent’s manners during a call using call center KPIs. This KPI is made up of a variety of elements (some of which are weighted) that are evaluated by a quality management (QM) or quality assurance (QA) monitor who is listening in on the conversation. Essentially, the greater the agent’s score, the more elements that can be ticked off. Phone etiquette includes greeting customers by name, speaking in a calm, clear tone, and repeating the caller’s issue to ensure that all parties understand.
10. Compliance with Procedures
Many call centers have a pre-written script that agents must follow while speaking with a consumer. Managers may track how successfully agents follow corporate procedures while dealing with consumers using contact center metrics, such as the proper way to greet a caller, the best approach to terminate a call when a call transfer is acceptable, how to de-escalate a difficult situation, and more. Organizations can ensure more consistency in their call center customer service by monitoring agents’ compliance with procedures.
11. Absent Agents Rate
The number of days lost due to agent absenteeism each year can have a significant impact on call center scheduling and staffing, as well as a company’s bottom line. That’s why a KPI that tracks the number of call center agents that are missing can be quite useful for modifying a budget or improving workforce management techniques. For handling high call volumes, limiting queue wait times, and lowering call abandonment rates, knowing there are enough agents planned and present at any one time is critical.
12. Agent Turnover Rate
Agent turnover goes a step further than agent absenteeism by revealing the rate at which salespeople leave to pursue other opportunities. This is an important KPI for any manager to monitor as it ebbs and flows throughout time because a high turnover rate might have serious ramifications. Not only may turnover affect team morale, but it can also have an impact on call center scheduling, hiring, training and retraining requirements, and customer satisfaction, which is why agent experience indicators should not be overlooked when analyzing outbound call center indicators.
Optimize your outbound reach with NCRI
NCRI helps optimize your business’s representation to the customers by carefully securing and tracking key performance indicators for outbound call centers regularly to increase the effectiveness of the campaign. Our experienced workforce is highly skilled in monitoring and adjusting outbound call center metrics, not only these our efforts are further enhanced by the use of Data analytics and business intelligence reporting.
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