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If you want to gauge the performance of your call center, you can’t do it without metrics. Also called Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), call center metrics show you key data points related to your business operations, allowing you to identify what’s going well and where you can improve.
But there’s a ton of different types of metrics out there, and a lot of the most popular KPIs are way overvalued. Meanwhile, some of the most vital metrics for understanding how your call center is really doing are often overlooked.
7 Undervalued Call Center Metrics
No matter the type of call center you’re running, metrics are the lifeblood of your business. Let’s say you want to know how effectively your agents manage calls. Or maybe you want to understand where overall customer satisfaction levels are at.
You don’t have to guess. The answer is in the numbers.
When it comes to KPIs, you can’t focus on everything at once. Start by choosing just a couple essential metrics to focus on. That way, as you make small, incremental adjustments to your approach, you can easily track how these changes affect your chosen data.
- Containment Rate
This metric conveys how many calls are managed or “contained” using only your Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. It’s calculated by dividing the number of IVR-managed calls by the total number of incoming calls, yielding your rate as a percentage.
The higher your percentage, the better. You want to at least be in the 65-75% range, meaning that many of your callers are taking advantage of self-service IVR options, which leaves agents more time to manage complex customer issues.
To boost your numbers, you’ll need to perfect your call flow — the sequence of IVR menu options provided to callers when they reach your business.
To start, you should understand the most common reasons why customers call in, then give them easy-to-follow instructions for how to navigate the system so they can reach their desired destination. A good call flow might include simple navigation instructions to update account information, hear their account balance, or schedule an appointment.
The key is to provide callers with a way to find answers or information quickly without an agent’s help.
If you see your containment rate dropping, it typically means your IVR setup is either too complex or doesn’t offer enough self-service options. You should revisit your setup regularly, as shifts in your business may result in a need to change your IVR navigation options.
2. Employee Engagement
Your agents are the foundation of your call center. You can’t run a successful call center without agents who are motivated and engaged in their roles.
While employee engagement is a difficult metric to reliably capture, anonymous internal surveys can give you a general sense of team morale.
You might also check out third-party review websites like Glassdoor or Indeed, where past and current employees can leave honest feedback about their experiences.
It’s no secret that the fast-paced nature of call center work can quickly become overwhelming and isolating. Providing the right support can lead to higher retention rates, with agents feeling more satisfied in their roles and motivated to create better customer experiences.
The trick is to find the right ways to empower your team. For instance, your team might be up for a bit of friendly competition, either individually or as a group. This might look like setting goals related to sales volume, achieving a certain growth metric, or completing additional training, and then offering a reward if they hit that goal by a certain date
Also be sure to provide ample resources that help agents do their jobs quickly and effectively. This increases personal satisfaction with their roles while also improving the customer experience.
3. Agent Redundancy Rate
The flipside of the containment rate coin is agent redundancy rate.
This metric captures the number of inquiries handled by an agent when they should have been managed with your call flow. Typically, these are simple and straightforward calls, like making a payment or finding out an account balance.
These less complex calls can be tracked in your online call detail records, highlighting missing pieces in your IVR service menus.
Remember, customers want self-service options. If given the chance, most callers would opt to handle these easy queries themselves.
This also frees up your agents to handle more complex calls, which makes your call center way more efficient.
As you track and categorize call details, pinpoint any frequently occurring questions or requests that could be managed by your automated system. Use these insights to amend or restructure your existing call flow, making sure to keep menu options brief so that callers don’t get frustrated and jump ship.
4. Contact Rate
Contact rate applies specifically to outbound call centers.
Quite simply, it’s the percentage of customers your agents actually reach when they’re making calls
To find your call center’s contact rate, divide the number of calls answered by the total calls placed within a given period. This shows you the percentage of calls that resulted in an actual conversation with a customer.
Your contact rate is slightly different from your connection rate, which includes all customer answers, even if it reaches a customer’s voicemail or they answer and immediately hang up.
An average rate of 25-35% is considered acceptable, but there’s always room for improvement. To boost your numbers, you should rethink the variables of your campaign that might entice more customer engagement.
For example, you might try calling at a different time of day, after customers get home from work. It could also be helpful to coordinate with your Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone provider to set up a bundle of local numbers so customers aren’t wary of an out-of-state call.
A closer look at your leads management can also be beneficial. Rather than obtaining large lists of unvetted customers, spend more time identifying high-quality leads, which results in fewer calls with a higher rate of contact.
5. Average After Call Work Time (ACW)
A lot of call center managers pay close attention to their Average Time in Queue (ATQ), the average length of time that customers are waiting to speak with an agent. It’s less common to consider how inefficiencies in your ACW might directly impact both of these key metrics.
Using analytics software, you can specifically track the seconds an agent spends wrapping up their call notes and closing out the ticket. If these post-call tasks are eating up more than the industry average of 45 seconds, you should probably look into ways you can streamline the wrap-up process.
Is your operating system slow to load or difficult to navigate? Do your agents need additional training in an efficient close-out process? If your call quality and AHT fall within a healthy range, yet agents aren’t managing a steady number of calls, ACW might be where you gain back your edge.
6. Average Speed of Answer
In contrast to your answer rate, which reflects how quickly agents answer the phone, Average Speed of Answer (ASA) captures how quickly they’re able to provide answers to the caller. There are a few important insights you can glean from this number.
If you’re seeing lengthy ASA times for multiple agents, it points to a bigger issue than just an individual lack of experience. It could be an issue with your knowledge base or the ease of navigating your operating system.
If you make improvements to both and still encounter problems, your business might benefit from utilizing Real-Time Assist (RTA) features. A standard option on several leading call center software systems, this tool allows you to create unique pop-ups addressing specific caller issues that consistently drain agent time.
7. Inbound Call Tracking
As your business grows, it becomes all the more vital to provide callers with self-service IVR menus to offload some of that call volume. Inbound call tracking is a key part of this process, enabling you to figure out where most of your call traffic is headed.
First, ascertain the specific departments or individuals most callers are trying to reach, whether it’s customer service, account management, or appointment scheduling. Then, you can establish unique VoIP phone numbers for each by assigning them specialized IP addresses.
When callers can immediately reach the right person or department without navigating multiple phone menus, they often report a better experience. You can even create targeted call menus for each separate line, further customizing and improving the caller journey.
3 Misleading Call Center Metrics
- Average Handle Time (AHT)
Calculated by averaging the length of all incoming calls, AHT gives you an idea of how many minutes agents spend with each customer.
Ideally, you want your AHT between three and six minutes, depending on your specific sector.
Though it’s a widely referenced and useful metric for gauging the length of your calls, it tells you nothing about call quality. If you’re constantly urging agents to reduce their handling time, this is going to be detrimental to the overall customer experience.
The best practice is to dial in this metric while keeping an eye on interrelated data that reflect conversation quality. Customer service scores and call recordings, for example, can offer deeper insights into how agents are performing.
- Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
Of course, customer satisfaction matters. Customer satisfaction scores are integral to running a smooth call center operation, providing helpful feedback on your performance from a customer perspective. Yet, there are a couple of reasons why these results shouldn’t always be taken at face value.
Research suggests that often, unhappy customers are more likely to respond to these types of surveys than happy ones. As a result, your data may be slightly skewed toward the negative. These are still essential insights to consider, to be sure. You should definitely take customer feedback seriously, especially if you’re seeing the same complaints pop up over and over again.
However, you may not get as clear a picture of what’s actually going well.
It’s also important to note that abandoned calls don’t even reach the survey step. So you need to look a lot deeper than just customer feedback surveys to gain a better understanding of the beginning-to-end customer experience.
- Call Abandonment Rate
This one is tricky by nature, as you can’t necessarily track why a customer gives up on an interaction. Were they interrupted by another incoming call? Frustrated by a longer-than-expected wait time?
It’s also possible that the caller simply decided to try a self-service option suggested to them in your call flow. For instance, they may have hung up on the call to make a payment on your website instead.
You never really know for sure, and without knowing the exact problem (if there is one), it’s hard to come up with a solution.
What you can do is consider this data relative to your ATQ, which will show you how long callers waited before hanging up. This at least gives you an idea of how many customers were likely irritated at long wait times. If you see that a lot of callers are hanging up after waiting for several minutes or longer, you can begin to come up with solutions to solve this problem.
For example, your agents may need access to additional training or resources to become more efficient in their roles. It could also be that higher call volumes during certain periods require better staffing support to service each call quickly.
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