You can’t provide the best customer experience (CX) if you don’t have visibility into your operations. In this blog, we detail the top 12 contact center metrics you need to track.

To determine whether or not you are meeting your business goals—and providing the ultimate customer experience—contact centers need to track key performance indicators (KPIs) across a few areas of business.

These KPIs—or contact center metrics— give valuable insight about your company’s strengths and weaknesses. Without KPIs, you don’t know whether you are fulfilling your agents’ and customers’ needs, which can impact agent turnover, the custom experience and your bottom line.

Contact Center Metrics

Types of Contact Center Metrics

You can break up your contact center metrics into three main categories:

  1. Agent performance
  2. Customer satisfaction
  3. Call specific metrics

Let’s look at the top KPIs for each category.

Agent Performance KPIs

Agents are the face (or voice) of your company that customers primarily interact with. This is why it’s critical to ensure agents are doing their job well. You can track your agents’ performance using various KPIs, including:

  1. Average Speed to Answer – If this is too high, your agents may not be moving as fast as they need to be.
  2. Average Call Abandonment Rate – This measures the percentage of callers who hang up before they reach an agent. If this is too high, look into what might be causing your agents to not get to your customers in time.
  3. Average Handle Time – The time from when an agent answers the call until they disconnect. If it’s too long, it might mean the agent is struggling to resolve an issue. If it’s too short, they may not be providing any real help.
  4. First Call Resolution – A low first call resolution means a customer has to call back multiple times or is transferred too much. A high first call resolution means your agent is effectively addressing customer requests.

Based on these contact center metrics, you can evaluate your agents and determine who is underperforming, meeting standards or exceeding expectations.

When you recognize agents who excel, it makes them happy and gives them an incentive to stay with the company. This is essential considering the average turnover rate for U.S. call centers was between 30 and 45 percent in 2019.

Agent performance metrics also allow you to retrain agents who need improvement, which results in a better experience for customers.

All in all, it’s important to track KPIs that encourage agents to go the extra mile, as opposed to just volume-focused metrics and quotas that encourage agents to get off the phone and onto the next call as quickly as possible. You should strike a balance between quantity and quality.

Customer Satisfaction KPIs

Customer satisfaction is key to your company’s success. In fact, 90% of Americans consider a company’s customer service when deciding whether they want to do business with them. That’s why you need to make customer satisfaction an essential priority for your contact center. You can track your customer satisfaction with these KPIs:

  1. Customer Effort Score (CES) – This is based on a scaled survey that measures how effective the service was in helping a customer solve their problem. A higher CES means a better customer experience.
  2. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) – Also measured through a survey, CSAT helps contact centers understand how satisfied customers are with your product, service or customer service.
  3. Net Promoter Score (NPS) – NPS is usually based on the response to a question about a customer’s probability of recommending an agent or company to others.
  4. First Call Resolution – We mentioned this in the previous section, but it’s important to reiterate in the context of customer satisfaction, too. When you meet your customer’s needs the first time they call, they will undoubtedly be more satisfied.

By tracking these contact center metrics, you will start to see a clear picture of how your customers feel about their experience. Based on this information, you can improve your service and delight more customers.

Operational KPIs

Your contact center handles a lot of calls, which means you need to ensure you have enough agents to handle the volume. You don’t want to have too few agents and end up with customers waiting on hold or hanging up. But you also want to ensure you don’t have too many agents and not enough calls. That’s why it’s crucial to track the following operational metrics:

  1. Calls Handled – The total number of calls handled by an agent or interactive voice response system.
  2. Cost Per Call (CPC) – This indicates how effective your contact center is with allocating resources.
  3. Call Arrival Rate – The total number of calls you receive within a specific timeframe.
  4. Peak Hour Traffic – This metric helps you optimize workforce management.

These operational contact center metrics explain how many calls occur, when they happen and how much they cost. That’s valuable data you can use to better equip your contact center with the agents and resources required to stabilize your contact center’s operations and provide excellent customer service every single day.

How to Track Contact Center Metrics

Now you know which KPIs you should be tracking for your contact center, but how do you do it? The solution is contact center software.

Cloud-based contact center software can integrate your telephony and CRM systems quickly and affordably. That way, all of your tools communicate with each other, making it easier to capture important contact center metrics and make meaningful business decisions with data.

With contact center software, you can automatically archive call information and recordings as soon as the call is finished, meaning your agents don’t have to waste precious time manually inputting data. That gives your agents more time to focus on customers, leading to a better experience for everyone. Plus, your KPIs will be more accurate since there will be no input errors.

Conclusion

To improve customer experience, you need to improve contact center metrics that focus on agent performance, customer satisfaction and call specific metrics. And the only way to improve these critical KPIs is by first tracking them. The best way to do this is by implementing contact center software that allows your tools to work together seamlessly.

CDC Software can help your contact center improve customer experience by tracking and improving key KPIs. Contact us to learn more.