A call centre is the backbone of your customer service strategy, whether it's dedicated to handling inbound calls, generating leads with outbound calls, or even an outsourced answering service for medical office. To improve its effectiveness and minimise customer frustration and churn, you will need to set manageable goals and start tracking the performance of your call centre agents.
There is a plethora of call centre metrics to track, so we decided to narrow down the list to help you focus on essentials.
The choice of metrics to track depends on the specific goals and KPIs of your call center, and it's beneficial to analyse both qualitative and quantitative data for comprehensive insights.
FCR shows the percentage of customer problems that were resolved during the first interaction between a customer and your call centre. The goal you should shoot for is 70-75% of one-contact resolutions, but this benchmark varies by your industry.
Improving one-contact resolution will boost customer satisfaction and reduce your churn rate. Statistics say that 67% of customers list bad experiences with brands as a primary cause for churning.
The call abandonment rate is the percentage of users that hang up before they even reach your customer service agent. That is one of the most significant call center metrics, as it directly indicates customer satisfaction with call wait times.
Always compare the call abandonment rate against other metrics to understand the cause of customer frustration. For example, if both customer satisfaction rates and call abandonment rates are high, that may mean that your call centre hardware is outdated and that it keeps dropping customer calls. Such call center problems may compromise your brand image and user experiences.
Customer satisfaction measures how your customers feel about your service. There are many ways to collect customer feedback. For example, many call centres calculate the Net Promoter Score to quantify customer satisfaction. They usually obtain feedback across multiple channels, including SMS, email, website surveys, and phone calls.
Top virtual business phone providers also include comprehensive call analytics data. For example, Nextiva’s customer relationship suite allows you to measure the customer experience rate, as well as customer sentiment. Knowing what your customers feel about your service, it will be easier to improve it.
Apart from measuring customer satisfaction, you should also observe the quality of your customer support team. For example, you could choose a business phone system with call recording features.
As a call centremanager, you will choose random call recordings to analyse. Their goal is to evaluate your customer service reps’ professionalism, courtesy, patience, accuracy, knowledge, as well as their ability to capture customer data.
This metric tells you how often your call centre agents are available to your customers. It shows how well your customer service agents perform. For example, if an agent’s call availability is low, you should analyse their call records to see whether they are adhering to the schedule.
The average handle time shows how much time a customer spends on a phone call with your agent. It is calculated from the moment the agent picks up the phone until they disconnect the call. That way, it directly shows how effective your customer service team is
However, when calculating the average handle time, you need to consider several factors. For example, if your agent’s AHT is long, it may mean that they are struggling to solve customer issues. However, it may also mean that they are striving to provide highly personalised customer experiences and detailed feedback.
The same applies to agents with short average handle times. While it may indicate that an agent is soling customer service inquiries efficiently, it may also mean they are providing partial feedback or low-quality customer assistance.
Use quality insurance software to make sure your customer support is professional and helpful.
Service level measures the percentage of calls your agents answer within a specific reporting period.
It is often shown in real-time to both customer service agents and managers to measure the performance of a call centre. The industry standard is answering 80% of calls in 20 seconds. Therefore, if that is your service level goal, you will want to calculate how many calls are answered within that specific time frame.
Service level tells you whether your company has the right tools, people, and resources to meet customer needs. If your service level is low, your customers will often need to wait on hold, which may impact their satisfaction and increase the call abandonment rate. In that case, you would need to invest in more powerful customer service tools or grow your call centre team.
Measuring call centre metrics is essential for the success of your call centre. It gives you a chance to maximise the effectiveness of your customer service and build a base of delighted brand advocates.
When choosing the right metrics to track, remember that there is no one-size-fits-all solution for all businesses. To measure the right metrics and successfully interpret them, you will first need to set clear objectives and reasonable KPIs.
For starters, collect and analyse both qualitative and quantitative data to get 360-degree insights into your call centre performance. Above all, you should observe your data both individually and collectively. By comparing your metrics against each other, you will identify call centre trends and meet customer needs.
What metrics do you use to measure the quality of your call centre service?
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