We translated an article from David Geffen of NICE, where he shared six metrics that will help you assess the performance of your contact center managers more effectively.
How can you be sure that the call center provides quality service?
It’s pleasing to think that agents work with maximum efficiency and each of them is customer-oriented and competent, but is there a way to measure this? Or even better: prove the quality level of the agents’ work? Let’s consider where the information for the statistics comes from. Statistical data play a decisive role for the productive operation of the inbound call center. Such department processes thousands of requests every day, so it’s crucial to highlight the basic indicators that can help assess its effectiveness. This article will help you narrow down the list of metrics and focus on indicators that, with continuous monitoring and improvement, can truly help your call center thrive. Below is a list of the most important tracked call center indicators.
1. Customer satisfaction/h3>
Satisfaction displays how your agents cope with clients’ problem solving. This KPI can be gathered from various sources. Typically, call centers receive customer satisfaction info by conducting service quality surveys. Regardless of the methods used to acquire this KPI, this metric should always be taken into account when analyzing the performance of a contact center.
h3>2. Solving a subscriber’s issue upon the first contact/h3>
Solving a client’s issue upon the first contact is a KPI directly connected with customer satisfaction, and it’s understandable why. It showcases the percentage of calls in which the agent fully resolved the customer’s issue without the need for redirection, escalation, or callbacks to solve the issue.
Issue resolution during the first contact is so significant that many consider it the most informative KPI. Therefore, this metric should be at the top of any list of call center agent performance indicators.
h3>3. Service Level in the Contact Center /h3>1. Service level is the percentage of calls that have been answered by agents within a certain time frame. For instance, customer service managers often state that they aim to answer 80% of the calls within 20 seconds. This is how they define the service level of the call center. The service level reflects whether your business has sufficient resources to meet customer expectations. The metric allows you to know how quickly customers connect with team members and whether their issues are promptly resolved. If your service level is insufficient, it may be time to start using new customer service tools, such as a voice robot, or expand the team.
4. Average Call Handling Time /h3>
The Average Call Handling Time showcases the amount of time a agent needs in order to service a single client. Oftentimes, agents are evaluated based on how quickly they can wrap up the conversation and move on to the next call.
This occurs due to the following reasons:
A) For the contact center, it is crucial to reduce the call-waiting time;
B) Fast call processing speed indicates agent efficiency.
However, evaluating this metric alone might prevent us from uncovering important issues. Does the quality of the agents’ performance diminish when they are pushed for quicker call processing? Most customers do not wish to spend 45 minutes talking to an agent to resolve an issue or make a purchase, but they also do not want to call back two or three times to get full support or consultation.
Therefore, in general, the aim should not be to decrease call time. However, if you notice that the Call Handling Time has increased, it might indicate a flaw in the service process which needs to be rectified.
5. Proportion of missed interactions
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Lost interactions are the number of calls that are terminated even before they’re connected with an agent. When reviewing your lost interaction ratio, bear in mind that there is a small percentage of people who dial a wrong number and hang up when they hear your company name in the automated message (for example, “Thank you for calling ABC Company”).
Usually, these calls end within the first 10 seconds, and for most call-centers, they amount to 1 to 2% of the total calls. This percentage may increase if your number closely resembles another call center’s number with a high volume of calls.
Typically, the lost interaction ratio is linked to the response speed of call center agents. The quicker a client receives a response, the lower the refusal rate will be. High refuse rates can lead to a decline in sales and customer dissatisfaction. They can also artificially inflate future call volumes, since customers who could not get through the first time keep retrying until they receive an answer.
h3>6. Cost
