Top 10 Contact Centre KPIs
Between QA, feedback and insight that can be inferred from things such as call duration and other meta-data, there is a large amount of measurement and analysis that can be done to monitor the quality and operational performance of contact centres. Whether it’s IVR, chat or email being used to serve your customers, each channel should be measured and managed to ensure customer needs are being met effectively and efficiently.
Here we list ten common key performance indicators that can be valuable to your contact centre’s CX performance.
1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
NPS measures your customer’s overall sentiment and loyalty regarding your company. With NPS you ask your customers “On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend [Company Name] to a friend or colleague?” Respondents can be grouped into three categories: Promoters (10-9), Passives (8-7) and Detractors (6-0). If a customer had a difficult or frustrating interaction with your contact centre you will easily obtain a detractor. A quick and efficient interaction should garner you a promoter.
Businesses often turn to NPS as a KPI and the score is often used to motivate an organization to become more focused on improving products and services for consumers. Regardless of industry, NPS is the metric most businesses emphasise, and for this reason, it can be useful when it comes to market benchmarking.
2. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
The most straightforward CX measurement is the CSAT score. According to Gartner, 70% of companies report customer satisfaction scores to executives. A CSAT score can be generated by simply asking customers to rate their experience. With a CSAT question, you ask your customer at the end of the interaction: “On a scale of 1-10 how happy were you with your experience?”
CSAT is probably the most versatile and customisable of the KPIs. It makes it easy to ask your customers questions at different intervals along the customer lifecycle; identify areas in which your service needs to improve based on individual experiences; and help explain key factors such as customer intentions, lifetime value and customer churn.
3. Customer Effort Score (CES)
CES is a measurement based on ease of experience. Rather than asking customers about the quality of their experiences, a CES survey will ask customers to gauge the ease of their experience with your call centre. To keep them coming back, they want ease and efficiency at every interaction.
The idea is that if a customer had an easy experience, they are more likely to be loyal to your company. With call centre surveys this of the utmost importance because it is also an indicator of how well your staff performed. In a general retail interaction, for example, a customer could have a really great CES because they walked in found what they wanted and used self-service checkout with little to no staff interaction. With a contact centre, your employees and technology are the only determinants of a customer’s effort and experience.
4. First Call Resolution (FCR)
FCR is the percentage of inbound calls that are resolved on the first attempt by the customer, meaning the customer’s issue is resolved before they hang up or end their chat session, meaning there is no reason for them to call back or receive a call back from an employee. This metric is an incredibly important contact centre KPI because it is an indicator of both customer effort and customer satisfaction. Low FCR is also important for maintaining a low cost to serve. If a team or employee has an unusually high FCR score, more training is needed to ensure they are able to handle customer calls or chats more effectively.
5. Average Handle Time (AHT)
This is a straightforward metric to measure the amount of time an agent spends resolving a call from start to finish, including hold time. Generally, you want to keep this at a low average, but too low may mean your staff members are rushing through calls and not delivering the best service to the customer. Too high and other customers may be stuck with long wait times. Each customer experience will be fairly unique which can result in a wide range of AHT scores, but figure out what works uniquely for your business to optimise productivity and operational efficiency.
We’ve previously discussed how Zappos never rushes its employees to hurry through a call, but rather encourages employees to take their time to deliver the best customer service to individual customers, sometimes resulting in hours-long talk time. So while having a generally quick AHT is important to how the contact centre runs, sometimes a longer than average call is an indicator of a really fruitful interaction rather than a difficult one.
6. Service Level
Service level is the number of requests answered within a given period of time. Managers will set a goal of how quickly calls or chats will be responded to and the service level is the amount that reaches the target (i.e., 80% of calls in 20 seconds). It’s a key metric to see if your contact centre has the resources required to meet customer demand. Whether you need more staff members or more training, service level sets an idea of how accessible you are to your customers. This metric should be used as an operational measurement rather than a quality measurement.
7. Abandon Rate
This is a meaningful indicator of how frustrated your customers are with your contact centre. There are a number of reasons a customer interaction may result in an abandoned call. High wait times, hold times or handling times can leave customers frustrated or just general frustration with agent performance can all lead to a customer hanging up, thus affecting your abandonment rate. Whatever the reason for the abandoned call, it suggests that the customer being served, or waiting to be served, was unhappy with the service or interaction.
At times, it can also show that your technology is inadvertently dropping the calls and needs to be updated. This is exceptionally frustrating for customers who are waiting or on hold for an extended period of time, only to have the call dropped from the service end. If your satisfaction is high alongside your abandonment rate, this could be the reason.
When measuring your abandon rate, you can usually disregard calls that were abandoned within the first few seconds because the customer likely made a mistake when dialling or was able to find an answer on their own.
8. Average Speed of Answer (ASA)
This metric is important for fairly obvious reasons. It is an indicator of wait times and the efficiency of your contact centre. If your ASA score is high, your customers are spending too much time waiting to be attended to and some tools or processes probably need to be updated to reduce response times. It may even mean that you need more staff. While this metric is important, a few things must be considered and factored into your analysis of this score – for example, an unusually high call volume would slow down your teams’ ability to answer quickly.
9. Quality Assurance (QA)
Quality scores are a qualitative measurement of team member performance in the contact centre. These scores can single out employees or teams that need further training to deliver better customer experiences. Quality monitoring should be done at random on a number of calls per month per employee to observe performance. For smaller contact centres managers can have a scorecard or checklist to evaluate the calls, but larger contact centres should have a quality team to ascertain quality assurance across the contact centre.
10. Cost per Call (CPC)
This final metric is the average cost for each individual call handled in the contact centre. It is pretty simple but very relevant to understanding operational efficiency and resource allocation in your contact centre. To calculate CPC you simply measure the total cost of all calls over the total amount of calls. It can be good to set a target for this KPI and see which teams are performing over or under so you are able to analyse why.
