To assess the efficiency of your call center, it is important to analyze your call center’s KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Identifying the key KPIs, accurately measuring them, and acting upon that data will help to manage your call center successfully. Call center KPIs are statistics related to a call center, like the performance of the agents, team, departments, and so on, that are used to analyze constructs that are vital to the success of a call center. The data can be used to identify trends, and make decisions that will help to increase:
- The efficiency of your call center
- Increase customer satisfaction
- Increase the revenue of your call center
- Reduce your call center costs
Following are some of the KPIs that you can concentrate to optimize your call center performance.
KPI – Calls Blocked Percentage
This is the percentage of callers who received a busy tone when they called into your call center. This is often caused by two reasons. First, there are no available agents, all the agents are busy handling other customers. The call queues are full, so the customers hear a busy tone or they are transferred directly to the voicemail. Second, the call center software does not have the capacity or capability to handle the call volume. This call center KPI has a large impact on customer satisfaction. A customer calling into your call center to report issues will obviously be frustrated upon reaching a voicemail or upon hearing a continuous busy tone. This is one KPI that you should not ignore.
KPI – Queue Average Time
This KPI is calculated by dividing the total time a customer waits in the call queue, with the total number of calls answered by the agents. Again, when it comes to customer satisfaction, this KPI is one that has to be prioritized. Customers hate waiting in the queue. While a minute or two is still acceptable, anything more than that will only lead to customer frustration. This KPI will also indicate whether your team is performing well or not.
KPI – Average Abandonment Rate
It is the percentage of customers who hang up the call before reaching an agent. When inbound calls are abandoned, it is mostly because the customer is frustrated with the hold time. Obviously, this will have a direct impact on customer satisfaction. So, it is important that you keep an eye on this KPI. A software that can provide real-time call-waiting statistics can help a manager or a supervisor to effectively reduce the call abandonment rate.
KPI – Service Level
Service level is the percentage of calls answered within a specified time frame. It can be measured over any period of time, for 30 minutes, for an hour, for a day or for a week, and for each team, department or your call center as a whole. The service level statistics are displayed in real-time to both the agents and the managers. This will help them to keep the service level in an acceptable range.
KPI – Average Speed of Answer
This is the average time it takes for calls to be answered in a call center during a specific time frame. This includes the time spent waiting in the queue and the number of agent’s phone rings. This is one KPI that can be used to assess your team’s efficiency and degree of accessibility to their customers.
KPI – AHT (Average Handle Time)
Average handle time includes the amount of time an agent spends on a call and engaged in after-call-work associated with that call. AHT can be calculated by dividing the total talk time plus total hold time plus total after-call-work, with the number of calls handled. This KPI is directly related to customer satisfaction.
KPI – First Contact Resolution
A first contact/call resolution is achieved when an agent resolves the customer issue on that call itself. That is, without offering the customer a callback or having to escalate or transfer the call. This is one of the most important KPIs that is directly related to customer satisfaction. Most of the call centers claim that this is the most important KPI related to customer satisfaction. Making this the top KPI at your call center will definitely help in making your call center efficient, and successful.
KPI – Customer Satisfaction
The customer satisfaction level can be determined by conducting surveys, as well as from many other sources. Irrespective of the methodology used to determine this parameter, customer satisfaction is one KPI that should always be considered when analyzing call center effectiveness and efficiency. The base of every call center is its customers. Without customers, there would not be a call center.
Agent Turnover Rate and Agent Absenteeism are two other KPIs that you can track to improve the performance of your call center. It basically means agents are also important to your call center as much as customers.
