Call Center Metrics Best Practices

Obtaining useful metrics on daily operations in your call center can help to improve many aspects of your business. However, there is quite a bit more to making effective use of call center metrics than merely amassing data and generating reports.

When properly harnessed, call center metrics open the door to precise monitoring of growth over time. They can be used to design a powerful development plan for your team members, denote areas of daily operations in which you are losing money, and more.

The Importance of Metrics in Call Center Operations

Managers on the floor can only keep track of so many factors at once as they go about monitoring active agents. Although the immediate concerns of agents in need of assistance and other urgent needs are readily apparent from a manager’s perspective, raw data on customer satisfaction, speed, and more can only be captured through targeted analytics.

The metrics yielded by such analytics provide invaluable insight into your call center’s inner workings.

Data-Driven Optimization

Metrics allow you to eliminate the guesswork where improving your organization’s throughput and quality is concerned by identifying problem areas in daily operations as they arise.

Choosing Appropriate Metrics

Knowing the importance of metrics in strategically improving performance within your call center should get you much more interested in measuring and monitoring them. However, not all metrics are made equal.

Certain metrics may prove to be more useful to your business than others. To choose what information matters most to your company, give the following tips a try:

Lead With Your Goals

Although it may be tempting to capture as many metrics as possible for a more widely varied perspective on your business’s performance, keeping your current goals in mind and aligning analytical choices with them may be more effective in the long run.

Any one of the key areas covered below could be potentially more important for your business than the others. Aim to incorporate metrics that reflect what matters most to your call center at any given time.

Accuracy and Speed

If you have noticed issues among your agents with fulfilling necessary quotas or requiring multiple calls to resolve issues, then it may be helpful to capture the following metrics:

• First Call Resolution

This metric focuses on the percentage of customer calls that are resolved on the first contact, without additional contact being needed. This paints a clearer picture of your call center staff’s overall competence.

• Service Level

Service level describes the number of services provided to customers over time. For the most part, this metric helps in defining your top operating speeds and capacities.

• Customer Effort Score

Customer Effort Score (CES) tallies up the overall difficulty customers had in using your services. By paying close attention to this metric, you can determine how well individual calls are being handled by your agents.

Customer Experience

The metrics covered above can work well in this area, too, but the pair below are uniquely well-suited to revealing the details of your callers’ experiences with your company.

• Net Promoter Score (NPS)

This simple metric, commonly known as NPS, analyzes the number of individuals who would willingly recommend your services to others in their social circle, effectively telling you just how many customers’ standards your organization is meeting.

• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

This metric centers on customers’ experiences with individual services or facets of the same service that you provide them. A high CSAT indicates that you are excelling in specific areas of your operations.

Agent Experience

Customers may come first, but agents are just as important. Keeping track of your agents’ satisfaction with their jobs can help tremendously in encouraging improvement among them. The primary agent-tracking metric below is a great help in achieving this.

• Agent Retention Rate

Measuring your agent retention rate helps in keeping tabs on the overall success of your call center as a work environment. If your turnover rate is relatively low and you are effectively retaining most of your agents for extended periods of time, then you are likely to see improvements across other areas of your business as well. Retained talent typically fares better as they have the benefit of experience on the job.

Capturing Data to Generate Metrics

There are multiple ways to capture data from agents and customers, but they all yield slightly different results. The following options encompass the most widely used means of data capture for generating metrics:

Surveys

Simple surveys often provide entirely anonymous avenues for customers and agents alike to voice their opinions. Many people answer differently in anonymous surveys than they would face to face.

Voice of the Customer (VoC)

Ideally, VoC solutions leverage data gathered from multiple sources, including phone calls, chats and completed surveys. These options can prove highly useful when you have more than one way of interacting with your customers.

For more information on leveraging Voice of the Customer solutions with data-driven strategies, as well as recognizing their impact on brand loyalty and your business’s bottom line, download our white paper, Measuring the Voice of the Customer: Data Driven Strategies & Tools to Unlock Voice of the Customer Insight.

Automation

Automation as it pertains to capturing metrics, tends to come down to survey suggestions being pushed to customers and agents at opportune moments.

In Person Interviews

Although decidedly old-school, the traditional approach of simply asking your customers and agents about their experiences can yield highly actionable results.

Leveraging Insights Within Your Organization

Gathering all the metrics that align closest with your organization’s goals is a great first step to take in building a lasting growth strategy into your current workflow. However, you should remember to make active use of the insights you derive from all this data. Without any action ever being taken, all the metrics in the world would be meaningless, after all.

Give the above tips and best practices a try to make better use of metrics and the many insights they provide for your call center.

What metrics matter most for your call center’s growth strategy?