The most effective way to monitor call center performance is by identifying key metrics that align with your performance objectives. By tracking and benchmarking these key performance indicators (KPIs), you can monitor the performance of agents, processes, scripts, and other individual elements as well as overall call center performance. Superior call center software solutions can automate the tasks of gathering and analyzing data to streamline efforts.
What KPIs are most important in a call center?
Among the hundreds of performance-related KPIs that call centers track, these metrics are often considered the most important.
- Service level is the percentage of calls in which the call center’s customer service standards are met. Standards may include calls being answered, handled, or resolved within a prescribed time.
- Average handle time (AHT) is the average amount of time required for an agent to handle a customer call, including time spent on hold and time spent on work after the call.
- First call resolution (FCR) is the percentage of issues that are resolved by agents on the customer’s initial call.
- Average speed of answer (ASA) is the average time before a customer can speak with an agent.
- Abandonment rate is the percentage of customers who hang up before reaching an agent.
- Customer effort score (CES) measures the lengths a customer must go to resolve their question or issue.
- Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) measures overall satisfaction with a business and with specific products, services, and touchpoints on customer journey.
- Net promoter score (NPS) represents the number of customers who would recommend a business, its products and services, or its customer service experience to others in their social circle.
What are call center metrics for agent performance?
Many of the KPIs for call center performance are also used to measure agent performance. For example, call centers often track customer satisfaction scores for individual agents to understand how well agents interact with customers and where additional training may be needed. An agent’s first call resolution rate is an indicator of their effectiveness, while average handle time helps supervisors identify agents who are having trouble resolving calls without additional research.
What is call center experience?
The call center experience is the perception that a customer has of a call center based on the sum of their interactions with call center agents. Factors that impact the call center experience include the customer’s perception of how they were treated during the call, how quickly their needs were met, and whether they felt that the agent heard, understood, and validated their concerns. Delivering an exceptional call center experience can increase customer satisfaction, enhance brand perception, build customer loyalty, and increase customer lifetime value.
What is call center analytics?
Call center analytics uses data and analysis to accurately measure call center performance and develop insights into operational efficiency, agent performance, and customer needs. Call center analytics platforms may include speech and text analytics technology that can automatically capture and analyze spoken and written conversations. Additionally, operational analytics can track and monitor metrics such as service level, first call resolution, and average handle time.
What tools do call centers need to improve performance?
The most common and important solutions in a call center’s technology stack include:
- Automatic call distribution (ACD). ACD systems identify callers, puts them in a queue, and route them to the ideal agent.
- Call scripting software. This technology outlines the language and information that agents should use during a call and provides a flowchart or logic that agents can use to take the next-best action based on customer questions and responses.
- Cloud-hosted soft phone software. A cloud-hosted telephone app makes it easy for agents working remotely to take calls outside the office.
- Call queue application. This software places incoming calls in a queue and informs customers how many callers are ahead of them.
- Omnichannel help desk software. Many customers prefer to contact support via channels other than the telephone. Omnichannel software enables users to also connect to call centers via email, chat, social media, and SMS.
- CRM technology. A customer relationship management (CRM) platform provides essential tools for tracking and managing customer information.
- Interactive voice response (IVR) systems. This technology collects information from callers to route the call to the right department or agent or to resolve the customer’s needs without agent intervention.
- Dashboards and analytics. These tools enable supervisors to monitor KPIs and call center metrics in real time.
In addition to these standard solutions, many call centers are adopting conversation intelligence platforms that automatically capture and analyze every customer conversation to provide comprehensive metrics and a deeper understanding of customers’ needs, preferences, and behaviors.
How does conversation intelligence work?
Conversation intelligence uses speech analytics and text analytics technologies to capture and analyze interactions with customers on phone calls, emails, chats, social media, SMS texts, and websites. The unstructured information in these interactions can be a gold mine of data and insights that can deliver more accurate metrics and a deeper understanding of customers. Conversation intelligence uses natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) to understand the meaning and intent of each speaker in a conversation as well as the emotion and sentiment that drives their behavior. By transforming interactions into structured data that can be searched and analyzed, conversation intelligence technology enables managers to view highly accurate metrics and glean critical insights that can improve customer experiences, automate quality assurance, enhance performance, and reduce agent churn.
How does CallMiner help monitor call center performance?
The CallMiner Eureka platform is the industry’s most comprehensive solution for analyzing omnichannel customer interactions at scale. CallMiner captures every customer conversation on every channel, analyzing interactions at the deepest level to identify patterns, interpret nuance, and shed light on the customer experience. CallMiner makes it easy to monitor call center performance with dashboards and visualizations that provide granular detail into agent performance, process challenges, and customer behavior. CallMiner can alert agents and supervisors when certain indicators suggest that a customer is at risk of churn and provide next-best-action guidance to help resolve a potentially negative interaction. CallMiner can also automatically score each call to monitor agent performance, target behavior for guidance or reinforcement, and create a persistent culture of improvement.
