15 Essential Call Center Metrics Your Business Must Measure

call-center-metrics

Collecting, analyzing and reporting information regarding the performance of the business is significant for organizational growth. Taking decisions that are critical to the business needs a closer look into each segment. In the customer service industry, businesses must track and improve the essential call center metrics to understand where the business is heading to and what action plan is required to achieve better results.

“Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts.” -Albert Einstein

With a lot of things in hand, call center managers often juggle between what to take up first while monitoring contact center KPIs. The ultimate goal is to bring upon a data-driven change that can lead to delivering a positive customer experience. Happy and content customers can do wonders in branding but a bad word of mouth can tarnish the brand image.

If you are managing a call center or working in one and are facing difficulty in what to go after first here is the list of call center metrics that are critical for the health of your contact center:

Agent Availability

Agent availability refers to the time call center agents were available to take calls during their shifts, including the time spent on handling calls and the time spent waiting for calls to arrive. It is also known as Adherence as it implies how well agents adhere to their shift schedules and is usually expressed as a percentage of logged on time.

Average Handling Time (AHT)

Average handling time (AHT) is the sum of the average talk time, hold time and the average wrap-up time for a specified period. Call centers should ensure to reduce AHT for improved agent productivity.

Answered Calls Ratio

It is the number of calls that arrive at the automatic call distributor (ACD) and are answered by an agent. The call center SLA for answered calls is 95% or more of offered calls.

Agent Talk Time

It is one of the crucial call center metrics and considers the time in seconds an agent takes to talk to the customer, from answering a call to the caller hanging up, but excluding any hold time.

Call Abandonment Rate

An abandoned call is a call or other type of contact initiated to a contact center that gets ended before any conversation occurs. Calls that arrive at the ACD but terminate before an agent has answered. The call center SLA for abandoned calls is 5% or less of offered calls. Call center managers must take steps to eliminate call abandonment

Customer Effort Score

Customer Effort Score (CES) is a type of customer satisfaction metric used to measure the degree of ease the customer felt they had to expend to resolve their issue or to use the product or service. The purpose of such surveys for organizations is to evaluate how likely the customers are to continue using and paying for their product.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

It is a customer satisfaction survey methodology to measure customer’s satisfaction with a business, purchase, or interaction.

First Call Resolution (FCR)

First call resolution is a call center metric that monitors the quality of service that customers are receiving by counting the number of times the customers’ needs are addressed the first time they call in, thereby eliminating the need for the customer to follow up with a second call. Higher FCR helps in delighting customers.

Handled the First-Time

The proportion of calls that are handled by call center agents without the need to transfer the call to the service department. If an agent refers to the service department for advice but retains the call then this is counted as first-time resolved.

Lost Calls

This call center metric helps to track calls that arrive at the ACD and were not answered by an agent.

On-Hold Time

On-Hold Time is monitored by supervisors with a detailed agent level and queue level real-time monitoring to have an insight into how long the average caller waits on hold before they are connected to a call agent.

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Peak Hour Traffic

Peak hour traffic is the time of the day when there are maximum calls to be handled by agents. This can be determined and identified with the help of real-time monitoring and the agent allocation can be planned to handle the work in the busiest hour of the day.

Response Time

This call center metric helps to measure the time it takes an agent in a call center to respond to interactions/tickets that were handled when they arrive.

Service Level Agreements (SLA)

Service Level Agreement specifies the time limit within which a ticket has to be replied to and resolved based upon the priority of the ticket.

Wrap-Up Time (or Wrap Time)

Wrap Time is the time spent by an agent doing After-Call Work once they have concluded an interaction such as putting disposition codes to take note of interaction outcome and follow-ups.

Measuring and tracking call center metrics in real-time can improve call center performance enormously. But the key lies in using the right and tools. If you are exploring the call center software solutions that can help you measure the just-in-time data and support you to do the call center performance analysis then check out Ameyo’s call center reporting and monitoring dashboards.