Steps to Track your Call Center’s Performance using KPIs

Steps to Track your Call Center’s Performance using KPIs

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Steps to Track your Call Center’s Performance using KPIs

Steps to Track Call Center

Call center monitoring is an ongoing procedure of collecting data, analyzing it and giving feedback. Since it directly affects the customer satisfaction, employee retention, and your bottom line, it is essential to carefully navigate the implementation of certain KPIs or Key Performance Indicators into your call center working strategy to work to your advantage.

We understand being a contact center manager is a tough job as apart from managing your team, you have to successfully identify and choose from the vast pool of metrics, your KPIs to measure the overall performance and measure them accurately along with a focus on improving your key metrics to make your call center thrive.

Step 1

Before diving any further into the list of suitable KPIs, let’s have a look at the few things you should consider before choosing your key metrics.

1) What is the type of your call center, is it related to sales, service or support?

2) Are you assisting your agents with necessary feedback to help them provide excellent service to your customers?

3) Empathy and rapport building is essential in engaging customers, are your agents providing that?

4) Do you expect different queue time depending on the channel?

5) Can metrics be used more effectively to personalize interactions with customers?

Step 2

The previous step outlined the need for a game plan, once that’s sorted, you will know which KPIs to track in order to yield the most value and actionable insight. Below are mentioned some such KPIs to choose from.

 a) Operational Efficiency Metric is the overall measure of the capability of the call center to deliver services to its customers in the most cost-effective way possible while still maintaining the quality of the support service.

 b) Average Handle Time or AHT is the average duration of one transaction taken during the initiation of a customer’s call to the end moment till the issue is resolved. It includes any hold time, talk time and related tasks that follow the transaction.

c) Wrap-up Time is the follow-up process that includes the measurement of the time spent by an agent performing ACW or After Call Work once the transaction is over. It also includes entering notes or any tasks related to the closure of the customer-related

d) Forecast Accuracy basically provides us with a simple measure to help us access the quality of our forecasts. It enables you to forecast calls correctly in order to ensure you are not under or overstaffed at any given time.

e) Cost Metrics measure how well the contact center is managing their costs which also involve operating expenses along with costs per call, agent attrition (customer loss due to retirement and resignation of employees) and agent absenteeism

f) Customer Satisfaction is a metric that measures how the support services provided by a call center meet or surpass a customer’s expectation. It is essential as it provides the contact center manager with a metric that he can use to manage or improve his call center

g) First Call Resolution is keeping the tracks of every inbound and outbound call that addresses the customer’s needs during the first time, thereby eliminating the need to call again thus ensuring satisfaction in shortest time.

h) Self Service Usage is the track keeping of customers that are using self-service options to resolve their own issues without the need to get in touch with the service agent.

i) Average Wait Time is the average amount of time customers wait in a waiting queue before an agent addresses their calls.

j) Agent Performance KPI measures the performance of help desk agents by tracking the effectiveness of the agent using various metrics such as-

    1) Agent Job Satisfaction

    2) Agent Tenure

    3) Training Hours for New Agents

    4) Annual Agent Training Hours 

Step 3

Now, last but not the least, since we know what areas to work on and what are some of the top KPIs to choose from, let’s learn a bit about KPIs in general in order to better utilize its applications.

    a)Use KPIs to enhance your knowledge about the workings of various platforms and channels.

b) Use KPI to track the NEV (Net Emotional Value) in order to better serve your customers.

c) Understand that in this ever-changing world, you need to change KPIs on a daily basis to meet the current requirements.

d) Use 2 or 3 KPIs to generate better results as no single KPI can guarantee 100% performance.

Closing Thoughts:

You cannot hope to track all the indicators at once as it would be too time-consuming, and the amount of data would be completely useless to examine for human analysts. You would miss the forest looking for trees.

What you can do is create a scorecard of performance aspirations and quality control and focus on one or two KPIs for each study period.