The contact centre industry is the backbone of brands all over the globe. It provides the necessary contact point for customers to connect with brands, whether that be troubleshooting, simple questions or administrative needs.

Understanding how to make a profit on the double bottom line (DBL) involves employing a broad range of KPIs and key metrics to ensure a contact centre meets every need that a business may have in supporting their customers.

Here’s a list of 10 key metrics that can be used by contact centre managers to ensure the delivery of both strong customer experiences and financial performance through workforce efficiency.

1. Customer Satisfaction

According to a Contact Center Helper report, 95.7% of the 380 contact centre professionals they asked thought customer satisfaction was one of the most important metrics.  Customer satisfaction is a quality-based measurement to gauge the overall quality of the delivered customer service. A strong customer satisfaction result means more customers have been satisfied with the quality of service provided.

The value of quality in a customer service experience cannot be understated. It’s shown that 67% of customers are happy to pay more for a better customer experience.

2. Service Goals

Staffing Requirements are based on service goals. How quickly you wish to answer the contacts.​There are two ways of measuring this either average delay or grade of service. Average delay refers to the average amount of time a customer spends waiting in the queue for an answer from an agent whereas grade of service is the defined as a percentage of contacts answered within x seconds.  A common grade of service is 70% in 20 seconds however service level goals should take into account corporate objectives, market position, caller captivity, customer perceptions of the company, benchmarking surveys and what your competitors are doing.

3. First Contact Resolution

First contact resolution refers to the percentage of people who received the necessary answer on their first contact and did not require any further contact relating to the initial problem. This metric reflects the knowledge base and expertise of the agents working in the contact centre as well as how well your customers are directed through the IVR to the appropriate agent.

The industry benchmark for the first call resolution measurement is between 70% to 75%.

4. Net Promoter Score

Net promoter score was developed by Bain and Co in 2003 and is a measure used to gauge customer loyalty, satisfaction, and enthusiasm with a company.  It is calculated by asking customers one question: “On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product/company to a friend or colleague?

This metric is not as popular as it used to be as it is also influenced quite highly by factors outside the contact centre such as pricing, negative publicity in the media and overall branding.

The industry median net promoter score is +44, meaning there’s generally more positive promoter scores than negative.

5. Customer Effort Score

A customer effort score refers to the effort that a customer has given, to get a solution or answer to their desired question. This score provides an overall view on the performance delivered, the level of customer service and includes variables such as ease-of-access, wait times and more.

This metric is very similar to the customer satisfaction number as feedback is provided back to the company through a survey form from the customer. As a result, the feedback could be biased and may not accurately represent a customer’s effort to obtain a solution.

6. Advisor Satisfaction

There is a famous quote by Richard Branson “Take care of your employees and they’ll take care of your business.”

Advisor satisfaction is a measure of the contact centre team’s happiness which like customer satisfaction can be measured in many ways. Tools to improve staff engagement and more frequent measurement of advisor satisfaction has become increasingly important with the rise in work from home staff.

 7. Quality Score

Quality scores are a measurement of staff performance as they provide the ability to assess the overall caller experience while focusing on the conversation had with the agent.  They help team leaders and managers understand where more training and development is needed for staff members and highlight those that are doing well and deserve a reward.

Calibration is key when measuring quality to ensure any suggestion of bias is removed.

8. Forecast Accuracy

Forecasting for contact volume and aligning this information with efficient work schedules is critical if you want to run a profitable contact centre so measuring forecast accuracy is a favourite for Workforce Planners.

Forecast accuracy is the comparison of forecasted contacts to actual contacts expressed as a percentage.  There are two ways of looking at the forecast accuracy:  If you divide by the forecast contacts you find the percent of error in the forecast.  If you divide by the actual contacts, you find the percent the forecast varies from the actual.

9. Average Handle Time (AHT)

Average handling time tells you how much time on average, an agent spends working on a task.  It includes total talk time + total hold time + total wrap up time and is divided by the number of contacts handled.

Average handle times may rise when there’s increasing complexity in customer queries from a new product or business change. Therefore, it may not be an accurate representation of an employee’s performance. The length of AHT is dependant on what the service or product is and can vary greatly in length.

A contact centre is one of the most highly time scarce environments where every second is worth something. However, some organisations have chosen not to set this as a KPI but to measure it in the background.  Unfortunately, because it has such a large impact on staffing requirements, it cannot be completely ignored.  Even if it is not set as a KPI, management can use it to coach and train staff to improve the way they handle contacts to get better results.

10. Adherence

Schedule adherence is the degree to which agents do what they are scheduled to do in terms of being logged on.  ​It is measured as a percentage of scheduled time on the phone.

For example, if an advisor is scheduled to take calls from 3pm to 4pm, but was five minutes late and takes calls from 3:05pm-4:05pm, they were only at work for 55 of their scheduled 60 minutes. This means that the advisor’s adherence percentage would be 91.6%, as highlighted below.

Adherence Formula: Total Adherent Minutes / Total Scheduled Minutes x 100

This metric is often confused with others, including conformance, occupancy and utilisation, but it is used widely in contact centres around the world.

For more information or recommendations on contact centre metrics, contact Call Design today.