Call Center Metrics

Customer Satisfaction: a measure of how products and services supplied by a company meet or surpass customer expectation. C-SAT is based on customer’s experience with the support or service. The scoring for this answer is most often based on a 0 to 10 scale.

Average Handling time (also Average Hold Time): a key measure for any contact centre planning system, as it indicates how long a new item of work takes to be handled and not just the talk time.

Revenue Per Call: usually used in sales projects which calculates the effort of a representative with respect to increasing sales. RPC can be calculated by dividing the total amount of sale by total number of calls.

First Call Resolution: properly addressing the customer’s need the first time they call, thereby eliminating the need for the customer to follow up with a second call.

Total Problem Resolution: percentage of time the problem has been completely resolved from the customer point of view. This KPI is mostly used for: Operational Excellence. This keeps troubleshooting time to a minimum, which, according to industry averages, currently accounts for as much as 80 percent of total problem resolution time, and gets the problem fixed.

Net Promoter Score: measures the loyalty that exists between a provider and a consumer. NPS is based on a direct question: How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague? The scoring for this answer is most often based on a 0 to 10 scale.

Quality Scores: by far the most common metric used. It provides the ability to look at the overall caller experience and the conversations that agents are using on their phone calls.

Service Level Agreement: an agreement between two or more parties where one is the customer and the others are service providers. The contract may involve financial penalties and the right to terminate the contract if the SLA metrics are consistently missed.

Active & Waiting Calls: measures current volume of active calls compared to the number of callers waiting to be patched through to an agent. This is a real-time status metric that should be shared with all the agents to offer them insight on their performance. Agents should be encouraged to resolve calls on a timely basis in order to get to the next caller in queue and not keep the callers on wait.

Call Abandonment: measures the number of calls that are disconnected before they can be connected to one of your agents. This metric is closely related to Service Level and Customer Satisfaction. Customers are not expected to be patient. They will hang up and possibly switch their brand loyalties.

Forecast Accuracy: better described as forecasted contact load vs actual contact load. It is a performance metric that reflects the percent variance between the number of inbound customer contacts forecasted for a particular time period and the number of said contacts actually received by the centre during that time period.

Staff Turnover/Retention: The best way to measure the satisfaction of your workforce is to look at the percentage of staff that leaves. There can be some telling information in these numbers and it is crucial to track and analyse the turnover rates in many ways.

Up-Sell/ Cross-Sell Rate: simply the success rate of generating revenue above the original intention of the call. It is becoming an increasingly common practice, not just for pure revenue-generating call centres but for customer service centres as well.

Staff Shrinkage: the percentage of time that employees are not available to handle calls. It is classified as non-productive time, and is made up of meeting and training time, breaks, paid time off, off-phone work, and general unexplained time where agents are not available to handle customer interactions.

Blockage:a measure of accessibility that indicates what percentage of customers will not be able to get in touch with the contact centre at a given time due to insufficient network facilities.

Cost Per Call: A major factor determining revenue is the cost of running the organisation. A common measure of operational efficiency is cost incurred for each minute of handling the call workload, commonly referred to as Cost per Call. This cost per call can be simply a labor cost per call, or it can be a fully loaded rate that includes payroll in addition to telecommunications, facilities, and other services costs.

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