Contact center is the place where most of the first interactions between your company and your customers take place. As per in-person meetings, you probably won’t have a second chance to make a good first impression. That is why it is crucial your agents have the right competencies and the appropriate tech applications to ensure top-quality support to customers, solving their issues quickly, possibly exceeding their expectations.
Giving due weight to contact center KPIs can help you to meet this challenge and increase customer satisfaction.
Which are the 5 Contact Center KPIs you must measure for success?
Let’s analyze together the most important KPIs you need to keep under control to provide your customers with an outstanding customer experience:
1- Average Handle Time (AHT) – is a metric that measures the average amount of time an agent spends on a call with the customer. It comprehends both the time spent actively on the conversation with the caller, the total hold time and the after-call work, that is the post-call processing. AHT varies according to customer issues’ complexity and to the time the agent uses for the after-call actions (e.g. write notes, scheduling follow-up, update colleagues). This KPI is fundamental, as it contributes to painting the portrait of how the service is performing.
AHT = (Total talk time + total hold time + after call work time) / total number of calls
This measure can be an indicator of the agents’ performance but not necessarily the shorter the AHT is, the better the quality of the service: if an agent is more concerned on closing tickets rather than solving issues, its performance will be poor, even with a lower AHT. With that said, there are several best practices you can adopt to reduce it:
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- implement a contact center with a queue management service that efficiently routes calls to the most appropriate operator, according to the call distribution algorithm that best suits your business’ needs;
- plan an appropriate training for operators, to put them in a position where they can solve customers’ requests directly, reducing hold times during the conversation;
- make sure your contact center is integrated with your CRM software. CRM integration empowers agents as they can read customers’ record history and add their additional notes in a few seconds.
AHT is one of the most important key indicators for agents’ performance because, in an ideal scenario, the issue should be solved before closing the conversation. This leads to the second KPI of this article.
2 – First Call Resolution Rate (FCR) – FCR measures the number of customer interactions that your support staff is able to resolve at the first time of asking. FCR is an indicator of your support service quality because it is proof of your agents’ ability to immediately meet customers’ requests.
The higher your FCR is the more satisfied your customers are: consider that 82% of people say they decide to change supplier because of poor customer support. To increase your FCR you can follow the advices of the previous point because, as shown before, the two aspects are strictly related. Keep in mind also that lowering FCR you will not have the same customers calling a second, or a third time, so you will save in customer service costs.
3- Average Hold Time in the Queue – This key performance indicator measures how long the caller is placed on hold in a queue before being served by an agent. People don’t like the boring waiting time when they call a company/call center: 35% of customers will hang up the call after 1 minute of waiting and two-thirds will hang up after 3 minutes. Minimize the waiting time is essential for customer satisfaction so we advise you to:
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- choose how many agents should be active at the same time according to the average volume of calls you receive, considering a margin to deal with high peaks.
- adopt an IVR (or Automated Attendant) to welcome callers in the best way, guiding them through pre-recorded audio messages, to the most appropriate service queue.
- invest in an advanced queue management system to route incoming calls and transfer them to the caller’s desired extension (or department) without the need for a human operator. In this way your agents will receive only calls that need a human interaction, minimizing also the number of transferred calls.
Please keep in mind that Average Hold Times should not be confused with the time people are put on hold by the agent during a conversation to search for additional information or data, useful to solve their issues. This is another KPI you can track and analyze to improve your agents’ performances.
4- Call Abandonment Rate – There could be many reasons why customers abandon calls: it can be related to how you designed the queue, how much time the caller is placed on hold (as shown before), how many times the call is transferred, and also to the operator’s performance. The percentage of calls hanged up before being served or before the issues being solved is a key indicator of your support service quality. To reduce this rate you can:
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- reduce hold time in the queue (as shown before in bullet #3);
- train your agents properly to solve specific requests without transfer the call or place the call on hold;
- optimize your welcome messages to give key information and take advantage of the voice menu;
- optimize call flow routing to assign calls to the right department and the most appropriate agents.
5- Transfer Rate – This KPI is indicative of agents performance and of call routing: if it is a high number this means that your agents are not able to solve the issues customers call for, either because they have no efficient training or the calls are assigned to a wrong operator or department. We suggest you to go deeper into this, as understanding why so many calls are being transferred, can spotlight refinements points for your customer service.
Analyzing these KPIs allows you to have a clear view of your support service performances and quality and it gives you some crucial suggestions on how to plan a strategic business plan to improve it..
To go deeper into these 5 KPIs, check their expanded definitions on our website on the Knowledge Hub section.