
A company may believe it has the finest contact centre, however, if it tracks and reports the right KPIs & statistics, it won’t be sure.
Call centres, unlike most other divisions, have metrics that allow them to track performance minute by minute. Although each KPI has importance, call centres should concentrate on a tiny proportion of them to prioritise and make successful judgments, as they do in call center in Kenya.
Companies must also be aware of the pitfalls and weaknesses of individual KPIs to avoid focusing solely on a single objective, which could lead to unintended effects, including an agent pushing a consumer off the call without trying to solve the problem.
Following are some of the most significant customer care call centre KPIs and metrics to pay attention to.
First contact resolution
FCR (first contact resolution) is a metric for the customer experience that assesses how often an agent can address a client’s problem in a single conversation. Several customer-focused metrics, such as customers’ contentment and customer effort, are heavily influenced by FCR.
The most effective technique to calculate FCR is to analyse data to see if a client rescheduled with the same or comparable concern within a specific time frame.
Asking the consumer right near the end of a telephone conversation or surveying them afterwards to see if they had FCR are two more techniques of assessing FCR. The challenge with these strategies is that contact centre administration may not be capable of determining whether or not the agent addressed appropriately the core source of the problem immediately after a conversation.
Level of service
The number of inquiries that agents respond to within a selected timeframe is measured by service level, which is a customer experience metric.
An agent’s service level objective is to address 80 per cent of callers within thirty seconds (80/30). It is a useful KPI for ensuring that a contact centre has adequate resources for inbound telephone service and also that client call wait times are reasonable.
The problem with this metric has been that it overlooks all inquiries that don’t meet the service level target in terms of the waiting period. The service level metric eliminates the 20percent of inquiries that operators do not respond to within 30 seconds if they meet their 80/30 goal.
Plenty of the callers that operators do not respond only within service level expect a reply within thirty seconds, however, there is a gaping hole in this statistic if a substantial percentage of callers would have to wait 1 minute or beyond for an operator to respond to their call.
Call centres must additionally track KPIs such as the percentage of inquiries that operators respond in gaps longer than thirty seconds to make sure that employees deliver a great customer experience to a diverse group of clients.
Abandoned call rate
The call abandonment percentage is a customer experience metric that determines how many callers hang up even before the operator picks up the call.
The amount of time a customer waits in line, alternative methods of interaction, the severity of a request, and if there are additional businesses in the marketplace that customers may readily switch to rather than all impact the abandonment rate. To build a successfully targeted abandonment rate, contact centres must first know their callers’ demands as well as their rivals.
To analyse trends & detect difficulties, contact centre administration should tally and monitor all dropped calls.
Several businesses do not track dropped calls within particular time frames as they assume the caller won’t give them enough chance to react. The following are two typical examples:
- Whenever a caller hangs up in a short period, like 5 seconds;
- or when a caller hangs up within such a level of service goal, like thirty seconds for an 80/30 level of service objective.
To analyse patterns and detect difficulties, the contact centre administration should register and monitor all dropped calls. For instance, a contact centre may have a 2 per cent rate of abandonment within 5 seconds that is reasonable.
Average handle time
AHT Average handle time is a contact centre productivity metric that quantifies how long employees spend answering client calls. There are three essential components of AHT:
- average conversation time — the amount of time an agent spends talking to a caller;
- average wait time — the amount of time a caller is placed on wait by an operator; and
- Post call work time – refers to the time it requires an operator to complete follow-up work after a caller has hung up.
Many firms prefer to ignore this statistic when evaluating agent performance since it encourages agents to hurry telephone calls to meet their AHT targets. However, AHT remains a critical indicator for determining if agents require extra training or if system enhancements will increase efficiency and help resource management.
Instead of having a particularly big target, organisations should create an appropriate AHT range. Because AHT differs per organization, the spectrum may vary based on the industry. For instance, in commerce, an accepted AHT would be 3 to 5 minutes, whereas, in technical assistance, it might be fifteen to twenty minutes. Contact centres can avoid issues like recurrent callers and operator uncertainty by selecting a range to hit.
Other call-related metrics
While all these KPIs are some of the most critical for contact centres to track, they are far from comprehensive. Here are some additional indicators to examine for contact centres:
- blocked call rate
- the average response time
- contentment of customers
- customer initiative
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- dial transfer rate
- amount of calls in queue
- the longest time on hold
- the volume of callback messages
- Rates of self-service resolution
- rate of call escalation
- the total number of calls handled
- rate of occupancy
- rate of use
- shrinkage
- Availability of the system
- Patterns of call arrival
- rate of attrition
Understanding the customer experience, improving productivity, and driving agent efficiency all require monitoring and reporting KPIs and data. The goal is to focus on the right KPIs and metrics and to grasp their worth to make better decisions.