What are the most important contact center metrics to track, and how can you use them to improve performance?

Let me highlight that CSAT & NPS are two different metrics. We cant use CSAT to measure NPS or vice versa. While both CSAT & NPS are CX metrics they both differ in measuring customer satisfaction. CSAT looks at how your customers felt while speaking to your rep - Short term CX related to a feature or specific interaction, whereas NPS looks at long term customer advocacy or loyalty, basically provides a longer, broader and high level insights into customer sentiments. At the end both provide crucial insights to make data driven decisions to improve CX.

Absolutely agree, however I might recommend to use them from time to time, during an special promotion or campaign for example.

Both are helpful and very important. We should always be looking at CSAT and NPS. These go hand in hand, but NPS would get the nod from me with regard to how we are actually doing. If a customer goes out of their way to recommend you, that is huge.

A happy employee is a happy customer. Once the employer recognizes and incentifies it's employee through their hard work and recognizes them customers will be happy.

CSAT is a MUST HAVE metric in contact center, since from customer's perspective the main job as contact center is how to satisfy and delivered unforgetable CX to them. Meanwhile for company's perspective the CSAT as an insight that the service provide by our frontliners will continue to support our sales performance as they 100% trust to our company both service and the products we sell.

FCR is definetely a metric that could deliver cost saving! and it works!! if you equipped your agents with good knowledge, they can answer all queries and as an impact the AHT will be short and eventually will impact to cost saving.

FCR is the most important among those six. And the main reason is that it respond for basic need and reflects pure sense of CC existence. Nobody calls CC to be treated kindly or just have small talk. Our job is makes things DONE. This is why FCR is main driver of NPS

To me it is not about individual metrics. It is taking a combination of metrics and letting it tell a story of effectiveness and efficiency. For example looking at ACD/ACW/AHT as individual metrics may provide an initial inaccurate indication. The teammate with the highest ACD and lowest AHT may be seen as the pride possession of a contact center, their rockstar that is achieving the contact centers target of a certain AHT. What would be missed is that the person with the higher AHT may have much higher quality interactions leading to higher FCR, improved referrals, higher service scores. So individual metrics are one dimensional factors, while taking multiple factors and using a correlation and causation approach tells the real story.

FCR is an indicator of how well thought your process is and how appropriately trained your staff is. Furthermore not aiming for FCR causes twice the volume to flow in, increasing expenses related to staffing for the added volume.

The most important call center metrics include first call resolution (FCR), average handling time (AHT), customer satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and agent performance metrics like adherence and quality scores. By tracking these metrics, call centers can identify areas for improvement, optimize processes, provide targeted training, enhance customer experiences, and ultimately increase operational efficiency and customer satisfaction levels. Regular analysis and adjustments based on these metrics are crucial for ongoing performance improvement.

In all the contact center KPIs or matrixes, C-SAT is the single most important and independent matrix that directly empowers customers to share their verdict. While all other KPIs are internally measured and have different success criteria, C-SAT is directly measured by the customer and is an honest reflection of what customers perceive about the quality of interaction. Insights from C-Sat feedback are always helpful to introspect internal processes and policies, identify the important areas and build action points to improve further.

FCR_first call resolution is one of the most important, followed by quality of the service offered, this shows that the agent clearly understands the system and products and this leads to customer satisfaction hence sustainability

AHT can help to messure topics and standars, however we should not work by using a generic and unic AHT. We should base this metric on different call typologies, brands, quality requierements, etc

AHT relates to people development at your contact center operation, long AHT means there's something problem with your agents. You need to improve immediately once it happened with many kind of training, role play, etc to make a better AHT.

What is the Globally accepted AHT for an Incoming call? Many ask this question and struggle to find a perfect answer. Well, for me, there is no such timings. AHT of your call centre purely depends on your business nature and operation model. Hence, first do an analysis of your call centre data to understand your own present AHT and then work backwards to see how you could reduce the same.

SL should be communicated to the teams involved, otherwise it will be your SL but to the concerned it will be a pool of complaints.

Pretty much agree, service level helps us to ensure we are responding to our customers efficientely. Also to find out if we do count with the right resources to assume back loads.

SL basically can be customized based on the mature of the center. Don't put too high if you don't have enough resource! just make it what's make your team comfortable with the SL target.

SL is very important for large contact centres. It allows us to mesure the overall success of the contact centre. It also allows us to identify downtime where we can take employees offline for coachings and other activities

SL is very important for large contact centres. It allows us to mesure the overall success of the contact centre. It also allows us to identify downtime where we can take employees offline for coachings and other activities

According to me it does not matter how much time or effort you put in performance or training, if you cannot keep your talent motivated and need to start again, all the profit you make with those small windows of high performance gets eaten up by the investment you put in hiring and training.

Agent Turnover in my opinion highly relates to contact center with big size. Meanwhile for those who in the small size, I think it is not to important to measure it. also for centers who is managed by in-house don't need this.

Agent Turnover in Contact Centers is a crucial metric that Leadership should continually review. While it is not the most important of the metrics mentioned, it can have a ripple effect on all of the other mentioned metrics. The typical thought is that higher tenure (*ie less turnover) should equal increased agent knowledge and effectiveness and in-turn, better interactions for customers.

AT is useful in two different angles. On common practice, it gives you reasons why your agents are leaving. On the other hand, it will be also useful in designing your training plan for new commers. I.e. if your turn over ratio is high (due to any reason), it will indicate that you need a fast track.onboarding process to manage the operation

This is ridiculous. Measuring how many people leave an organization is the equivalent of putting the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. What every organization should be doing is measuring happiness/satisfaction and understanding the joys and the pains of the team. Put a guardrail at the clifftop.

A well built QA team or grid can do two things Solidify your process and help with FCR Allow involvement from different members to influence, discuss and improve on our current processes. Agents are your first line of defense and a well of knowledge. Involve them in the process and always value their input.

CSAT and NPS are good and effective ways to measure customer satisfaction. CSAT is a good way to measure touchpoint effectiveness, and NPS provides invaluable insight on how the customer feels about the product and service as a whole.. Another area that is of significant importance is the effectiveness of a robust internal quality monitoring process that is accompanied by sound coaching and development. This has become a blind spot within some customer care teams.

Definetely essential for a contact centre. Weekly evaluations help us to identify points of improvement and keep agents motivated in their work. Calibration sessions are also important between QA and management team. This will ensure cohesive coachings.

Definetely needed. Daily quality evaluations help us to identify either strenthness and weaknesses what will be useful to improve sales.

In any contact center you need to quality check. More importantly, you need to coach to it and even more importantly you need to follow up.

Don’t focus on one metric, you will end up with an unbalanced view. Contact centres are way too complicated systems to try and dumb it down to a single metric. Think about choosing some metrics that are central to your vision, values and business outcomes . I would focus on a balance of FCR, customer satisfaction and employee engagement…. These will give you a balanced view of your performance

All of these are good to measure, but I believe the ultimate KPI in how you are driving a good CX is Customer Effort. How easy do you make for people to do business with you? High wait times, abandons, hold times, agent knowledge and was the issue resolved on the first call are all impacts to Customer Effort. I don’t know that many have a way to track that other than post call surveys or sentiment analysis. Maybe there is a formula that can combine all these KPIs to give an effort score. The easier we make it for our customers the more they will want to do business with us.

Call center metrics and KPIs are essential for measuring and improving the performance of customer service teams. I would also like to add the below to the list. -Calls transfer rate: This metric focuses on the calls that are internally transferred from one agent to another. Higher transfer rates tell you that the agents are not trained well or equipped to handle customer queries. - Repeat Call Rate: This metric measures the percentage of calls that are made by customers who have already called about the same issue. HRC rate indicates that issues are not being resolved on the first attempt, which leads to increased customer frustration and longer handle times.

While metrics are vital for workforce management and gauging performance, the success of a contact center extends beyond numerical indicators. Building a successful center involves fostering a positive and collaborative work culture, investing in agent training and development, and prioritizing customer-centric approaches. Effective leadership, open communication, and a commitment to continuous improvement are equally essential components for creating a thriving contact center environment that goes beyond the numbers.

In my experience, this is still a people business. Don't get me wrong. It's mandatory to track and action KPIs like SL, ACR, etc. to support P&L bottom line. Nevertheless, from my perspective, the key to keep a healty balanced scorecard is focus in the same way on your staff development. They are the ones doing the magic. All the above recommendations will be achievable if you provide with training about the call center management and you strengthen discipline. Besides, provide with tools like a call model, so everyone feels comfortable speaking to customers and adding value on each interaction, making sure the CX is enhanced on every call