Today, consumers have more choices than ever when choosing a company to do business with. Since the barrier to finding alternatives is low, companies must provide a world-class customer experience to keep customers and drive more business. Call center interactions are a critical component of a company's customer service, and agents are often at the front line for providing an outstanding customer experience, especially if there’s a problem.

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Given the importance of a call center team, performance should be closely measured and monitored. Call center key performance indicators (KPIs) are an important tool in performance monitoring, and understanding which KPIs to track is essential.

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What Are Call Center KPIs?

Anyone familiar with call center management knows that monitoring metrics is essential to efficient operations. The key question is, "How do you determine the success of a call center’s performance?"

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KPIs help evaluate the overall success of your call center. KPIs help call center managers measure and track data points across all activities within a call center’s operations. They also highlight individual agent and team performance goals along with benchmarks, summarizing the customer experience your call center delivers. Objective or subjective data can be included in KPIs, and which KPIs you choose to track will depend on your organization's needs.

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Why Measure Call Center KPIs?

Call center managers have volumes of customer data coming in from various platforms that are often focused on measuring call center performance. KPIs and general metrics provide a way to monitor this data. Depending on your role, it’s likely that the KPIs you need to measure will change. Operational leaders might need one set of KPIs, but front-line agents or team leads may prefer a different set of KPIs.

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The saying "What gets measured, gets managed" is especially relevant here. Measurement and monitoring of all objective and subjective data points enable better team management and allow you to predict outcomes more accurately.

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What Matters Most When Reviewing Your Call Center's KPIs

Tracking call center KPIs helps you understand what areas of your business are affected by those metrics. Consider the following three areas to choose which KPIs matter most to your business.

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Delivering a Positive Customer Experience

Digital communications have provided customers with more options for contacting businesses, resulting in higher customer service expectations. Delivering an excellent customer experience can determine whether you retain your customers or lose them to competitors. Positive or negative experiences with your products and services are determined by how customers rate their experience, alongside other factors.It's impossible to review every customer interaction manually.

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To ensure your customers' expectations are met, consider the following:

• Were your customer's concerns resolved during their first interaction?
• Was your customer so pleased with their experience that they would recommend your services to others? (Net Promoter Score)
• How many times were your customers transferred?

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Monitoring your call center's KPIs ensures that your call center agents deliver a positive customer experience in every interaction.

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Identifying Training Opportunities

Certain KPIs can show how your customer-facing teams work together to improve the center's overall performance.

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To find areas of opportunity to train, coach and up-skill your workforce, consider:

• Do you have agents who accumulate high Average Handle Times (AHT)?
• Are there agents with excessive unavailable time for After Call Work (ACW)?
• How efficiently are agents resolving customers' issues on the first touchpoint?

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By quickly identifying training opportunities, you can provide accurate feedback on how to improve call handling.

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Driving Efficiency to Save Costs

A baseline assessment of your call center's performance is the first step toward improving efficiency. Once the baseline is established, finding inefficiencies within the business is much easier.

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Consider the following to spotlight areas of redundancy or repeated inefficiencies that could contribute to high costs:

• Are there shifting trends within the call center, such as repeat calls, with the same issue?
• What are the call center’s peak hours, and are you adequately staffed?
• Are there any product launches or marketing campaigns that affect call volume?

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When areas of redundancy or repeated inefficiencies are fixed, there's ample opportunity to reduce operating costs while improving the customer experience.

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Key Takeaways on Call Center KPIs

Call center KPIs can be tracked in dozens of ways, but ultimately, measuring what matters most to your team and business comes down to your priorities. Making your call center's KPIs work for you will help your company balance operational efficiency while cultivating a positive customer experience.

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Learn more about improving your call center customer experience with Brightmetrics™ here.

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