Wondering how to know whether your call center is performing above expectations? Is your call center agent giving his or her best for every call? Was the customer satisfied with the response? These questions must be asked regularly to ensure that the contact center management is on the right track.

Every contact center has to deal with numerous customer calls on services and issues and ensure that these calls are satisfactorily answered. Measuring the performance of your contact center is essential to determine whether they are achieving the desired goals or straying from it.

Making use of call center key performance indicators enable businesses to take stock of their day-to-day contact center operations as well as to make appropriate corrections to rectify the situation. If you do not do that, the following can happen: failure to resolve customer issues, leading to increasing dissatisfaction and consequentially, the loss of customers. A competent and experienced call center support outsourcing service provider would lessen your worries in this regard, as they would already have expertise in this area to monitor the performance and sustain productivity.
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Top Ten Call Center Performance Metrics:

Here are the top ten call center performance metrics that are used to monitor the working of the contact center. Implementing them would help companies and their outsourcing partners enhance their contact center performance standards:

1. First Call Resolution or Best Contact Resolution:

This is one of the most important metrics, as it is believed to have the most impact on customer satisfaction. It measures the number of customer calls received and handled, which leads to no further customer calls or follow-up. The customer’s issues/complaints are resolved on the first call itself. A high FCR rate indicates good performance of the contact center and assures businesses of continuous customer satisfaction.

2. Call Abandonment Rates:

CAR is another critical metric that measures the number of calls abandoned by customers before they connect with an agent. Higher CAR rates may predict the likelihood of customers shifting their loyalties to competitors. This serves as a warning sign for companies.

3. Call Blockage (Percentage of Calls Blocked):

This metric provides important information on where the contact center is lacking and where it needs to pull up. It measures the number of calls blocked, unfulfilled, or unanswered by contact center operatives because of various reasons. A high percentage of calls blocked do not bode well for current contact centers and as a result, managers would need to re-visit existing contact center practices.

4. Call Quality:

An important customer service parameter is the call quality metric. This helps the contact center management evaluate the overall caller experience and ascertain whether the agent-customer conversations are happening as per the desired trajectory.

5. Service Level:

This is another important performance indicator and it provides a direct estimate of the effectiveness of the call center operations. It measures the number of calls answered within a specific period and thus provides feedback on service quality. A high value of service level indicates a greater degree of customer satisfaction. This is a must-measure metric for tracking call center performance.

6. Average Handling Time:

This used to be one of the most important metrics to evaluate the contact center performance. It continues to be in use as it provides information on the efficiency of the process. The indicator measures the amount of time required to handle a call. This time includes the talk time, on-hold time and hang-up time.

7. Schedule Adherence:

The schedule adherence parameter provides information on the efficiency of an agent. This metric evaluates whether the agent is completing the specified daily tasks in the specific time. Hence, it can be used for workforce optimization.

8. Average Time Spent in Queue:

This refers to the total time spent by customers in queue divided by the total number of customer calls answered by the agent. If this time is in excess, it means that there are serious problems with the customer service operations.

9. Customer Satisfaction:

This KPI directly estimates customer satisfaction. There are no mathematical methods to quantify it. Rather, a contact center gets an idea of customer satisfaction using post-call automated surveys, callbacks, IVR based surveys or follow-up emails.

10. Agent Occupancy Rate:

If you want an estimate of the productivity of the contact center agent, then this very important indicator can provide you that information. Agent occupancy rate is a measure of the time spent by an agent in call handling versus the time-spent sitting and waiting for a call. Lower the occupancy rate, more productive is the agent and more focused is he on completing the tasks. However, this would require a higher number of agents. Ultimately, this rate is useful for contact centers as it helps them strive to achieve greater levels of customer satisfaction while keeping costs down.

Making use of these metrics as part of your contact center performance strategies will definitely help in creating the right management strategy that will bring in the desired revenues while ensuring that customer satisfaction remains the top priority.