How to Successfully Manage Your Contact Center
Metrics to monitor and act on
Today’s contact centers handle a lot of calls, emails, and chats with massive amounts of information coming in and going out. Given the large volume of contacts handled, the challenge becomes knowing how the contact center is performing and how to improve. Over the past couple of decades, as contact centers have grown, a number of different metrics have emerged that enable call center managers to track very specific actions within their centers. In this article, we’ll take a look at the metrics most critical for successfully managing your contact center including what they are and why they are important.
METRICS TO MEASURE
First Call Resolution: FCR measures the number of customer calls or contacts required to resolve an issue. If the issue can be resolved within the first call, this yields a high FCR rate for the contact center. First Call Resolution is so vital because it directly impacts customer satisfaction. When a company has a strong FCR, agents normally do not have to transfer or escalate calls. And customers rarely need to call back for the same issue. Research shows that a decrease in FCR directly correlates with lower customer satisfaction. Quick resolution during the first contact, results in a happy customer. However, we suggest that having slightly longer Average Handle Times is well-worth it if you can resolve the customer’s issue on the first call.
Call Abandonment Rates: CAR measures the number of calls where customers are hanging up before they actually connect with an agent. When the CAR is high, this usually indicates that the customer is waiting on hold too long or the IVR is confusing. If this is the case, the likelihood of customers going elsewhere increases. CAR is an important metric to measure because it directly correlates to customer satisfaction.
Anyone with an ACD (automatic call distributor) has the ability to measure this metric. You can calculate the call abandonment rate by dividing the amount of abandoned calls by the number of total inbound calls. Generally, a 2% abandonment rate is very good, with 5% as the general goal.
Average Handling Time: AHT measures the amount of time that is required to handle a call from a customer. This includes talk time, the amount of time on-hold, and hang-up time. This is an important metric to measure because it provides insight as to how the call center is performing and how quickly they are able to address the needs of the caller. If the AHT is too short or too long, this could indicate an issue and would warrant further investigation. Additionally, research is showing that more and more people have less patience for waiting on hold. Microsoft found that U.S. customers have the lowest tolerance for hold time among the several countries it looked at in a recent study. It found that only 43% of Americans are willing to wait on hold for 1-5 minutes. 39% are willing to wait 5-10 minutes. While there is no standard for this metric, we recommend working to keep your hold times well below 10 minutes depending on the complexity of your industry and types of calls.
Service Level/Response Time: This is a very important metric to measure because it shows how accessible the contact center is to customers who reach out. Service level can be defined as the number of contacts answered in a certain amount of time. For example, 80% of calls will be answered within 20 seconds. Response time deals with the transactions that don’t require immediate attention, such as e-mails. Response time is typically measured as 100% of e-mails will be answered within 24 hours.
You can use this formula to calculate service levels:
Service level = [ Number of calls answered within the service level threshold] / [Number of calls offered] * 100.
Schedule Adherence: This metric helps us understand the efficiency of an individual agent and whether or not they are managing their time and performing their tasks as needed. This particular metric is becoming increasingly more important within the call center because this pertains to what the agent can actually control. Agents don’t have control over the number of calls that come in but they can control how they manage their own time. This metric is a good barometer of call center management. If an agent is being properly trained to handle their tasks with the knowledge and the tools needed to do the job, then their efficiency greatly improves. If the agent’s schedule adherence is efficient, then the other metrics such as FCR and AHT have a way of improving as well.
Schedule adherence is measured by taking the total time a call center agent is available and dividing it by the time they are scheduled to work, expressed as a percentage. Schedule adherence can take into account time spent on breaks or doing non-call related work.
Call Scoring Call Scoring is the evaluation of phone call data against a defined performance standard, usually for the purpose of scoring customer service agents. Call scoring can help teams understand metrics like sales agent script compliance, effective rebuttals and much more. Once you’ve determined the metrics that make up a successful customer interaction between the agent and the customer, the next step is to record the calls and evaluate the interaction. This is a manual process where quality evaluators listen to the calls and score them against this set of criteria. A best practice is to score 6 calls per agent per month which will provide ample data for coaching them towards improvement.
Customer Satisfaction: This metric is truly the most critical and is the over-arching goal of every contact center. Simply put: if customers are happy with the service you provide, they will tend to be loyal to your company, which impacts profits and ultimately, employee morale. Measuring Customer Satisfaction is essential and the most efficient way to do this is typically via IVR-based surveys that happen immediately after the customer’s interaction with the agent. At this point, the interaction is fresh on their mind and the opportunity to get clear, usable information is best. This metric not only tells you how the customer feels but also informs the manager how the contact center is performing as well.
Agent Turnover Rate It could be argued that Contact Centers have one of the highest turnover rates in any industry. Penny Reynolds, Founder of the Call Center School, says average turnover rate for the call center industry can be as high as the triple digits! Turnover is very costly for contact centers as it leads to increased training costs, staffing shortages, and inconsistent service. It is critical to measure your agent turnover rate and then put practices into place to improve in this area. A strong agent retention program that creates happy agents goes a long way at improving all of these other metrics.
NOW, WHAT?
Now that you know the most important contact center metrics to measure, the next step is to define your KPIs or Key Performance Indicators. These are essentially the goals that you’d like your contact center to achieve. Every business is unique and will have different KPIs for their contact center. They may even have different KPIs for different types of calls. For example, a phone call asking for insurance coverage information will be very different than someone calling to book a cruise.
Once you have identified your KPIs, the next step is to determine the best way to accurately measure them and then how you will act on the data.
At Centris, we know that managing a contact center including the agents, technology, and infrastructure is complex. For more than 20 years, we have been providing nearshore contact center outsourcing for a variety of industries. If you’d like to learn more about how Centris can help you improve your contact center metrics, let’s talk!
