6 Factors to Keep in Mind When Setting Contact Center KPIs

Written by KOVA Corp

Setting key performance indicators (KPIs) is key to your contact center’s success in hitting your business goals. However, contact center managers aren’t always clear on what KPIs need to be in place and how to tie them to the correct metrics to ensure that their operation is performing at an optimum level. If setting KPIs has been a challenge for your organization, consider these six common ones used by contact centers to measure their performance. Follow them as a guideline to establish your own:

Service Level 

This KPI is important because it establishes the basic goal of your contact center performance. Determine what your contact center’s baseline service level should be — or what has been outlined in your service level agreement — and monitor it in real time. For example, you may have a goal of taking 80 percent of calls with 15 seconds. Your performance should always reach your set goal or higher. If you are consistently failing to meet this goal, investigate why and make corrections.

Call Resolution

You also need to measure the outcome of each call handled by your agents. Tracking and monitoring this KPI is critical in measuring customer satisfaction and agent performance, with the goal being to resolve every issue on the first call. This KPI could help identify whether a specific agent—or the entire procedure—is the root of the problem.

Customer Satisfaction

This call center metric can be used to measure how customers rate your performance. This information is typically collected by taking surveys after an agent interaction. It’s important to try to capture as many details as possible and find out how they felt about the quality of the call, whether or not their issue was resolved, and how long it took for the issue to be resolved. This KPI can also help identify whether a specific agent receives consistently low ratings or determine if procedures allow for agents to successful resolve issues.

Average Handle Time

This KPI measures the average time spent on a call as well as any administrative actions or reporting associated with the call. Using this KPI will help you get a better understanding of call efficiency, agent efficiency, and customer satisfaction. It also helps when considering cost per contact, another KPI that you can use when conducting cost-benefit analysis.

Active and Waiting Calls

This metric can be measured along with average handle time and used to measure call volume in real-time. Agents should aim to resolve calls in a timely manner and quickly transition to the next caller in the queue without sacrificing good service. The goal is to minimize call abandonment (which can be established as a separate KPI) and increase the number of customers being connected to agents and having their issues resolved. The goal is to get to callers before they reach their threshold for waiting. It’s important to have adequate staffing in place to manage the call volume as this has significant impact on this KPI.

Agent Performance

This KPI should measure how your agents perform in a number of categories and can be analyzed in conjunction with agent adherence. Agent adherence tells you how well an agent performs during their shift and how efficient they are with their time. Adherence is a key factor in determining call center cost, and measurement of adherence should be comprehensive, including activities like reporting and any coaching associated with performance.

These are just some of the many KPIs that your call center can use to measure its performance. Before choosing KPIs, list what areas of your organization that you wish to measure. You could have just hired a group of new agents, so agent performance is one to consider. If your center recently changed procedures, you’ll want to consider the service level and average handle time KPIs. Each contact center, though they have the same purpose, will require a different set of KPIs.

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