Call Center KPIs For Customer Success- Guide

Call center KPIs are a set of metrics that measure key characteristics of a call center. They are usually used to ensure that the organization meets its objectives and should be considered during the call center performance planning.

These metrics can be divided into two main categories: internal and external.

The internal metrics are focused on measuring the results of your work as a customer care representative, like average handle time, first call resolution, percentage of calls blocked, and average calls per day or calls per hour. The external metrics measure the quality of the customer experience by tracking customer satisfaction scores and other related metrics.

Customer care representatives must keep a constant tab on all the key call center KPIs to understand how well they are performing their service to customers and whether they are meeting .

the business's expectations. Employers can use this information to improve call center processes, leading to better customer satisfaction and retention rates.

This article is a comprehensive guide about all the crucial call center KPIs an agent must consider and track to ensure customer satisfaction in every call.

Call Center Terms to Know

Before we delve deeper into the call center KPIs, let's know some critical terms that must be regularly tracked and analyzed to improve the overall customer effort score.

BPO/BPM - Business Processing Outsourcers, commonly termed BPO, provide business process operations to various clients. They are now known as BPM or Business Process Management companies in this digital age. BPM services include payroll, human resources (HR), accounting, and customer/call center relations.

IVR - IVR, or Interactive Voice Response, is an automated telephony system used to gather information about the nature of the call and direct the call to the appropriate departments.

Skills-Based Routing - Skill-Based Routing or SBR is a tool used in an organization to effectively match and direct customer queries or grievances to the best-suited associates based on their skill sets.

Virtual Bots - Virtual Bots, commonly known as ChatBots or Voice Bots, use artificial intelligence and machine learning to answer customers' basic queries via either a chat messenger or automated voice replies.

Canned Responses - Canned Responses are predetermined, scripted responses that allow associates to respond quickly and efficiently to a customer query or grievance.

Self-Service - Self-Service is proactive support for customers who want to find the solution to their problem by themselves rather than interacting with an associate.

CRM Platform - CRM or Customer Relationship Management is a tool employed by an organization to effectively capture and manage interactions for both current and prospective customers.

Assisted Service - Assisted Service provides various solutions to those customers who need help finding an answer to their query by initiating an interaction with a trained associate.

Customer Journey - Customer Journey, as the term suggests, is a customer's complete journey and experience when interacting with a brand.

Digital Customer Experience - Digital Customer Experience is the digital interaction and the resulting impression of a customer when interacting with a brand.

Call Center KPIs

Here's a list of call center KPIs that you must analyze as your key performance indicators to understand how you can improve your customer satisfaction score:

NPS - Net Promoter Score, or NPS, is a customer satisfaction benchmark and one of the critical call center KPIs used to evaluate the chances of customers recommending the brand to their contacts. It ranges from -100 to 100, which measures negative and positive reviews.

Wary of hitting a low net promoter score? Talk to your supervisor to proactively reach out to the detractors and get the feedback loop closed. The feedback will help you gain insights into areas where you are faltering, and can improve and uplift the entire call center performance . A root cause analysis will also help you determine the main factor impacting your NPS.

TPH - TPH, or Transactions Per Hour, is a crucial call center KPI that analyzes an individual or team's transactions per hour. This is a significant performance measure.

CSAT-CSAT, otherwise known as Customer Satisfaction, is a score to measure the level of satisfaction of a customer when it comes to transactions or interactions with the brand.

Hone your skills of attending to customers via multiple channels. This way, you can attend to more than one customer at a time. However, remember to take a breather between customer calls to prevent burnout.

CSAT - CSAT, otherwise known as Customer Satisfaction, is a score to measure the level of satisfaction of a customer when it comes to transactions or interactions with the brand

While a low customer satisfaction score can be a dampener, it allows you to determine areas where you need to improve. Make your interaction with customers more personal. Improve your knowledge base constantly to provide correct information to your customers without much delay

AHT - AHT or Average Handle Time is a call center KPI used to calculate the total average duration of a single interaction between a customer and an associate. It helps assess the associate's efficiency and the organization as a whole.

Begin with cutting down the call greetings. Most customers may strictly mean business and may not be interested in exchanging greetings. Get in touch with your supervisors to listen to call recordings. Create a list of common troubleshooting questions and get the answers ready. It expedites the process of resolving customer issues.

FCR - FCR or First-Call Resolution is another crucial call center KPI used to identify an associate's ability to resolve customer queries or grievances in the initial call without any follow-ups or repeats.

Ensure that you have access to all the necessary information in one place. It will enable you to answer more questions in a single call. This increases the chance of first-call resolution and includes customers' waiting time. Conduct a deep-dive analysis to identify issues not solved in the first call. Create a separate knowledge repository to expedite the resolution of the problems identified within the initial calls answered.

EWT - EWT or Expected Wait Time is the approximate waiting time, which is informed to a customer before they are connected to an associate. If not appropriately optimized, a high EWT or an improper conveyance of the same can result in a massive volume of abandoned calls.

You may be handling calls that do not match your expertise or your current bandwidth limits the number of customer calls you are taking. Both of these situations invariably result in long call queues and EWT. Widen your expertise to address customer issues in various areas. Or talk to your supervisor to set an optimized call center scheduling to route calls to available agents with the requisite expertise to handle the calls.

Wrap Time & ACW - Wrap Time or Wrap-up time is the amount of time taken by an associate in completing ACW or After Call Work, the documentation process for each interaction, once the exchange has been concluded.

An easy way to reduce wrap time is to create a standard operating procedure to help you fix the right amount of details you will need to take down. Reach out to your supervisors to help them understand tasks that prolong the wrap-up time and can be automated. Integrating a customer relationship management tool with your legacy call center software will get half of the jobs done on your behalf, effectively bringing down the average wrap time.

To Conclude

In the end, there are dozens of potential call center metrics to track, but they all boil down to a few simple goals. Call center KPIs should be easily accessible, understood, comprehensive (encompassing data across many different aspects of the business), and relevant (meaning that they reflect performance against value-added activities). Most companies use several different KPIs in their call center—but it's always essential to ensure each one serves a specific purpose and is necessary to measure the desired outcome.