May 11th, 2021

Efficient contact center performance: key metrics you need to measure

• Call Center Efficienсy

You can’t improve what you can’t measure. To make a contact or call center performance more efficient, managers and supervisors need to know for sure what metrics to track and where to direct resources for managing performance.

It’s crucial that contact centers look at key metrics using the best tools to analyze their processes. This gives you an objective view of performance, especially when omnichannel software is being used and agents are handling communications through calls, messages, WhatsApp, etc.

In this article, we’re going to look at the key metrics you can use to enhance efficiency in your business.

KPIs for sales and outbound teams

• Average Waiting Time (AWT). Modern contact centers leverage outbound dialers to eliminate manual number input. Instead of initiating calls themselves, agents wait for the dialer to provide them with the next call. This accumulates into the Average Waiting Time (AWT), and the longer it takes to connect agents with clients, it leads to fewer calls being made in a day.

  Daily or weekly tracking of the AWT is crucial for the success of any outbound campaign, signaling whether dialer settings need to be changed in order to minimize the AWT.

• Abandonment Rate (AR). The Abandonment Rate (AR) is the percentage of calls that are prematurely terminated by a caller. It results from the dialer initiating more calls than there are agents available to achieve a lower AWT.

  So when the person picks up an incoming call and nobody is there to assist them, they will most likely hang up. In reality, losing too many calls negatively affects customer satisfaction, so tracking the AR, sometimes legally enforced to be less than 3%, is essential to ensure the quality of a campaign.

  The same metric can be monitored in inbound contact centers as well, with high ARs most likely related to clients who are tired of waiting in long queues (more on this later).

• Answer Seizure Ratio (ASR). The Answer Seizure Ratio (ASR) is the number of calls that are answered out of the total calls made, including the ones that go to voicemail. This metric is important, as it clearly indicates the receptiveness of leads in your calling list – and the higher it is, the better.

  Advanced software solutions are also able to detect calls that are picked up by answering machines and separate them from real agent-client conversations, providing more accurate statistics on the results of your outbound campaign.

Key performance metrics for customer service

• Queue Abandonment Rate. When it comes to delivering exceptional customer service, the Queue Abandonment Rate is perhaps the most critical metric to measure. A high number of pre-queue abandons may indicate your IVR needs some improvement, while calls dropped in-queue usually suggest the customers have to wait in line for too long.

  Tracking these metrics in real time gives campaign managers and supervisors the chance to appropriately reassign agents between queues.

• Average Speed of Answer (ASA). The speed of answer is widely used by managers to assess their team’s efficiency and client accessibility.

  It’s calculated as the total length of customer wait time divided by the total number of calls answered. The average can be assessed for the overall call volume or for any particular queue depending on your needs.

  The ASA is often a key part of the SLA (Service Level Agreement) – a guarantee that a certain percentage of calls will be answered within an agreed amount of time.

• Average Call Duration (ACD). The Average Call Duration (ACD) is the average length of all answered calls, an all-purpose parameter that can be measured separately for agent teams, performance of individual agents, specific queues, and so on.

  If an agent’s average handling time is too long, they may be struggling to get to the root of customers’ problems. However, if it’s too short they may be rushing and customers may not be getting the attention they need.

  As the numbers may differ for each use case and campaign, the optimal ACD is something every contact center has to figure out internally. Supervisors can also analyze the weekly deviation from the mean for each agent to identify top performers and those in need of more training or resources.

Why you need to measure these metrics

Properly integrating these key performance metrics will help your contact center grow and achieve new goals. With contact center software like Voiso, you can easily measure all of these metrics – and 40+ more – both in real time and retrospectively via Voiso’s dashboard widgets and advanced historical reporting.

Start tracking today to deliver the customer service your clients expect tomorrow.