In the era of hyper-relevance, where every company is jockeying for pole position to stay competitive and profitable, collecting actionable data from your call center KPIs is low-hanging fruit. Your center’s KPIs, or key performance indicators, give you deep insights into just how well your team’s processes work. They can also show whether you’re on track with customer expectations, or not.

Use call center KPIs and call journey reports to fill in the gaps of insight into your call center performance and customer experience. With them, you can piece together the story of your customer interactions to improve satisfaction and support agent productivity. Below, we’ve listed 10 of the most impactful metrics to measure and give you tips on how to put them into action.

5 Call Center KPIs to Improve Customer Experience

A recent report from McKinsey & Company found that when you improve your customer experience, you’ll boost your bottom line, too. In fact, organizations that focused on CX increased their sales revenue by 2–7% and profitability by 1–2%. In addition, their shareholder return increased by 7–10%. That’s no small thing. Using these five call center KPIs, you can track your customer experience and identify areas of improvement.

1. First Response Time (FRT)

FRT helps you to gauge the amount of time a customer waits on hold before connecting with an agent. Nobody likes being on hold. So, it makes sense that the quickest way to harm your customer relationship is to make them wait in lengthy call queues. In fact, as many as 73% of customers say that valuing their time is the most important thing a business can do to provide them with good customer service.

Tracking FRT ensures agents handle requests quickly and customers don’t spend excessive time on hold. Plus, when you improve FRT, you’ll likely see lower abandonment rates and higher CSAT.

2. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Your NPS helps you understand the loyalty and experience of your customers. It’s based on the response to one question: “How likely are you to recommend this agent/business to a friend or colleague on a scale of 1–10?” It’s not a secret that customers tell their friends about the products and services they trust. Brands that have loyal customers don’t just experience repeat sales — they also improve their sales pipeline.

NPS gives you valuable feedback from customers about their interactions with the call center and your products or services. With a strong NPS, you’re more likely to see positive revenue and business growth.

3. Percentage of Calls Blocked

The most aggravating thing that can happen to you as a customer is getting a busy signal when you need help. A busy tone usually results from a lack of available agents (i.e., the agent call queue is too full). Or perhaps the call center software can’t handle the current number of incoming calls. Either way, this lack of availability negatively affects your customer experience.

Track the percentage of blocked calls to assess whether you have staffing issues or need to upgrade your technology.

4. Customer Effort Score (CES)

Like NPS, customer effort score is closely linked to both customer loyalty and satisfaction. CES uses a survey to ask customers to rate the ease of their experience on a scale of 1–10.

Customers don’t want to put in effort to get a good experience. They want to be served! And if your customers are putting in lots of effort, they’re more likely to be disloyal to your brand. Disloyal customers are then more likely to spread negative reviews, halting future purchases and costing your company.

5. Call Center Attrition

High turnover and attrition rates plague call centers. But what does attrition in your call center have to do with your customers? Turns out: a lot. Burnout, disengagement, and attrition lead to poor experiences for your agents and your customers.

If agents are leaving left and right, it’s pretty safe to assume they’re unhappy. And unhappy agents typically lead to unhappy customers. Think about it, if you’re constantly in recruitment mode, that means you’re not able to spend time coaching and training your existing agents. So they’re not getting the answers they need to promptly answer your customer inquiries. Worse still, burned-out agents tend to disengage, meaning they don’t care whether your customer is happy or not.

Want to learn more about improving customer experience in your call center? Reach out to one of our consultants.

The 5 Call Center KPIs That Impact Your Agent Productivity

1. Average Handle Time (AHT)

AHT is the average time it takes an agent to complete one interaction. Customers want help fast. They’re already inconvenienced by even reaching out, making the amount of time you spend with them precious. AHT begins the second a customer initiates an interaction and includes any time on hold and the tasks that follow until the agent can start the next interaction. The lower your AHT, the higher your call center productivity.

AHT gives insights into whether agents have sufficient training to complete interactions quickly, if their workload is too much, or if they need more training.

2. Transfer Rate

The transfer rate is the number of times an agent passes along a customer to another agent during an interaction. Your customers don’t want to be transferred over and over.

Agents should be empowered to handle a customer’s inquiry without intervention from others. A high transfer rate indicates agents are missing training or the autonomy to problem-solve on their own. To boost productivity, give your agents what they need to handle interactions without transferring customers.

3. After-Call Work Time

Your agents likely complete some work after an interaction to document and prepare for the next call. But this shouldn’t take significant time. Tracking after-call work can boost efficiency and ensure agents have what they need from your call center technology.

4. Cost Per Call

Every customer interaction costs money. You can keep agents productive and lower your call center costs by tracking the cost per call. Because longer interactions often cost more, this call center KPI correlates with AHT.

Your cost per call may indicate a need for better agent support. It could also be a sign that you need to improve your self-service options, add automation and AI, and improve other interaction channels.

Learn how AI can boost your call center’s efficiency. Talk to a consultant now.

5. Average Speed of Answer (ASA)

ASA measures the time it takes for a call to be answered from the second it hits the queue. The industry standard is to answer 80% of calls in 20 seconds or less. If it’s taking more than that, it might mean your agents need more training or product knowledge to answer customer inquiries. It can also be an indicator of an understaffed center. For instance, if your average talk time is low but your ASA is high, you might not have enough agents to handle the volume of calls coming in.

Your ASA should be as short as possible. The more experienced and, more importantly, knowledgeable an agent is, the easier it is for them to cut down their ASA.

3 Key Benefits of Tracking Call Center KPIs

1. Improve Customer Satisfaction

When you know what your customers think and what they experience daily, you know how to serve them better. To improve CSAT and give customers what they actually want, track (and then respond to) your call center KPIs.

2. Optimize Agent Performance and Productivity

How can you properly invest in your agents’ performance without tracking it? Call center KPIs provide data-backed evidence about where your agents need to improve, where to fill training gaps, and how to optimize their performance.

3. Increase Operational Efficiency

Operational efficiency is critical to keep costs low and customer satisfaction high. By tracking call center KPIs, you can identify areas to improve workflows, optimize software, and streamline processes.

Ready to start improving your operational efficiency? Schedule a demo.