As a call center manager, maintaining quality customer and employee experience is key to your job description. And let’s face it, your success criteria rely on how happy your customers are after every single interaction. But your team can only create happy customers if they’re also satisfied and productive. To track productivity and satisfaction, use call center performance metrics.

Customer experience is becoming more important by the day. It determines what brands dominate the market and which ones fall behind. In fact, 81% of organizations cite customer experience as a competitive differentiator. And as many as 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience.

But to cultivate a strong CX, you need to know how your center is performing. Where do your agents need support? Are your customers satisfied?

Call center performance metrics give you a clear picture into your center. Metrics can identify growth areas. They help you see your team’s strengths and offer insights into customer and employee happiness. While dozens of KPIs support excellence on your team, here are 10 that can help you focus on what success looks like and how to achieve it.

4 Benefits of Tracking Call Center Performance Metrics

Before we dive into the specifics, here’s how you (and your team) can benefit from tracking call center performance metrics.

1. Boost Operational Efficiency

Call center performance metrics help you identify areas where you can improve your efficiency. By monitoring key metrics like call resolution time and customer satisfaction scores, you can identify processes that need streamlining, gaps in training, and technological needs.

2. Reduce Costs

With efficient operations, you can optimize processes and boost performance. This lets you cut operational costs while maintaining — or even improving — service quality. Metrics like average handle time and call abandonment rates can identify cost-effective strategies.

3. Enhance Customer Experience

Measuring your call center performance metrics helps to bolster your customer experience. Metrics like net promoter score (NPS) and service level can help you understand customer preferences and pain points. This gives your team more knowledge about your customer base, which enables them to tailor services and interactions and enhance the customer experience.

4. Improve Agent Experience

Everyone wants to grow in their job. We need coaching to gain new skills, and we crave feedback to know how we’re performing at work. In fact, 69% of employees say they would work harder if management recognized their performance. Identifying the call center performance metrics and specific KPIs to track gives you a look into where and how to invest in your employees. These metrics can become a sort of prioritization list for more effective coaching and training. Plus, it makes it clear where they’re killing it — so you can give specific praise where it’s due.

 Want to learn more about improving efficiency in your call center? Check out our blog post.

The Top 5 Call Center Performance Metrics You Should Be Tracking

And now for the fun stuff: Here are the top five call center performance metrics you should track this year.

1. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

CSAT measures how happy your customers are with your products, services, and support through a simple survey that asks: “How satisfied are you with [company]?”

CSAT is mission-critical to your operations, customer loyalty, and ROI. To improve your customer satisfaction, you need to measure it. Sometimes called the “Happy Customer” KPI, your CSAT score is your first step to consistently delivering excellent service. It guides you to understand what is (and isn’t) working in your customer experience.

2. First Contact Resolution (FCR)

FCR measures the rate at which your customers’ questions or problems are resolved in a single interaction. It helps you and your operations team determine if customers are regularly dealing with repeat issues without getting full resolutions. If you have a low FCR, it could indicate your product has implementation issues or your agents need more training.

FCR is an indicator of satisfaction, too. In fact, according to a study from Service Quality Management Group there’s a one-to-one correlation between FCR and CSAT. For instance, for every 1% improvement in FCR a company sees, they’ll see an equal boost in CSAT.

3. Average Handle Time

Average handle time refers to the amount of time a customer spends with an employee from the beginning of the interaction until its resolution.

This helps you track customer experience, employee performance, and resource allocation. High handle times show when employees don’t have enough resources or lack empowerment to help customers quickly. And in turn, CSAT could drop due to prolonged issue resolution.

4. Average Hold Time (AHT)

The average hold time tracks how long customers are on hold after an employee begins the interaction.

Long hold times may indicate that you’re understaffed or your employees are ill-equipped to handle interactions quickly and effectively. It also often directly correlates with a lower CSAT score. When you can decrease the time it takes for an employee to reach a full resolution for a customer, you improve both your customer and employee experiences.

5. Abandonment Rate

Abandonment rate measures the inbound interactions in which a customer leaves (i.e., hangs up) before they reach an employee.

A high abandonment rate is a bad sign. It can signal a variety of issues like staffing shortages, ineffective care, and more. High call abandonment can lead to repeat calling, which lowers FCR and customer satisfaction.

5 More Call Center Performance Metrics to Track

Looking for a few more KPIs to add to your analytics dashboard? Here are seven that offer a look at your operations, CX, and agent experience.

1. Service Level (SL)

Service level provides an overview of your service quality, giving you a birds-eye view of the quality of your customer experience. It measures how accessible your customer service team is and whether you’re hitting targets and properly allocating resources. It also helps you evaluate customer demand so you can staff appropriately to meet their needs.

2. Average Speed of Answer (ASA)

ASA measures how much time passes before an interaction is answered, from when a customer is placed in the queue to when an employee answers. Speed of service isn’t everything, but it’s a good measure of efficiency. ASA speaks volumes to your team’s performance and accessibility.

3. Average Transfer Rate

Your transfer rate is the percentage of inbound interactions that employees end up transferring or escalating to another team member or department.

A high transfer rate indicates employees don’t know the answer to your customers’ problems. Tracking the transfer rate offers insights into how empowered your employees feel in their jobs. When employees don’t feel empowered, this lowers confidence, productivity, and performance.

4. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Often called the gold standard of customer experience metrics, your NPS measures customer loyalty. The score uses a single-question survey that asks: “How likely are you to recommend the company or service to a friend or colleague?” using a scale of 0 (Not Likely) to 10 (Extremely Likely).

Customers will recommend services and products that they love. You want to build a loyal customer base to build retention and increase revenue. Use your NPS to see what’s driving your customer experience so you can prioritize improvements that impact customers the most.

5. Customer Churn Rate

Customer churn, or attrition, is the rate at which customers stop doing business with your company over a given period. Similar to turnover rates, churn indicates an unhealthy customer experience. An unexpected increase in your churn rate signals deeper issues with your customer experience.

Need help tracking performance in your call center? Connect with our team!