2020 Call Center Metrics: 6 Key Metrics for Your Call Center Dashboard

Operating a growing call center operation involves logging and assessing myriad moving elements at once. It can be close to impossible to manage these critical success factors without help from specialized software.

At the heart of most technological optimizations implemented within a successful call center are fine-tuned metrics. Keeping tabs on the right metrics can make consistent improvement notably simpler over the long term. However, not all metrics make sense for a growing call center to monitor. Below, we have put together a batch of the best metrics a call center can make use of to inform growth strategies and track performance. Read on to learn more.

1. Peak Hour Traffic

This metric helps in determining when your call center generally receives the most traffic. Such information comes in handy where scheduling and staffing are concerned, allowing you to maintain a sufficient stock of agents at key times during the day.

Strategic scheduling around the Peak Hour Traffic metric makes cost management easier across the board as agents can be kept on call specifically when they are needed instead of all day.

2. First Response Time

The rate at which your agents handle new calls can make or break consumer perceptions of your business.

First Response Time (FRT) makes this critical caller waiting period clear enough to act on, ensuring you can positively impact the customer journey and experience at the very first touchpoint.

For more information on the customer experience, download our white paper, The CX Pro’s Guide to Speech Analytics.

A low FRT means your team is working efficiently and can handle the influx of calls they are receiving. Should your FRT be too high, you can safely conclude that your agents are having trouble efficiently handling customer issues. Common approaches to solving such issues include staffing additional agents, encouraging faster answering with more frequent holds and training agents in multiple disciplines so that they can handle a greater variety of concerns.

3. Average Handle Time

Average Handle Time (AHT) gives an accurate, real-time measurement of the usual amount of time it takes to handle an interaction from start to finish, from the initiation of the call to the time your organization’s call center agents are spending on the phone with individual callers and handling any follow-up tasks, such as documentation. AHT also includes any time callers spend on hold.

Although some consumers place greater importance on accuracy than speed, AHT still has a special place in a call center’s daily operations. To get the most out of this metric, use it to inform budgeting and infrastructure-related decisions as opposed to using it for agent benchmarking purposes.

4. Customer Effort Score

The lengths to which a customer must go in order to solve issues determines the likelihood of them continuing to do business with you. Customer Effort Score (CES) clearly describes your organization’s efficiency in this regard with figures that are easy to act on.

There are multiple ways to measure CES, but what matters most is how you leverage the information this metric reveals. A poor CES indicates an overly complex journey for the customer from point “A” (their problem) to point “B” (solving their problem).

Eliminating obstacles and unnecessary tasks that a customer could encounter in dealing with your organization improves this metric as well as your overall call center performance. Such tactics as limiting transfers and ensuring problems are more thoroughly addressed in the first place can help quite a bit here.

5. First Call Resolution

The ideal outcome for any call center agent in dealing with a customer is to efficiently resolve their concerns over the course of a single call. The First Call Resolution (FCR) metric specifically focuses on this outcome.

Your agents’ collective ability to solve callers’ problems without the need for subsequent interactions can drastically change their perceptions of your brand. A high FCR measurement implies excellent efficiency among your agents and a strong connection to the needs of your customers.

If your First Call Resolution numbers are low, you may be dealing with several operational obstacles, including excessive complexity in your agents’ scripts, poor collaboration efforts between specialized support teams or even a faulty phone system. Finding and eliminating issues that threaten your call center’s FCR can help achieve lasting improvements in many areas of its operations.

6. Customer Satisfaction Score

Although the full process of precisely measuring your customers’ overall satisfaction with your business’s services and products is fairly complex, this simple metric comes surprisingly close to doing so on its own. By collecting CSAT scores from customers on specific aspects of their experiences with your company, you can determine which areas are most in need of improvement.

Exact strategies for improving your call center’s customer satisfaction metric depend on the services you have surveyed your customers on. The more specific your surveys, the more actionable your results.

But in addition to traditional post-call surveys, advanced speech analytics software can help you mine 100% of interactions with your customers and score them based on their content and acoustics for customer satisfaction indicators.

The metrics covered above can help you to identify key areas of your operations that need fixing in addition to yielding valuable insight into the minds of your customers. By harnessing the information each of the above metrics presents you with, it is possible to consistently improve your call center’s performance over time.

What metrics does your business make use of the most?