5 Call Center Agent Performance Metrics You Need Right Now

Figures show there is a lack of performance metrics established in the call center.  More than half (59%) of UK businesses can’t, for example, create reports on tracking customer service agents, contact center sales, and support team performance.

Without proper performance metrics in place, contact centers miss out valuable opportunities to drive customer service excellence that results in a better customer experience overall. It’s simply a shot in the dark to determine agent strengths and weaknesses.

There are a handful of KPIs call centers can use to improve agent performance, but we’ve gathered a list of the key call center agent performance metrics your contact center needs right now.

1. Forecast Accuracy

“Forecasting accuracy – better described as forecasted contact load vs. actual contact load is a performance metric that reflects the percent variance between the number of inbound customer contacts forecasted for a particular time period and the number of said contacts actually received by the center during that time. It is a critical, high-level objective in all contact center environments.

Underestimating demand leads to understaffing. This, in turn, leads to long wait times in queues, frustrated customers, burned-out agents, and high toll-free costs (due not only to the long hold times, but also to the longer call times that might result from dedicating a portion of the call to caller complaints about hold times). However, overestimating demand results in waste, overstaffing and increased idle time.”

(Source: ICMI)

2. First Call Resolution Rate

“Continuously measuring, tracking, and acting on first call resolution (FCR) analysis outcomes should be the cornerstone of your call center evaluation process. If you don’t measure FCR, you can’t improve it.

Companies that consistently measure FCR are seeing major performance improvements. According to research conducted by The Ascent Group, 60% of companies measuring FCR for a year or longer reported a 1% – 30% improvement in their performance. With results like these, you cannot afford not to track your FCR rate. In order to be effective, measurement of first call resolution must be reliable, consistent, and accurate.”

(Source: Talk Desk)

3. Average Handling Time

“AHT, average handling time, refers to how long it takes an agent to complete an interaction. Many contact centers agents are evaluated on how quickly they move through callers because A) contact centers want to reduce call wait times and B) faster AHT rates should indicate which agents are more efficient.

But once again, evaluating this contact center metric on its own could mask a huge problem. If agents are being pushed to move faster, is the quality of their work suffering? Most customers don’t want to spend 45 minutes on the phone working to resolve a customer service or sales issue, but they also don’t want to call back two or three times to actually get everything squared away!”

(Source: CallMiner)

4. Contact Center Efficiency

“[In the past year], 60% of companies have expanded their focus on contact center efficiency, while 65% of contact centers track their efficiency efforts. Customer satisfaction is another area of focus for companies, with 37% of contact center leaders citing it as the best way to measure agent productivity.”

(Source: CallMiner)

5. Contact Quality

“The quality challenge is made tougher by a lack of consensus about what the term actually means. 42% of respondents say quality service delivery in the contact center is about ‘delivering effortless customer service to the greatest possible number of customers’, while 41% argue it’s about ‘achieving high levels of first call resolution or first contact resolution.’”

(Source: Call Centre Helper)

Final Thoughts

As recent studies show, half of customers will take their business elsewhere after a less than satisfactory customer experience.  As a result, it’s essential for call centers to have the right metrics in place to gain insight into where agents can perform better. Having a powerful speech analytics system in place will also help to better track these metrics.

While there are a handful of metrics that can shed light on agent performance, we hope this list gives you an idea of which indicators to focus on.

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