Call center effectiveness can be measured by tracking a broad range of metrics concerning agent performance, process efficiency, optimum staffing levels, adequate training and coaching, and customer satisfaction with the call center experience.
What is a call center vs. a contact center?
A call center is a customer service center that primarily interacts with customers via phone. In a contact center, agents interact with customers on every channel, including phone, email, chat, social, websites, SMS text, and others.
What are call center metrics for determining effectiveness?
There are hundreds of metrics that call centers used to track and improve effectiveness. The most important include:
- Average handle time (AHT) is the total amount of time it takes an agent to handle a call, including talk time, hold time, and wrap-up time. To improve customer satisfaction, call centers can reduce AHT by implementing more effective practices and processes.
- First call resolution (FCR) measures the percentage of calls that are resolved on the initial contact. High FCR rates indicate effective call center practices and can help reduce costs and improve customer satisfaction.
- Quality scores provide an overall score of a caller’s experience. By tracking the quality score of each interaction, supervisors and agents can get an accurate and unbiased perspective on performance.
- Customer satisfaction (CSAT) is a reflection of the effectiveness of individual agents and resolution practices. Customer satisfaction scores can be measured through surveys and by collecting post-call feedback.
- Net promoter score (NPS) measures the likelihood that a customer will recommend the call center experience or the company to others.
- Average speed of answer (ASA) measures the time before a call is answered by an agent. Higher ASA metrics indicate inefficient processes and inadequate staffing levels.
- Abandoned call rates are based on the percentage of customers who hang up before speaking with an agent. High rates of abandoned calls are an indicator that wait times are too long.
- Service level metrics track the number of calls that are answered within a specific timeframe.
What is call center experience?
The call center experience is the impression that a customer has of their interactions with a company’s call center. Call center experience is typically affected by the customer’s perception of how they were treated and how quickly and easily their needs were met when asking questions, seeking support, placing orders, returning items, or registering complaints. Call center experience can also refer to the experience of employees working in a call center. Improving the employee experience is an important step in retaining quality agents and improving their performance.
How can I monitor my call center performance metrics?
Making improvements in key areas can help call centers to enhance performance.
- Ensure adequate staffing levels. Having the right number of agents will improve service levels and reduce wait times.
- Provide superior training and coaching. Agents who have superior knowledge of products and services, as well as outstanding customer service skills, are better able to deliver exceptional call center experiences while reducing average handle time.
- Empower agents. Call center agents who are empowered to resolve customer needs without escalation can improve first call resolution rates and enhance customer satisfaction.
- Optimize routing. By analyzing the performance of individual agents, call center supervisors can determine which agents are best suited to different types of calls from customers. This insight enables supervisors to route calls more effectively to reduce average handle time and increase first call resolution.
- Deliver real-time guidance. Conversation intelligence technology can analyze customer conversations in real time to provide agents with guidance on how to manage a conversation and what actions will help resolve the call most quickly and successfully.
What is call center analytics?
Call center analytics technology uses data and analysis to measure the effectiveness of call centers, track the performance of agents, and identify areas for improvement. Speech analytics solutions analyze spoken conversations and identify keywords, customer sentiment, and other data points that can help businesses better understand the customer’s needs, preferences, and mindset. Text analytics perform the same actions for email, chat, social media, SMS text, and other written interactions. With a conversation intelligence platform that combines both speech and text analytics, call centers can analyze omnichannel customer interactions at scale to track performance metrics and gain critical customer insights.
How does conversation intelligence work?
Conversation intelligence technology uses AI and machine learning to capture, transcribe, and analyze interactions with customers across all channels. By converting the unstructured information in these conversations into structured data that can be searched and analyzed, conversation intelligence platforms deliver greater insight into customer behavior and agent performance while tracking a wide range of KPIs. Conversation intelligence platforms help call center managers identify patterns, pinpoint trends, uncover root causes for performance problems, and develop plans for improvement.
How does CallMiner help measure and improve call center effectiveness?
The CallMiner Eureka platform is the industry’s most comprehensive solution for capturing and analyzing omnichannel interactions at scale. With CallMiner, call centers can automatically capture and analyze metrics from 100% of customer interactions, extracting meaningful insights to improve effectiveness and deepen understanding of customers’ needs. Real-time call monitoring technology provides agents with next-best-action guidance and enables supervisors to provide real-time coaching. By monitoring for specific keywords and phrases, CallMiner can identify customers at risk of churn and conversations requiring intervention or escalation to ensure a positive outcome. CallMiner can also score every conversation to provide supervisors with tools to improve agent training and to discover the agents and approaches who are most successful at resolving specific issues.
