Call Center Metrics

There are a number of ways to measure call center performance, but a few should be enough to give you the most useful results.

Call centers are becoming very important to the operations of many companies. Call centers provide them the ability to connect with customers more effectively and efficiently and allow them to focus more on developing products that consumers will find useful. Ultimately, the most accurate way to measure call center performance is to relate it to how well call center services contribute to improvement in terms of company sales and product quality. However, this is largely dependent on the way companies analyze and utilize call center generated data.

For a call center, the process of measuring performance can be a bit complicated since as a separate company, it has its own performance measures. These measures, however, must be flexible enough to accommodate the expected outputs of clients. And call centers may be servicing a couple or more clients at any given time.

Depending on the requirements of client companies or accounts, call centers employ several performance measures common to the industry. They can employ average talk time (ATT), average handling time (AHT), percentage of resolved issues, service level, cost-per-call, abandon rate, customer satisfaction, and delay time, which refer to the time spent by customers waiting for call center representative to pick up their calls.

These different measures make it easier to assess the performance of the center itself, although other measures are needed to come up with a complete and more reliable assessment of performance. Favorable results in the evaluation of these measures do not automatically mean success; they must contribute to the operations of the client’s accounts. The number of measures employed also does not matter much –, what is more important is the relevance of said measures. A few will do the trick as long as they have the ability to capture performance levels accurately and effectively.

Among the different techniques enumerated above, customer satisfaction is perhaps the best when it comes to measuring performance. This is because customer satisfaction is the ultimate objective of any company, including a call center. The levels of customer satisfaction mostly stem from the quality of product or services being offered; thus, it is a good gauge of how well the center is performing or the quality of the clients’ products and services.

Negative customer satisfaction evaluation results tell a lot about the performance of the center and product of the company. Other measurement metrics will be helpful in providing details to the evaluation. Abandon rate, for example, tells how many customers decide to abandon calls they themselves initiated. Clients cannot be expected to wait patiently until somebody picks up their calls. A few of these and you can expect to receive negative feedback from them, and complaints are decidedly clear manifestations of dissatisfaction that does not bode well for the call center as well as its clients. Abandon rates may be caused by long lines of customers calling. It is very important to determine the reasons behind high abandon rates so that solutions can be found and applied.

There are many techniques used to measure call center performance. The number employed is not as important as the quality of metrics utilized to measure the performance.