In a traditional environment, businesses often emphasize tracking a few call center KPIs to determine their outsourcing partner’s efficiency and performance. These include -Cost Per Call, Call Abandon Rate, Hold Time, and AHT. However, with an increased focus on customer centricity among organizations, many companies today are now interested in tracking a wide range of customer-focused call center KPIs. These include:
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Customer Satisfaction
There’s no better way to gauge the call center experience than asking callers how they feel. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) surveys and follow-up calls often go beyond “good” or “bad” assessments and add more context to your customer’s response. A number of companies today use scale-based assessments for determining how satisfied their customers are with call center and brand experience. However, if needs be, they can use these surveys to, but they can go more in-depth if necessary.
Many call centers use this KPI as a Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) indicator and leverage it to guide target service levels and test their quality standards and scorecards.
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Forecast Accuracy
It is not sustainable for call centers to continually staff their workforce as per the theoretical peak on a continuous basis. At the same time, failing to meet the staffing demands may result in long wait times, overworked agents, and poor CX delivery. Therefore, forecasting demand with accuracy is essential for optimal staffing, and measuring forecast accuracy can help you evaluate the accuracy.
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Contact volume
Contact volume or total number of interactions is one of the primary measures of call center activity, which measures the number of interactions handled by your call center in a given period. In a multichannel and omnichannel call center, this KPI should be tracked for all channels, including voice, chat, email, and social media, and then summed up in a total.
This KPI can then be tallied against forecasts to enhance Forecast Accuracy. Contact Volume is also needed to determine other measures, such as Cost Per Interaction, for which Cost of operations need to be divided by contact volume (see the equation below).
Cost Per Interaction = Cost of Operations / Contact Volume
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Quality Scores
Quality Scores reflect an agent’s performance in meeting both customer and business needs during a customer interaction. While in most cases, this KPI encompasses manual scoring of each customer-agent communication, some call center outsourcing partners have already started using digital transformation solutions like speech-to-text and robotic process automation in the scoring and evaluation process, eliminating bias and enhancing the accuracy of quality scores.
The scoreboard depicting quality score will be weighed based on key CSAT drivers and other compliances, summarizing your organization’s idea about quality customer service.
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Utilization Rates
Utilization rate refers to the percentage of time an agent is available for work and expected to provide service. Utilization helps you balance labor costs against call center demands.
If utilization rates are high during a low contact volume period, then labor costs will be pointlessly high. On the other hand, if Utilization is low during periods of the peak contact period, it will inversely affect service levels and cause CSAT to decline. Therefore, utilization rate (formula below) is a good indicator of whether your workforce is in a state of readiness and logged in most of the time or not.
Utilization rate= an agent’s logged-in time/ their total shift time
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Cost of Operations
Cost of Operations consists of all the activity costs directly related to a call center, including variable costs – salaries, communication costs, software fees, and miscellaneous expenses that vary as per their usage, along with fixed costs such as hardware, contact cost, allocated overhead etc.
Cost of Operations is a crucial call center KPI because it is tallied against the budget to find out whether costs are controlled or not.
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Net Promoter Score
“How likely are you to recommend this brand to a friend or colleague on a scale of 1-10 with 10 being very much likely and 1 being least likely?” – asking the specific question to all your customers can get you a Net Promoter Score (NPS), which provides an in-depth insight into your customers’ satisfaction as well as loyalty.
Businesses can identify satisfied customers or “promoters” on a scale from one to ten,” giving scores of nine or ten, highlighting the brand advocates.
NPS is determined from a single question with a multiple-choice answer. Therefore, the scores given by customers can be readily compared and analyzed. It allows companies to benchmark the results across businesses easily. Moreover, it offers companies an accurate insight into customers’ feelings, determining whether their customer service game needs to be improved.
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Customer Complaint Volumes
When setting their customer service goals, organizations often forget to consider the scope of improvement in their products and services. Your call center outsourcing partner can play a significant role in this.
If you start tagging your customer communication with specific categories like “website related complaint,” “Product related complaint,” and “Post sales service-related complaint,” you will be able to see if the volume of a particular complaint category is high and needs your address to the problem. By tracking Customer Complaint Volumes, you will be able to drive the voice of the customer in an organization-wide level and display the value of call center outsourcing.
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Customer Sentiment
Customer Sentiment is becoming a crucial KPI for many companies due to its ability to show the relation between call center performance and customers’ feelings. This KPI can be measured using simple feedback surveys conducted by your call center partner.
However, there is a more sophisticated way to build a better overall picture of customer sentiment with a sentiment analysis tool. This analytics uses AI and ML to analyze large volumes of customer data. When integrated with predictive analytics, it is possible to determine how a customer feels when engaged on a particular subject and what the customer may buy and even create more tailored interactions personalized to suit the needs and sentiments of each customer.
Wrapping up
While a wide range of KPIs can be tracked in a call center environment, only a few get the due importance. However, in this ever-changing market landscape, a company should focus on new customer-centric KPIs to determine the efficiency, performance, and importance of having a proficient call center partner. It will help them see call centers as experience centers and not just cost centers.
