Metrics That Matter

Contact Center KPIs

The metrics that matter to your contact center are unique. Depending on the product offered, service provided, or even day of the week; challenges vary. Industry experts say Contact Centers need to be aware of 20 various analytics to maximize performance but most centers only focus on 5 to 10 of the most critical real-time and historical Key Performance Indicators (KPI) depending on responsibilities.

Real-Time content, in most situations, is the prominent tool used to gauge an agent, or group’s performance; providing immediate awareness to important metrics like Calls InQueue, Longest Wait, ASA, Available Agents, Service Levels, Abandonment Rates, and Emails/Tickets Waiting. Awareness of these top KPIs can increase revenue and improve customer satisfaction; the primary goals of any Call Center.

Historical metrics are critical as well, agents and managers need the ability to monitor trends that led to past call center, group, or individual agent performance. Managers also need the ability to investigate Agent Averages, historical context used to raise awareness to enhance a service, justify an agent or group’s performance, or to simply promote proactivity.

Metrics Based on Responsibilities

Below are a few examples how analytics can vary by departments in the same organization.

An Insurance company might provide content to two different departments; New Customers and Policy Cancellation. Both departments require group level information but since group responsibilities vary, metrics and threshold values should vary as well.

New Customers is responsible for revenue, monitoring standard real-time KPIs like ASA, Hold Time, Average Handle Time is an easy way to gauge the center’s efficiency. Policy Cancellations, on the other hand, represent lost revenue. Similar to New Customers, Policy Cancellations is concerned with similar real-time KPIs but with elevated threshold values and Agents Staffed.

It’s easy to see that the performance of one group can easily affect the performance of the other. Increasing New Customers KPIs for example, will have a direct effect on Policy Cancellations performance by limiting call volumes and reducing a customer’s desire to cancel due to a more efficient experience. The end result could allow you to slim your workforce or alter staffing to reduce overhead.

In yet another example, Support/Customer Service managing trouble tickets and support tickets also need to monitor metrics based on differing responsibilities, and threshold alerts to highlight a variety of benchmarks.

Gold Level CS are tied to SLAs so metrics are compared against goals, while the Free CS is focused on overall performance and overflow. Each group is monitoring the same metric, however, the Abandonment Rate for Gold Level may have a threshold level of 7.5% while the ABN Rate for Free CS agents has a threshold of 20% since Free CS is on responsible for Gold Level over-flow. Longest Wait and Average Wait are important to Free CS, reducing these metrics will directly affect Abandonment Rate and Service Levels in both departments.

Providing a mix of Real-Time and Historical content with different thresholds is important, but the ability to modify or add calculations to the source data provide a unique tool for managers to monitor agent activity and help minimize overhead.

In addition to monitoring standard real-time KPIs like ASA and ABN rates; both departments are viewing the custom metrics Productive States {Agent} and Non-Productive States {Agent} that are totaled and summarized to give managers a unique perspective of agent performance and labor costs. Metrics like this should be part of the managers summary level reporting.

There are many articles and white papers that show how critical metrics vary based on responsibilities. Corporate and departmental goals should determine what’s important to improve your service.

Rather than follow the list in the latest article review your corporate goals.

Think about your challenges and goals.

Think about what you’re trying to accomplish for the call center.

Build reports based on your needs and answer your questions about agent, group and overall performance. Only then can you decide how the content will be viewed; agent Desktops, manager Dashboards, and group Wallboards.