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, as organizations increasingly prioritize customer-centricity, many companies seek to track a broader range of customer-focused call center KPIs.
9 Customer-Focused Call Center KPIs You Need to Start Tracking Today
1. 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. Several companies today use scale-based assessments to determine how satisfied their customers are with the call center and brand experience. However, if necessary, they can use these surveys, 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.
2. Forecast Accuracy
It is not sustainable for call centers to continually staff their workforce continuously as per the theoretical peak. 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.
3. Contact volume
Contact volume, the total number of interactions handled by your call center, is a key measure of activity. In a multichannel and omnichannel call center, track this KPI across voice, chat, email, and social media channels and aggregate it.
Compare this KPI against forecasts to improve Forecast Accuracy. Contact volume is crucial for calculating metrics like cost per interaction, which is a computer that divides operational costs by contact volume (as shown in the equation below).
Cost Per Interaction = Cost of Operations / Contact Volume
4. Quality Scores
Quality Scores measure an agent’s performance in meeting customer and business needs during interactions. Some call center outsourcing partners now use digital solutions like speech-to-text and robotic process automation for scoring, eliminating bias and improving accuracy.
The quality scorecard reflects key CSAT drivers and compliances, summarizing your organization’s standard for quality customer service.
5. Utilization Rates
This K 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.
Labor costs will be pointlessly high if utilization rates are high during a low contact volume period. On the other hand, if utilization is low during peak contact periods, it will inversely affect service levels and cause CSAT to decline. Therefore, the utilization rate (formula below) indicates whether your workforce is in a state of readiness and logged in most of the time.
Utilization rate= an agent’s logged-in time/ their total shift time
6. Cost of Operations
The cost of Operations consists of all the activity costs directly related to a call center, including variable costs such as salaries, communication costs, software fees, miscellaneous expenses that vary according to usage, and fixed costs such as hardware, contact costs, allocated overhead, etc.
Cost of Operations is a crucial call center KPI because it is tallied against the budget to determine whether costs are controlled.
7. Net Promoter Score
“How likely are you to recommend this brand to a friend or colleague on a scale of 1-10, with ten being very likely and one being least likely?” Asking this specific question to all your customers can get you a Net Promoter Score (NPS), providing in-depth insight into their satisfaction and 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, customers’ scores can be readily compared and analyzed. This 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.
8. 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.
Tagging your customer communication with categories like “website-related complaint,” “product-related complaint,” and “post-sales service-related complaint” allows you to identify high-volume complaint categories. Tracking Customer Complaint Volumes drives the voice of the customer organization-wide and highlights the value of call center outsourcing.
9. Customer Sentiment
Many companies prioritize Customer Sentiment as a crucial KPI because it demonstrates the relationship between call center performance and customer feelings. This KPI relies on feedback surveys from your call center partner.
A sentiment analysis tool offers a more sophisticated approach to understanding customer sentiment overall. This tool uses AI and ML to analyze large volumes of customer data, integrating predictive analytics to forecast customer emotions and behaviors. It enables personalized interactions tailored to meet each customer’s needs and sentiments.
Wrapping up
While numerous KPIs can be tracked in call center environments, only a select few are prioritized. In today’s dynamic market, focusing on new customer-centric KPIs is crucial for evaluating efficiency, performance, and the impact of a skilled call center partner. This shift helps view call centers as experience centers, not just cost centers.
