4 Important Call Center Metrics to Improve Customer Satisfaction

When it comes to a contact center, reporting the performance of your employees and predicting customer demands is a stressful task. Even veteran managers and directors struggle when it comes to measuring and boosting the KPI of their contact centers. And while using modern technologies and other methods to predict call volumes and customer demands, it’s still impossible for them to do so. In this condition, it becomes a horrifying task for managers and team leaders to explain those declining numbers to the organization. Apptivo brings to you the 4 main metrics that you can use to understand the performance of your call center and use them to improve overall customer satisfaction.

First Contact Resolution

FCR is a metric that indicates the number or percentage of customers who had their issues resolved by your call center and support team in the first interaction. FCR directly tells you the performance or the ability of your employees to resolve tasks On the first contact with the customers. It means, higher FCR specifies that your call center is more efficient in solving the issues and helping your customers. Another main factor that FCR helps in pointing is the percentage of customers that reach out to you multiple times for resolving their issues. Therefore FCR is a very crucial metric for your call center.

To boost your FCR, you need to work on several factors such as providing your employees with additional training so that your employees can serve your customers better. You also need to work on reviewing your call center processes to ensure that clear and proper channels are there for your customers to receive the best support from your employees. And lastly, you need to make sure that you don’t track average handling time as a metric for your call center. Instead, you should prioritize FCR as the prime metric.

Abandonment Rate

The second most popular KPI in contact centers is the abandonment rate. It indicates the number of calls that are abandoned by the customers before reaching an agent. Abandonment rate is also crucial for measuring the performance of your call centers as most of the time, calls are abandoned due to long hold time. Due to this, other metrics such as FCR are also affected as the customer would have to reach out to your call center later. Therefore, you need to make sure that the calls your employees receive have the least abandonment rate. For this, you need to work on multiple factors such as working on better staff hiring or better agent scheduling. Next up, you need to review your IVR messages as it helps in making the customers aware of the waiting time and increases the possibility of them holding on to the calls. And lastly, you can practice the call-back method to reduce the abandonment rate as the customers won’t have to wait longer.

Occupancy Rate

Another main metric to measure the efficiency of your staff is to look at the occupancy rate of your call center. It is an indicator that tells about the amount of time your agents spend on calls and do call-related tasks rather than just sitting and waiting for calls. For every call center, a high occupancy rate is desirable but it shouldn’t go much higher than 85-90% as your employees also need time to relax between calls. For making sure that your call center has a great occupancy rate, you need to take care of a few things. Firstly, you need to refrain from overstaffing in your call center. This is because overstaffing causes the majority of the agents to sit idle if the call volumes aren’t much higher and hence decreases the occupancy rate. Next up, you need to make sure that during quiet times, your employees are involved and focused on other tasks so that they remain productive. And lastly, you need to focus on your employees’ wellness so that they don’t experience burnout and remain efficient throughout.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT Score)

Lastly, now we talk about the most important thing that matters while working in the contact center, i.e. customer satisfaction. CSAT scores help you in determining the level of customer satisfaction and assessing the quality of the service that your team provides to your customers. Higher CSAT scores show that your call center provides great service to your customers. And, it is measured through customer surveys and questionnaires after a customer interaction. For ensuring that the CSAT score of your call center remains boosted, you need to work on a few factors that include reviewing the feedback from your customers. When you gather data from your customers, don’t just store it away, take points from it and look at the major trends that are addressed in it. It shows their most common concerns and the difficulty they face while dealing with your agents. After that, you can experience for yourself what your customer journey looks like and look for any issues in different channels such as email, chat, messages, etc. And lastly, you need to empower your agents into feeling encouraged about helping the customers. This would make them understand the customers in a better way and deliver the best experiences.

So, these are the 4 main call center metrics that you need to focus on and work on. It would help you in ensuring that your call center delivers the best experience to your customers while also making sure that your employees are also happy with you.

Conclusion

Measuring call center KPIs associated with customer satisfaction is a crucial task for every business. And the main objective of having call center metrics is to efficiently manage your operations and optimize the performance of your employees. So, keep track of these 4 main metrics and get the best visibility into your customers’ satisfaction.