Your company’s call center is vital. Whether handling general queries or resolving major issues, it represents your business and can often be the reason why a customer decides to buy from you. On the flip side, any negative experience with your call center could cause customers to take their money elsewhere.
So, the quality of customer service you provide through your call center is critical to your business’s continued success. But what if you handle thousands of calls daily? How do you ensure you maintain a high standard and meet—better yet, exceed—customer expectations?
Monitoring KPIs is one of the most effective techniques to gauge your success and find areas worth improving. Today, we’ll go through some of the best KPIs you can start measuring immediately and solutions for improving them.
But first, let’s look at what makes quality customer service so you understand what you’re striving for.
What Makes for Good Customer Service Quality in a Call Center?
Several elements of a call center will guarantee excellent customer service. Here are three essential ones:
- Well-trained and highly motivated staff: Staff must be on top of their game in terms of expertise and their ability to connect with the customer. Sales training methodologies should reflect this need.
- Customer centric culture: All training and operational strategies should reinforce this focus, making it a core aspect of every customer interaction.
- Personalization: More than a buzzword, personalization has become widespread in customer service. It’s very much expected in many commercial circles and customer environments now, so a call center that can’t tailor an interaction around the individual consumer will fall behind.
- Omnichannel communications: Call centers are facing a panoply of comms channels, so you need to be able to handle any and all of them. Tech such as unified communications solutions can help by standardizing customer interactions and incorporating automation so that staff can use the same interface to manage communications.
8 Call Center KPIs for Improved Customer Service
So, now you have a clearer idea of what you’re trying to achieve, let’s explore the metrics that will help you deliver. Keep in mind that many of these are connected. That means any struggles with one KPI could be impacting a KPI in another area. The benefit here is that improvements in one KPI are also likely to have a positive knock on the other.
1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
A reliable indicator of how happy your customers are with the service they’ve experienced is to ask how likely they are to recommend your business to another person. This is what the Net Promoter Score (NPS) is all about.
Send out an NPS survey after a customer interacts with your call center customer service team. Simply ask the customer to respond on a numeric scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being not at all and 10 being extremely likely.
The scores allow you to assign the respondent as one of the following.
- 6 or under = detractor
- 7 or 8 = neutral
- 9 or 10 = promoter
If you receive a lot of detractors or neutrals, you should look at your center’s customer service quality.
2. Call Arrival Rate
A layperson wanting to improve a call center’s customer service quality might begin by looking at what degree of traffic it deals with and when. Well, that’s what this KPI is all about: measuring the number of daily calls.
The information this provides enables the call center manager to staff up or down to match fluctuations in demand throughout the week or year. Doing this means customers don’t have to wait on hold for long, as there’s always an appropriate staffing level to handle incoming calls.
If you don’t have the resource capacity, it’s worth considering call center outsourcing. The main deliverable here is that service level always meets demand, so you never have to worry about having to manage your own staffing levels.
3. Average Wait Time (AWT)
This metric follows straight on in the sense that it tells us how long those customers have to wait. All being well, your staffing levels will be such that wait times will be short. However, it might be that each call is taking longer than has typically been the case, so new callers are waiting for longer than you (or they) would like.
Speed is paramount—people aren’t willing to wait long to get what they need. This is why fulfillment and logistics have seen improvement with tech, such as AI innovations. It’s just as crucial with customer service. If something is causing a traffic jam, you need to be aware of it quickly.
You can then try to discern what’s causing the hold-up and look for solutions, such as increasing staffing levels or implementing call routing.
4. Blocked Calls
New callers may hear an engaged or busy signal when your agents are all busy. This might be because agents are busy handling more extended interactions or you’re receiving a high volume of calls. Regardless, it’s likely to put customers off calling again.
To reduce the percentage of blocked calls, consider introducing interactive voice response (IVR). The technology greets new callers and presents them with a menu of options to ultimately perform an action based on their needs. This kind of engagement can persuade a customer to stick with a business much more than a blunt, busy tone.
5. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
Commonly used across a variety of customer service providers, CSAT scores reveal how customers feel about the fulfillment services or other interactions they’ve had. Crucially, it also tells you whether the service helped the customer achieve what they wanted.
CSAT scores feature a quantitative element in which customers place their responses to a question on a numeric scale, most often from 1 to 5. Questions can be along the lines of ‘How satisfied were you with your experience with our call center today?’.
There’s usually a qualitative section, too, comprising an open-ended question. This gives the customer a less prescribed format to express themselves, which can throw up some hugely helpful information that can boost customer service quality.
6. Customer Effort Score (CES)
In an ideal situation, you want customers to get the result they want with minimum effort. The more effort they have to expend during their call center interaction, the less satisfied the customer is likely to be.
CES is a metric that uses a survey of the customer’s feelings to gauge how easy the process was for them. Similar to CSAT, it features a scale and often an open-ended section, too.
High CES indicates that an area of the process is not as efficient as it should be. It could be that staff aren’t trained to meet specific needs or that customers are being put through to the wrong department.
A classic snag is where customers have to present their story repeatedly as they get transferred from agent to agent. This is where the right call center tech with advanced features like call forwarding and IVR will help to track customer journeys and reduce the need for repeated explanations.
7. First Call Resolution (FCR)
Being efficient means being able to help customers as quickly as possible. The more times they have to call you for the same problem, the higher the levels of customer dissatisfaction.
FCR reveals what percentage of customers’ issues your team is able to resolve with one call. Even with the best will in the world, there are times that it can take more than one call to solve a problem or ensure a customer is satisfied. But if there’s an unduly high percentage of repeated calls, then you need to get to the root of the problem.
Again, it could be insufficient staff training. Or it could be that people are calling in with problems that your team hasn’t encountered before. Whatever the reason, it needs looking at.
8. Staff Turnover Rate
If your staff are leaving in large numbers, this should be a clear red flag. It’s symptomatic of low job satisfaction rates, poor motivation, and lack of engagement.
All of these symptoms have a negative impact on the quality of customer service as these employees are unlikely to be motivated to deliver a stellar experience. It’s also incredibly expensive for your business, as the time and money spent recruiting and training new staff could be better spent elsewhere.
So, it’s critical to keep an eye on staff turnover rates among other call center reporting metrics that focus on staff performance.
Yes, you’d expect a degree of churn as people move on to new things or retire. However, if this figure creeps up, then you need to check in with employees to determine the cause. There might be something you can do to improve their engagement levels, whether that’s upskilling or introducing recognition schemes.
Final Thoughts on Call Center KPIs
By tracking these essential call center KPIs, you can see to it that your call center delivers rock solid customer service quality.
These metrics will give you all the data you need to get to grips with what’s happening in your center and how staff are performing. This way, you can iron out any snags—actual or potential—immediately.
On top of these KPIs, it’s a good idea to just communicate often with your staff. They’ll be able to relate experiences to you so that you build up a better picture of what’s happening on the frontline. This is, after all, where customer service takes place.
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