Contact Center KPIs in 2020: What to Measure

Customer expectations continue to rise, and it’s increasingly difficult for the contact center meet their demands — especially given the growth in available service channels. This makes it more important than ever to know what delights your customers and how your employees can achieve it. But to gauge customer satisfaction, it’s important to look beyond traditional key performance indicators (KPIs).

Let’s take a look at what your contact center should measure in the new decade. Here are some of the best KPIs to focus on, to help you personalize your customer experience and increase brand loyalty.

The Standards

There’s a reason Net Promoter Score (NPS) and overall customer satisfaction (CSAT) are popular: They provide important insights. NPS reveals the wider loyalty to your organization, while CSAT is about the immediate interaction.

NPS is based on a single question: “How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?” For CSAT, following a transaction, customers are asked a question about their satisfaction with the company, which is then rated from 1 (very dissatisfied) to 5 (very satisfied).

While these traditional metrics have value, it’s useful to reach further in order to build a complete picture of how you’re delivering customer satisfaction. Here are four more KPIs to consider:

Average Response Time

Today’s customers don’t want to spend time waiting in a queue. The average response time is therefore an important measurement to determine the quality of your customers’ experience.

Average response time measures the average amount of time a customer waits to connect with your agents. If you have multiple channels, you must monitor the response rates for each.

This indicator provides insight into your team’s speed in addressing issues and can show you where you might need more agents. If you answer your queues quickly, you can build brand loyalty.

Average Handle Time

Average handle time (AHT) measures, start to finish, the time an agent is occupied for an incoming transaction. This should identify total interaction time, including hold time and any other tasks your agents have to engage in related to the interaction.

This indicator helps you assess both agent and contact center efficiency. Again, if you have multiple touch points — email, web, text and social — you must separately identify the handle times for each, to avoid confusion.

While it’s important to understand this metric, keep in mind that pushing your agents to close a call or ticket, without having resolved the customer’s issue, doesn’t help anyone in the long run.

First Contact Resolution

In an ideal world, your agents can address the customer’s need the first time—eliminating any required follow up. The rate at which you can do this is first contact resolution.

But beware of how you measure resolution. For example, If your agent provides a partial answer, but the underlying issue isn’t fully settled, you haven’t really resolved the contact.

Follow-up calls create an overall increased call volume that, in turn, requires more agents. In general, you can accept an increase in contact time as long as the first contact resolution rate increases as well.

Abandonment Rate

This metric represents the number of customers who hang up or otherwise end a contact before they complete a task. It helps you identify understaffed queues.

Pay attention to the particular situations you’re identifying. Know, for example, if you’re including instances when your system disconnects the contact. Or, if you count when an agent answers and has to transfer the call, and your customer drops off in the middle of that transfer.

Typically, abandoned calls are those in which the customer has had at least some initial contact with your agents. But it’s important to understand what your system is measuring.

Connecting the Dots

Metrics and data are valuable tools to support your continuous improvement—and it’s important to focus on the KPIs that will be most helpful in your particular contact center. Also, keep in mind that metrics in isolation may not give you all the information you need. Connect the dots—across channels and throughout the customer journey — for a full sense of your customers’ experience.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can be a big help — particularly in an omnichannel environment. Contact centers are complicated; understanding KPIs and then knowing what to do with them is, too. AI can empower your contact center to analyze and drive the KPIs that are most important to you.

Read this IDC white paper to learn more about the impact AI can have on your contact center measurement and efficiency.