CONTACT CENTER AGENT KPIs

Industry Content Supporter:
Stephen Paskel
VP, Senior Technology & Global Operations Manager
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephen-paskel

Many contact centers operate in stressful environments. Employees must manage thousands of calls each hour while maintaining a high standard of customer service. You must know the latest metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to do this effectively. A KPI is a measurable value demonstrating how effectively your company, department, and agents achieve business objectives. It measures the level of success based on the contact center’s goals and expectations.

What drives your contact center? Track daily performance from busiest to slowest days for accurate measurement. KPIs can provide insights into personal and team continuous improvement areas and customer and agent satisfaction. By following your company's analytics, which can provide insights into where and how to drive the business, you can determine additional coaching and training needs and overall performance.

Here are the most common KPI’s for a contact center.
– Average Time in the Queue
– Average Speed of Answer
– Average Abandonment Rate
– Average Handle Time
– Average After Call Work Time
– First Call Resolution
– Customer Satisfaction
– Service Levels
– Quality Assurance Scores

There are many more, it just depends on what is essential to your business. For example, an online shoe retailer does not track agent talk times. They don’t care how long you talk with customers because they believe talking is good. There is no reason to hurry folks off the phones.

The real question is how agents get access to their metrics.

In many contact centers, an agent’s specific data is outdated when they receive it. Your competitive and conscientious agents strive to be top performers and always scream, “How am I doing?” If they could see their performance in real time, they would keep pushing to beat themselves and those at the top. Competing is very motivating and exciting for agents.

So, where is the agent Dashboard showing talk times, hold times, abandoned calls, and the amount of time spent on after-call work? People who want to be great need to know where they stand every minute to improve. This is why athletes always know their stats and lifetime averages.

A comprehensive enterprise contact center platform offers agent metrics directly on their desktops! The platform monitors all activities and displays them on a dashboard for agents. When agents log into the hosted platform, their dashboard showcases real-time metrics, allowing them to assess their performance. A highly advanced dashboard presents inbound and outbound statistics, displays the queues the agent is logged into, and features a complete menu bar with user status, script preview, chat functionalities, and more.

Seeing your numbers live motivates and will encourage agents to perform at their highest levels. Looking at yesterday’s call reports is like yesterday’s news. Give agents what they need to be successful.

Service Level is an old metric. It was one of the very first metrics to be produced by the ACD systems. It looks at the percentage of calls answered within a given time.

For example, the industry average is 80% of calls answered within 20 seconds and 95% answered within 15 seconds. It depends on your business.

What is interesting is SLA is measured starting from the queue. What about all the time before the caller gets into the queue? How long does a caller have to wait before getting into the queue? Does your company have a long forced greeting on the front end? Does the caller have to hear every product, every piece of news, and promotion that is going on before they can choose an option? How about IVR options, how many does the caller have to listen to? Do you require them to keep choosing several times before speaking to a live person? All this takes time, and all this activity annoys the caller. When the caller reaches the agent, they are so upset and wiped out that they forget why they called. All this time in the front impacts service levels and customer satisfaction, and none of this is controlled by the agent, yet the agent is evaluated and measured on these metrics.

Picture attending a sports event—basketball, hockey, or football—where both teams are energetically scoring points, shooting pucks, or kicking balls through goalposts, yet no score is kept. Would the game hold the same excitement? Certainly not!

Everyone wants to win, so keeping score is a way to determine who is winning. It determines who is more successful. Everyone loves a nail biter of a game, where both teams are scoring and we must have a winner.

While that’s the team’s score, what about individual performances? Which player made the most baskets, field goals, assists, or ran the most yards? These metrics might overwhelm casual fans, but they are crucial for players, providing essential insights for continuous improvement. When the team strives to enhance their performance, they become a winning squad! Each athlete must contribute their best efforts for the team to thrive collectively.

Anyone who wants to improve keeps track of their statistics. It is challenging to beat yourself if you don’t know where you stand. It isn't easy to win the top performer if you don’t know how far away you are. Agent statistics are like ballplayer stats except they don’t appear on baseball cards. Agents like their stats in a dashboard! 

Customer Satisfaction scores are an old favorite that looks at the percentage of happy customers.

This information is simple and easy to collect, and it can be carried out through a wide range of methods, the most common being a post-call IVR survey or a follow-up email survey. Implementing a Voice Data analytic system automates this process by converting the audio file into text for later analysis. Customers prefer voice data analysis because they don’t have to stay on the line to answer questions.
Customer Satisfaction metrics assess your call center’s performance from your customers' perspective. They are essential for any service-based industry, including retail and call centers. Customer satisfaction data is usually collected through customer surveys that ask general questions about call quality, call resolution, and satisfaction with the service received, regardless of outcomes.

Customer satisfaction is a tricky metric. Many times on the customer satisfaction survey, there are things the agent has no control over. When agents are evaluated on interest rate, for example – something they have no control over – how high or low the interest rate is, it can demotivate agents. Some will give up on this metric because it is a no-win situation. If this is a tool to measure how “satisfied” the customer is and how well the agent satisfied them, stick to asking about elements that agents have control over. When they have control over what they are being measured on, they will do what they can to get all their metrics to “exceeds” or whatever high score you deem to be the goal.