Which contact centre KPIs are still relevant in a digital era?

There may come a time when you notice things in your contact centre aren’t going as smoothly as they should. Rather you notice employees are unhappy, customers are unhappy and overall operational performance is suffering. Or, maybe it’s been that way for a while.

I see you nodding as you’re reading this; we’re all feeling the pressure of changing customer expectations and intense budget scrutiny — what we’ve been doing to support our customers isn’t going to cut it anymore.

And you’re right. Priorities need changing, and considering almost half of businesses (45.9%) have placed customer experience as a top priority moving into 2021, you’re not alone.

The truth is, your customers are changing. The way they interact with your company, the channels they access, their growing impatience and need for instant gratification. Gone are the days of having to ‘wait’ for an answer or be put on hold, customers don’t just want good customer service, they expect it. In fact, they demand it.

Find out how to manage customer experience in 2021 in this free report.

So, being the ambitious and determined contact centre leader you are, here you are, searching for insights to guide you through this new landscape and help you pinpoint how to adapt to this new world. And it all starts by looking at how we can measure success.

But first, let’s explore how this shift in customer expectations is impacting the KPIs we measure today. How is ‘what good looks like’ changing?

What impact does the shifting customer experience have on current contact centre KPIs?

Wait times, volume of calls, average call handling times, speed of answer and call abandonment rate are all typical ‘operational’ or ‘practical’ KPIs commonly found in most contact centres. These are mostly an indication of how our people, processes and technology are working to enable us to best support our customers.

However, thanks to our ever-evolving technology landscape, customers increasingly have the freedom to contact your company on their own terms. This means there are now (potentially) multiple touchpoints to account for in one interaction.

For example, a customer may use a self-service tool on your website, but if it does not provide the answers they seek, they move onto live chat.

Perhaps live chat had a wait time, so they call you as well, to try and get through to someone as fast as they can (oh, and now they are frustrated with you too).

By the time they actually get in contact with an agent, the customer is expecting their problem to be resolved then and there.

And they are prepared to jump ship if it’s not, with 1 in 3 customers leaving a brand they love after just one bad experience.

Not to mention, this almost always leads to an increase in overall contact volume, which drives longer wait times and higher abandonment. You get the picture.

The truth of it all is that...

What customers expect from their providers is always changing. Those changes impact their behaviour. And when their expectations aren’t met, there is a real risk that they’ll leave your brand and go to your competitor.

Solving this challenge isn’t easy, after all, you can’t stop the technology train in its tracks, or control your customers evolving expectations. What you can do is ensure that your contact centre is a well-oiled machine and is set up to quickly adapt and evolve with your customers.

This all starts with a clear view of your performance metrics and the trends emerging in this data.

So, first and foremost — are you tracking the right KPIs?

Tracking the wrong KPIs (or not tracking the right ones) can lead to poor decision-making, wasted budget, a drop in customer satisfaction and inefficient contact centre operations. You can’t fix what you don’t know.

When it comes to defining the KPIs you should measure, some questions you should be asking yourself are:

How well is my team serving customers?
How well is my operation performing?
Is my team enabled to perform at their best?
How well is my operation serving the business?

To ensure you’re tracking and acting on contact centre metrics that improve relationships with your customers and keep your operations running smoothly, let’s explore the relevance of 15 typical contact KPIs in this shifting climate.

The top key performance indicators propelling the future of customer success and operational excellence

Customer Experience — How well is my team serving customers?

According to a report, 95.7% viewed customer satisfaction as one of the most important metrics contact centre leaders should be tracking, but you already know this. Customer satisfaction is simply one piece of the much larger puzzle — that is customer experience.

Let’s take a look at standard KPIs and their relevance moving forwards.

Phone stats (abandonment, service level, , and average speed to answer)

At the centre of customer satisfaction you’ll find some tell-all measures such as abandonment rate, service level and average speed to answer. Phone stats will always have a part to play when measuring customer experience. They not only provide data critical to driving an efficient operation, but they also tell us a lot about our customer’s tolerance, expectations and behavioural trends.

What is a good call abandon rate for a contact centre? The global benchmark is between 5 and 8%.

Keep in mind that...

Many factors can affect what ‘good’ looks like for your operation. For example, if your customer calls you about a new product promotion, and while on hold they hear a message that directs them to a website URL where they can claim an offer, then the caller may abandon. This behaviour will impact your abandonment rate and your service level, and so you will need to factor that in when you set your own targets for these metrics.

Another common scenario we see is in the use of the ‘callback’ feature. If a customer opts to hold their place in the queue and receive a call back when an agent is available, some systems will count that as an abandoned call. Understanding how your technology counts such scenarios will enable you to set the right targets for these important metrics.

2. First call resolution (FCR)

First call resolution has been viewed as one of the most important metrics to be tracked within a contact centre. It looks at how many times a customer has to contact a company to have their problem resolved and allows contact centres to measure a problem from the customers perspective. Generally speaking, low FCR may indicate poor internal processes or lack of staff training/education.

What is a good FCR rate? The global industry benchmark for FCR is between 70 and 75%.

A shift towards first contact resolution

We now live in an omni-channel world where customers can now contact you from up to 11 different channels. Considering the customer experience, adapting this metric to first contact resolution can be a challenging task to define and measure, especially with the possibility of multiple touch-points or channels being involved in one ‘interaction’.

A more effective method of using this metric is by measuring the first contact resolution of the initiating channel, which is often self-service. Studies currently show 40% of customers now prefer to resolve their enquiry via self-service over human contact.

3. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

As we move towards a more customer-focused era, customers have now come to expect exceptional experiences with your company, and unfortunately, will leave you for your competitor in a heartbeat if they are not satisfied. In fact, 67% of customers will actually pay more for a better experience.

Customer satisfaction is one type of customer experience metric, and can be used to get a better understanding of your customer’s satisfaction (that is, how well you have met their expectations) with one or more elements of your service delivery.

CSAT is an excellent customer experience mechanism that can be used to gauge customer needs and understand their problems with your product and/or services. The flexibility of the CSAT approach allows you to choose which elements of your experience you measure, thereby adapting to the insights and trends evident in other data.

4. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS was first developed in 2003 by Bain and Co to measure and track the loyalty of customers to a company. Fast forward to 2020, NPS is considered the gold standard for benchmarking customer experience and is used by millions of businesses globally.

NPS still has a place as a customer experience measurement tool in the contact centre. It’s most effective application is in measuring trends — for example how one customer’s scores trend over time, indicating whether their overall impression of your brand is increasing or decreasing.

A primary limitation of using NPS in a contact centre is because of its overarching experience of the brand associated with a response to a question.

If a customer loves the experience provided by a contact centre, but hates the product they received, then the customer will not recommend the product to friends or colleagues. In this way, it’s most effectively used when deployed as a whole-of-business measure rather than a specific contact centre measure.

What is a good NPS score?

Your overall Net Promoter Score is calculated by comparing your Detractors to your Promoters. If you have more Promoters than Detractors, you have a score from +1 to +100. If you have more Detractors than Promoters, you have a score from -100 to -1. The same number of each is a score of 0.

A ‘good’ NPS is relative to the industry you are in, your direct competitors, and your own past performances. To generalise a good NPS, if you score:

-100 to 0 it needs some drastic improvement
0 to +30 is considered good, but there’s still room for improvement
+30 to +100 indicates you're doing great and there are more happy customers vs unhappy ones

5. Customer Effort Score (CES)

CES is the third musketeer in the customer satisfaction survey family and has been designed to measure how much effort your customer has to go through to get an issue resolved or question answered. It is said to be the biggest predictor of customer loyalty (out of the 3 metrics we’ve explored) and can have a strong correlation to other business outcomes, such as customer churn.

In the context of a contact centre, CES allows a business to assess their processes and self-service offerings through the lens of a customer and identify any factors that may increase effort. For example, being transferred multiple times, having to repeat information, switch channels or not being able to find information at the time needed increases effort and will lower your customer effort score.

It provides episodic information by capturing the rate of effort expended in one interaction. This kind of data can be used to compare with other interactions and reveal key focus areas that need improvement.

When it comes to measuring customer experience, this is not an and/or type of list. Each of the metrics explored has a purpose and a value to the contact centre and the broader organisation. Utilising each metric at the right time for the right purpose will be critical in identifying where the customer experience needs to adapt to meet evolving customer expectations.

Service delivery — How efficient is my contact centre?

Occupancy rate

Agent occupancy rate has long been used to measure a contact centre agent’s productivity across all their duties. It measures the time your agents spend resolving a customer's query and/or finishing up all the work related to that customer. Low occupancy rates can indicate you have too many staff rostered on, resulting in high operational costs and low productivity. High occupancy rates can mean you don’t have enough staff, wait times are ridiculously high, and staff are taking calls back to back (equals low staff satisfaction).

While this is an important stat to monitor, it’s application in an evolving landscape needs to change. The more complex and lengthy ‘human-assisted’ enquiries become, and the more demanding customers become, the more ‘overstaffing’ we will need to ensure those expectations are met.

This leads to new methods of skilling and assigning work to team members to ensure that overall productivity is maximised, which may have a downstream impact on Occupancy as we know it today.

2. Service level

Service level was viewed as the 4th (62.7% agreed) most important metric within a contact centre. It essentially measures the level of accessibility of a business to its customers — how quickly calls are answered in seconds — and it allows contact centre managers to assess their team’s responsiveness.

Service level is displayed in the format of % of calls answered in X seconds. Or in the case of emails or other back office tasks, this may be expressed as a ‘Response Time’ e.g. X enquiries responded to within Y hours.

Many contact centres still utilise what was once thought as the standard benchmark service level target of 80% in 20 seconds. However, it is far more effective to set a benchmark for this measure that reflects your true customer tolerance (how long your customers are willing to wait before they abandon), and your resourcing budget (there’s no point targeting 90% in 10 seconds if you can only ever achieve 80% in 60 seconds with the resources you have budget for).

3. Forecast Accuracy

This measure has been one of the unsung heroes of the metrics world for years. It allows contact centre managers and directors to understand how accurately the workforce planning team have forecasted workload demand and resources required. This is important because it has a direct and significant impact on your employee satisfaction, customer experience, business performance and budget.

The most critical business function that supports the efficient use of resources is the forecasting of workload demand. Get it right, all the ducks will line up nicely and do a happy dance for you, spreading rainbows and glitter in their wake.

Get it wrong, and the spiral of business impacts is exponential:

Customers wait too long, abandon and call back or try other channels
Performance against business targets tank
Employees get stressed and burnt out
Quality suffers as calls get rushed and mistakes occur
Absenteeism, adherence and attrition rise
Complaints increase
Customer loyalty declines, and churn increases
Company targets and profit are affected and budgets are tightened across the board

The ‘do more with less’ mandate becomes more pressing. Your ability to innovate and invest in improvements all but disappears. Drawcards to attract great team members fade away. Culture suffers. And all of this stems from not getting the forecast right. This measure is arguably one of the most important indicators in your contact centre.

Find out how to measure Forecast Accuracy [link to Optimise Lead Magnet]

4. Average handle time (AHT)

Average handling time, also known as AHT, is a well-known KPI amongst contact centre leaders. It measures the average duration of a customer interaction from start to finish. This includes call initiation, talk/processing time and any wrap-up activities. Average handling time can be used to understand team efficiency and identify outliers, those who are completing calls in much less or more time than the average team member. This can help pinpoint training gaps or process improvement opportunities.

While AHT should be measured and monitored, this should never be a target set for your agents. Agents should only be measured on what they can directly control, and targeting AHT may result in your agents rushing calls, which can have a negative impact on the customer experience. Customers may end up confused or receive an incorrect or incomplete answer, and may have to call back again, impacting other metrics such as FCR, and causing frustration for both your customers and your team

The global industry benchmark for average handling time is 6 minutes.

It goes without saying that this will vary significantly from industry to industry, and between different call or contact types. Overall though, many contact centres are reporting an overall increase in AHT as the adoption of self-service removes simple, automatable transactions and increases the complexity of agent-assisted interactions.

People & capability — Is my team performing at their best?

Staff satisfaction and engagement

Contact centres are a people-business. Resources are the most critical and costly part of any contact centre operation, so ensuring that they are engaged and happy in their roles is a core metric to pay attention to.

Good engagement results indicate that staff are happy in their role, that they feel supported by their leaders and see opportunities to grow within the team and the organisation. It’s Richard Branson who says - “Look after your employees, and they’ll look after your customers”, so a measure of employee engagement is also an important indicator for customer success.

Whether you use employee net promoter score (ENPS) or another form of employee engagement measurement, consider conducting surveys specific to the contact centre team, and deploying journey specific surveys at different stages of the employee lifecycle (in addition to your regular periodic check-points), such as:

During recruitment/induction/training
After implementing business or process changes
During structural, leadership or team changes
At exit interviews or change of role

This approach will enable you to gather specific insights that help pinpoint the areas of focus for improvement activities, and more quickly drive improvements in results when needed.

2. Staff turnover rate (attrition rate)

Staff turnover rate is the number of agents who leave the contact centre to work elsewhere. It’s important to distinguish ‘positive attrition’ (those who leave their roles for a promotion or placement elsewhere in the business, or who are politely nudged to leave as they are not performing to standard), from ‘negative attrition’ (those who left when we would have liked them to stay).

This measure is a critical one as it is a flashing red beacon that highlights issues that may exist within your centre, and it is an important input into future resource planning.

The impact of high attrition is broad, with higher recruitment and training costs, an increase in new, less experienced staff may result in poor service delivery (if you don’t have a great knowledge base in place!) further resulting in increased operational costs and ultimately customer satisfaction will take a hit.

3. Agent Absenteeism

As you undoubtedly already know, absenteeism is a challenge most contact centre leaders deal with on a daily basis, with average absenteeism sitting at 10% on any given day. Unplanned leave has a major impact on contact centre schedules, employee engagement, customer response times and ultimately the bottom line.

Like attrition, this is a core indicator of emerging cultural issues and should be monitored closely to help with early identification of potential disengagement.

4. Staff utilisation rates

This measure tracks the percentage of time an agent is busy working on customer activities compared to the time they are at work. Not to be confused with Occupancy, which measures how much ‘on phone’ time is available spent waiting for new work to complete. Utilisation considers the percentage of the total shift time spent doing customer facing work (as opposed to taking breaks, training, meetings etc.).

For example, a more experienced staff member may show higher utilisation rates as they need less coaching and training (considered un-utilised time) than a newer team member.

This measure is helpful and important for the resource planning team to use when calculating how many staff to hire and roster to meet forecasted demand, and should therefore be used as an indicator of the effectiveness of the scheduling and real-time management of the contact centre team.

Business objectives — how well is my operation serving the business?

Cost per call

Cost per call identifies how much each call is costing your business — calls made and answered. Cost per call considers costs from agent time, technology and software, the physical desk and facilities, and telephony costs. This metric can be incredibly useful as a comparison figure to demonstrate before and after states. For example, as part of a business case for a new technology solution, or as a ‘this vs that indicator’; comparing different sites or locations, and in-house vs outsourced operations teams.

2. Customer retention

Customer retention measures how many customers stick with your brand when they have the option to leave — highlighting the loyalty built with your customer and the correlation to your NPS or CSAT metrics and company’s revenue. It allows an organisation to measure and quantify the impact of investing in delivering a great customer experience.

While this is a measure that is impacted by many different factors inside and outside the contact centre, this figure is heavily influenced by the customer experience and confidence the customer has in the support provided by the contact centre team.

Therefore, it can be used as an indication that parts of the customer experience should be promoted (if high) or improved (if low). This measure is most valuable where reason codes are categories or feedback collected to indicate the reasons customers stay (or leave) so the appropriate focus areas can be addressed.

Key takeaways

As a contact centre manager, your main objective is to make sure your operations are performing efficiently, effectively and best serving your customers. This requires you to monitor the correct KPIs and metrics that not only help you achieve your goals but align with broader business objectives.

If you’re unsure on what KPIs you should be measuring or need some support and advice on how to adapt a more customer focused approach, we’re here to help. At Athena Consulting, we help companies navigate transformation large and small using the right skills, leadership techniques and technology. We understand that day-to-day management of contact centres requires a myriad of innovative solutions from how we manage and motivate people, to the integration and transformation of technology solutions and operational practices.

Download free report on “How to define, measure and optimise call centre performance” here.