15 Essential Contact Center Metrics and KPIs to Measure in Healthcare
February 19, 2026
Contact centers are important for enhancing customer experience, but how do you gauge their efficiency? Measuring contact center metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) is crucial for assessing performance and ensuring alignment with business objectives. In healthcare, this translates into serving patients more efficiently and delivering higher-quality care.
With the right data, you can make informed decisions to steer your business in the right direction. But with countless contact center KPIs available, what are the KPIs in healthcare, and which ones should you prioritize?
Here are 15 essential healthcare contact center performance metrics and KPIs to measure.
Why Measure Metrics and KPIs in Healthcare?
Measuring metrics and KPIs in healthcare is crucial for several reasons:
Enhanced Patient Satisfaction: Tracking patient experience and satisfaction metrics helps you identify areas for improvement and tailor your services to better meet patient needs.
Improved Operational Effectiveness: Measuring metrics such as call volume, average handle time, and first call resolution rates helps identify inefficiencies in your processes and streamline operations.
Better Quality of Care: By monitoring metrics on treatment outcomes, wait times, and adherence to clinical protocols, you can ensure high-quality care for patients.
Optimized Resource Allocation: Tracking metrics on resource utilization, staffing levels, and scheduling helps allocate resources more effectively, ensuring patient needs are met efficiently.
Compliance with Regulatory Requirements: Measuring metrics related to data security, privacy, and healthcare regulations helps mitigate risks and ensure adherence to regulatory requirements.
Continuous Improvement: Monitoring metrics and KPIs allows you to identify healthcare contact center trends, track progress over time, and make data-driven decisions to drive continuous improvement in patient care and operational performance.
Measuring Patient Experience
1. Schedule Adherence Rate
Even with the rise of more accessible, immediate options such as virtual visits, scheduling remains a top concern for both patients and providers. Healthcare contact centers can help reduce the rate at which patients reschedule or fail to show up for their appointments, known as the schedule adherence rate, with automatic reminders.
And if a patient wants to reschedule, self-service workflows can help reduce strain on staff, freeing them up for more valuable functions. Healthcare professionals often see these types of systems as helpful, as they improve the patient experience.
2. First Call Resolution (FCR)
The First Call Resolution, or FCR, metric should be a fundamental component of your call center KPI mix. FCR, which measures how often a customer's issue is resolved on the first call, is crucial for enhancing your reputation and customer satisfaction rates.
A low FCR can result in negative feedback and patients switching to other providers. Patients don't want to spend hours explaining their issues to different agents or providers to find a solution.
In healthcare, the average FCR rate is 52%, but providers should aim for above 70% to align with broader industry standards. Integrating your electronic health record (EHR) software with your contact center platform can help to improve FCR (and patient experience as a whole) by ensuring your agents have all the necessary information to quickly and accurately address patient concerns.
3. Average Wait Time (AWT)
An important healthcare call center metric, especially for gauging operations and patient experience, the average wait time in healthcare is 4.4 minutes. The longer the wait between when patients call in and when their call is picked up by an agent, the more frustrated patients are likely to become.
If your healthcare contact center isn't already measuring AWT, determining your current KPI and then working to reduce it can help improve your patients' experience and lead to higher sentiment. A high AWT (or an increasing one) can signal that your contact center is understaffed or undertrained to handle patient calls efficiently.
4. Talk/Listen Ratio
Whether it's virtual visits or a routine appointment scheduling call, patients want to feel heard. Now, with AI, you can measure more contact center performance metrics, such as talk/listen ratio, to better understand how much your providers or agents are really listening to patients.
According to ExperityHealth, providers interrupt patients in fewer than 20 seconds, which may make patients feel their concerns are unappreciated or that their provider is overly rushed.
Gong found that the "golden ratio" for Sales was 47% talking and 53% listening, though your contact center should determine your best ratio in conjunction with patient sentiment metrics. However, you should invest in communication training with agents and providers to promote active listening during patient conversations, even before you establish your ideal KPI.
Measuring Patient Sentiment
5. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Score
Your Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is one of the most important call center KPIs, and reflects how satisfied patients are with your services.
A high CSAT score signifies satisfied patients and reinforces positive relationships. However, a low CSAT score warrants attention, signaling potential issues within your contact center.
But how do you calculate a CSAT score?
Calculating a CSAT score involves gathering patient feedback, typically by asking them to rate their experience on a numbered scale and then converting those ratings into percentages. Healthcare CSAT scores vary by provider type, with emergency rooms averaging 67% and non-hospital services averaging 81%.
6. Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS)
In hospital settings, patient satisfaction is also measured through Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems surveys. HCAHPS scores are publicly reported and directly tied to CMS reimbursement, making patient feedback not just a CX metric, but a financial and strategic priority.
Aligning contact center performance with HCAHPS domains—such as communication, responsiveness, and care transitions—can have a measurable impact on both patient loyalty and revenue. Top-performing hospitals typically receive a score of 4 or higher, and the average score across nearly 3,300 U.S. hospitals tracked in HospitalView is 3.33.
7. Net Promoter Scores (NPS)
Similar to CSAT, Net Promoter Score (NPS) also assesses customer experience, but it adds another dimension: customer loyalty. NPS measures how likely a customer is to recommend a product or service to others.
The scoring is based on a sliding scale, with 9 and 10 indicating promoters, 7 to 8 as passive, and 0 to 6 as detractors. You calculate the NPS by subtracting the percentage of detractors from promoters. A score of over 50 is considered good, and the healthcare industry's average is 53.
Since NPS surveys are easy to administer, they provide valuable insights into which clients are the most loyal and which may be at risk of leaving.
Measuring Agent Efficiency
8. Average Abandonment Rate
The average abandonment rate is the percentage of calls in which patients hang up before connecting with an agent or provider.
An abandonment rate between 5-8% is no cause for concern. However, if it exceeds 10%, it's time for you to investigate why agents struggle to connect with callers.
Potential causes include understaffing during peak hours or technical issues that hinder agent and provider efficiency, both of which can inflate the KPI. Remember, every hung-up call represents a missed opportunity to provide excellent care, so vigilance over this metric is essential.
9. Average Speed of Answer (ASA)
Average Speed of Answer is the average time an agent takes to answer inbound calls, including the time the agent's phone rings but excluding the time the caller spends in IVR (interactive voice response) or in the queue.
The average ASA in healthcare is between 30 and 60 seconds.
Extended ASA times pose several risks, including customer dissatisfaction, heightened agent absenteeism and turnover, and indicate efficiency and accessibility concerns. To address these risks, prioritize reducing ASA by employing knowledgeable agents who can promptly address patient queries.
10. Average Handle Time (AHT)
Average Handle Time (AHT) measures the time an agent or provider spends on a single interaction, encompassing queue wait time, agent-caller conversation, and post-call tasks.
While many contact center agents are assessed based on resolution speed to reduce call wait times and enhance resolution rates, optimizing AHT requires caution.
Rushing agents to expedite calls may improve AHT metrics, but can lead to decreased customer satisfaction. Start with the industry standard of 3 minutes and 28 seconds, then strike a balance between efficiency and quality to maximize your AHT effectiveness.
Measuring Operations
11. Patient Reach and Engagement Rate
Frustrating for both patients and providers, one party being unable to reach the other leads to dissatisfaction for everyone involved—so patient reach rate should be one of the healthcare contact center performance metrics you measure.
While your engagement rate will vary depending on the type of healthcare services you provide, industry benchmarks for SMS marketing see a click-through rate (how many people click on a link provided in the text) of 19 - 36%. Of course, your contact center should measure this for every call or text, not just marketing-related ones.
12. Agent Occupancy Rate
The agent occupancy rate in a call center reflects the percentage of time agents spend on call-related activities, including taking calls and after-call work (ACW). Aim for an average occupancy rate between 75% and 85% for optimal agent performance.
But why not aim for a 100% occupancy rate?
Agents working at full occupancy function like machines without breaks. They lack time for training sessions, note-taking after calls, or improving service levels. To nurture agent development and uphold patient service quality, aim for a maximum occupancy rate of no more than 90%.
13. Cost Per Call (CPC)
CPC, or Cost Per Call, measures the average cost your contact center incurs for each call handled by an agent. This metric provides valuable insight into operational effectiveness and aids in resource allocation decisions.
By analyzing CPC, you can determine if your call center is operating cost-efficiently and effectively allocating resources. CPC is calculated by dividing the total cost of all calls by the total number of calls handled.
In healthcare, the average CPC is between $20 and $35, largely due to the highly regulated and confidential nature of healthcare information.
14. Call Arrival Rate
This metric, known as call volume, tracks the number of calls made each day throughout the month. Analyzing this call center KPI allows you to pinpoint days when call volumes were exceptionally high or low.
This insight enables you to predict peak call times and schedule agents' work accordingly, ensuring optimal staffing levels to handle patient inquiries efficiently.
15. Service Level
Another key contact center performance metric for healthcare is your service level, which is the percentage of calls answered within your goal ASA. For instance, if 400 of your 500 calls in a day were answered within your goal of 30 seconds, your service level would be 80%.
Service levels are a great way to tell if your contact center is understaffed, as the lower your service level, the more time patients spend on the phone waiting. It may also be an indicator that agents' after-call work is too time-consuming, as they're not answering calls quickly enough. AI-powered contact center software can help reduce ACW and enable agents to help patients more often, rather than focusing on administrative work.
Best Practices for Tracking Metrics and KPIs in Healthcare
Now that you're familiar with the metrics and KPIs to monitor, implement these best practices for healthcare contact centers to enhance tracking efficiency.
Regular Monitoring and Analysis: Consistently monitor and analyze healthcare contact center metrics and KPIs to stay informed about performance. Ongoing evaluation helps identify healthcare contact center trends and areas for improvement, enabling timely adjustments to optimize outcomes and patient satisfaction.
Benchmarking Against Industry Standards: Benchmark your organization's performance against industry standards to pinpoint strengths and areas for improvement, fostering continuous enhancement and competitiveness in the healthcare sector.
Continuous Training and Skill Development: Prioritize ongoing training and skill development for healthcare staff to ensure they have the necessary knowledge and skills to track and interpret metrics effectively.
Utilization of Advanced Technology: Utilize advanced technology like analytics platforms and data visualization tools to streamline metric tracking and analysis in healthcare. This automation enables real-time insights, user-friendly data visualization, and informed decision-making, enhancing overall performance in healthcare delivery.
These contact center metrics best practices will help you efficiently track your metrics and KPIs.
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Transform your healthcare contact center into a powerhouse of efficiency and excellence. Schedule a demo today.
Editorial Note: This content was originally published on March 29, 2024. It has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.
