What You Need to Know About Measuring Call Center Performance

Are you struggling to figure out how to measure the performance of your phone agents? If you’re still relying on inefficient, paper-based methods for evaluating key performance indicators (KPI), it’s time to explore the benefits of a technology solution for measuring performance.

How can cloud-based call center software help with measuring performance?

Even the best plans for improving your call center operations will come up short if your phone agents aren’t equipped with powerful tools to assist their work. With an easy setup and implementation process, cloud-based call center software provides built-in, automatic call center metrics to help you evaluate dozens of different KPIs, including:

• Average answer times: How quickly is a call picked up by an agent or the automatic call distributor (ACD)?
• Average abandonment rates: How many callers hang up while waiting to speak to an agent?
• Average call status: How many callers are on hold or speaking to a representative during a given period of time?
• Average call times: How long does it take phone agents to finish working with a caller?
• Average resolution rates: How often is a caller's problem solved by the time the call ends?
• Average after-call duties: How much time do your phone agents spend on after-call data entry or paperwork before they re-enter the available agent queue?

Which metrics are important for improving call center operations?

Contact center software can easily be customized to automatically compile your chosen metrics, so you can regularly review reports to help improve your phone agents' performance.

Here are just a few examples of common metrics that are important for measuring call center KPIs and overall contact center performance:

Agent productivity

With call center software performance reports, you can easily see how many calls an agent is taking each day, how quickly those calls are resolved and how long they wait to take the next call.

Agent availability

Are your phone agents always busy on calls, or are they frequently idle and waiting for the next customer? Related call center KPIs can help you visualize at a glance whether you’re understaffed or overstaffed, both generally and on a shift-by-shift or even hour-by-hour basis.

Automatic call distributor (ACD) queue times

You can also evaluate your staffing needs by measuring the performance of your ACD queue times. Busy queues with long wait times can lead to hang-ups and dissatisfied customers, and usually mean you need more phone agents. Alternately, very short queue times may indicate that you’re overstaffed.

Call routing

Call routing metrics can tell you whether callers are quickly and efficiently being routed to a phone agent with the skills to resolve their issue, or whether they're wasting time being transferred between agents or departments. You'll also be able to see how routing impacts your metrics for first call resolution, so you can adjust your training and policies accordingly.

Call times

Measuring performance in relation to call times can help you identify phone agents who may need more training to boost their efficiency. Conversely, it can also identify agents who show a strong commitment to resolving complex customer issues, and who should be encouraged to continue providing such high-quality support.

Campaign performance

Beyond measuring performance for phone agents, call center software can also help you use metrics to evaluate entire calling campaigns. You can easily visualize what the aggregate performance for the campaign was across the entire call center, then break that information down between individual phone agents to evaluate KPIs.

How can historical reports help improve call center performance?

Cloud-based storage means you’ll have easy access to flexible contact center report histories, so you can view daily reports along with automatically compiled monthly and annual reports to help you see the big picture over time. Equipped with this data, you can compare your business performance from month to month and year to year, see how changes in your operations are impacting your business over time, and identify phone representatives who consistently provide high level service.

You can easily review agent performance and workload statistics, volumes of interactions, average ACD queue times and other key metrics. You’ll also have convenient access to more complicated reports measuring campaign results, customer feedback histories and other important customer satisfaction indicators.

How can cloud-based contact center software help you meet your goals?

With easy access to a call center performance database, you can start setting goals for things like phone agent performance, first-call resolution and hold times. Once you have the metrics to accurately track that information, you’ll be able to monitor your progression toward those goals, increasing the success of your plans to measure and boost customer satisfaction.

To find out how Five9’s contact center software can help you measure your call center performance, or to request a consultation for business fit and ballpark pricing, contact us today!

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