Call center metrics & KPIs for tracking team's performance

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Call center agent speaking to a customer

Measuring the effectiveness and efficiency of your call center starts with identifying relevant and measurable Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

Call center managers and business leaders understand the role that customer support services play in a customer’s experience with a company. However, balancing workforce management with customer satisfaction can be challenging.

Choosing which call center (or contact center) KPIs to monitor over time requires you to assess your call center’s performance and how it aligns with your business objectives.

Here, we’re sharing 15 of the top call center KPIs and metrics to help you solve customer issues seamlessly and deliver exceptional customer experiences.

Call center manager reviewing call center KPIs

What are KPIs?

A Key Performance Indicator (KPI, as mentioned earlier) is a value used to measure how effectively a business achieves its objectives. Businesses use KPIs for performance management and quality monitoring.

KPIs should be tailored to your business or organization’s specific needs. Tracking call center KPIs and relevant metrics enable business leaders to gain valuable insights into company, team, and individual agent performance.

These findings can be used to assess the efficiency and effectiveness of your call center performance and highlight ways to improve customer experience (CX).

Cloud contact center solutions like RingCentral are designed to make tracking metrics easy. With RingCentral Contact Center, you can measure your team’s success with built-in tailored metrics that cover all aspects of performance and CX.

15 top call center KPIs and metrics to track your team’s performance

1. Active waiting calls

Active waiting calls is a useful metric that tells you how many incoming calls are currently waiting to be answered. Tracking this call center metric, especially during peak-hour traffic, enables call center agents to adjust their pace and manage their workload.

The metric also helps ensure company targets are being met and employee performance is up to par through real-time insights into agent productivity.

2. After-call work time

Average after-call work time is a call center metric used to determine the average amount of time an agent spends on post-call tasks and how much time should be allocated for this part of the job.

Call center managers should strive to keep after-call work time to a minimum to maximize the total time agents spend handling customer calls.

This metric can be measured in conjunction with overall agent occupancy rates to better balance agent workloads and reduce the possibility of burnout.

3. Average handle time (AHT)

With this metric, call center managers monitor the average time an agent spends handling a single call. Armed with this information, agents can better understand how to manage high call volumes by knowing how much time is required for each call.

This metric also helps managers to track agent performance and implement strategies that streamline customer support.

4. The average speed of answer

The average answer speed measures how long it takes for calls to be answered in a specific time frame.

Call center managers use this metric to assess team efficiency and determine how accessible agents are to callers. It includes caller wait times but doesn’t include any time spent navigating a call center’s IVR system.

5. Average time in queue

Placing callers in a queue for long periods is detrimental to customer experience. However, call centers receive a huge number of calls per day, and answering each one immediately isn’t always possible, especially during peak traffic hours.

To ensure caller wait times are kept low, call center teams must track the average time callers spend in the queue before their call is answered. This is a great way to determine whether your team’s service level aligns with your customer service objectives.

6. Call abandonment rate

Measuring call abandonment rate is crucial for customer-centric inbound call centers. This metric tells managers how many callers are disconnecting from the call before they speak to a human agent.

Customers often abandon calls if they incur long wait times due to being placed on hold. Although you might expect them to call back, a high abandon rate can cause frustration and have a damaging impact on your business reputation and customer retention.

Using this information, managers can address the reasons for abandoned calls to reduce hold time and prevent callers from dropping off before their issue is resolved.

7. Call arrival rate

This metric measures the total number of calls to a call center and includes data from the previous 30 days.

Tracking the number of inbound calls over the month can help managers identify patterns and trends to manage agent staffing schedules based on times of the day and days of the week where demand is highest.

8. Call setup success rate (CSSR)

Not all inbound or outbound calls are guaranteed to be successful. Measuring CSSR enables managers to understand how many handled calls per day are likely to be successful.

This way, they can better allocate agents and resources to achieve more successful answered calls.

9. Cost per call

Cost per call is an important call center metric that enables managers to monitor overall costs to ensure they don’t overspend.

Calls aren’t free. Call center software and equipment must get paid for and agent time needs to be reimbursed—tracking this metric helps to ensure these costs are kept under control.

10. Customer effort score

This KPI allows managers to assess customer loyalty and satisfaction by asking customers about their experience. Typically, this score is determined by asking how the customer found their experience and getting them to rate it on a scale (e.g., from one to five).

Customers might consider whether they had to endure a long waiting time, if their issue was resolved during the first call, or whether they had to call back. Ensuring your call center offers a quick response time and a low transfer rate will help keep customer effort down.

11. Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)

Measuring CSAT provides valuable insights into overall call center performance. CSAT also measures how an organization’s products or services live up to customer expectations.

Typically, this is measured by presenting the customer with a scale. CSAT rates indicate whether call centers are delivering high-quality customer support and experiences.

Understanding what’s making customers happy and what isn’t allows managers to identify areas for improvement.

12. First call resolution rate (FCR)

First call resolution (also referred to as first contact resolution) is often considered one of the most important call center metrics to track.

FCR refers to the number of customer calls that agents resolve the first time without transferring to another agent, escalating, or returning the call. This metric directly correlates to customer satisfaction, as customers expect their concerns to be dealt with effectively and efficiently.

13. Net promoter score (NPS)

NPS helps call center managers gauge a customer’s experience. It’s similar to measuring CSAT but is typically determined based on the question: “How likely is it that you would recommend this service/company to someone else?”

Customers answer on a scale of 1-10, with:

9-10 being considered promoters,
7-8 passive, and
0-6 detractors.

NPS enables businesses to use feedback relating to their call center to improve quality management and achieve higher call ratings.

14. Percentage of calls blocked

This KPI measures the percentage of inbound calls that are met with a busy tone or call blocking.

This might happen because there are no agents available or call queues configured, or the call center software cannot handle large call volumes.

15. Sales per agent

This is one of the most important agent KPIs to track sales and total calls, to measure outbound agent efficiency and successful call rate. Tracking sales per agent enables managers to adjust targets and assess overall call center performance.

Deliver better customer experiences with RingCentral Contact Center

RingCentral’s cloud-based contact center solution provides businesses of all shapes and sizes with omnichannel routing (voice, messaging, video), workforce management tools, and detailed reports and dashboards to help deliver tailored customer experiences.

RingCentral can help you gauge the effectiveness of your customer service teams by measuring agent performance, productivity, and overall customer satisfaction with a range of pre-built reports and real-time dashboards.

Here’s a look at some of the ways RingCentral can help you to enhance contact center performance:

Access pre-built reports to gain real-time insight into agent performance.
Monitor critical KPIs with real-time dashboards.
Increase agent productivity with a range of workforce management tools for service quality, scheduling, and real-time analytics.
Deliver tailored customer experiences while closely monitoring agent performance to ensure customer issues are solved quickly and effectively.

RingCentral Contact Center Overview - Close more deals and solve more cases

Measuring KPIs and metrics relating to performance and customer satisfaction is crucial to the success of your call center. Optimizing call center performance is vital to achieving business results and delivering exceptional customer experiences.

Implementing an effective contact center solution to track and monitor the 15 aforementioned KPIs is a great place to start. To learn more about how RingCentral’s contact center software can help you reach your customer service goals, try out a free demo today.