15 simple call center KPIs worth tracking

Ready to build better conversations?

Simple to set up. Easy to use. Powerful integrations.

Get started

We all know that good customer experiences are key to reducing churn and maintaining a healthy and thriving business in the modern age. Regardless of if you’re using an in-house support team, or a contact center location, it’s vital to be able to track your metrics.

But how do you maintain a high level of customer support throughout your organization? By having managers benchmark and establish the call center KPI’s (key performance indicators) worth tracking for their team.

There is a wide variety of call center KPIs that can be tracked, measured, and optimized.

• KPI’s for Support teams

• KPI’s for Sales-driven teams

• KPI’s for Customer Service teams

Depending on your type of business, we’ve broken down some of the most valuable types of call center KPIs worth monitoring to get the most out of their metrics.

Call center KPIs for Support Teams

If you’re planning on monitoring the KPI’s for an inbound call center, there are some classic metrics you’ll need to keep an eye on. These KPI’s will help capture the internal workings and productivity measurements of your performance.

1. Average time spent on the phone

This metric helps managers identify how much time an agent spends actually speaking to your customers. Generally, the higher the percentage, the better, as the customer is getting a more in-depth experience. However, if it’s too high, your agents could be taking too long to solve problems and may need some more coaching.

2. Calls answered

Keeping track of the number of calls answered is a great metric for several reasons. For one, it helps you keep track of which agents are doing more or less than others and secondly, it helps you get an average of how many calls your agents are able to handle in an hour, which can help you decide if you need to scale up, scale down, or focus on training.

3. Calls answered within x seconds

Knowing how many calls are answered within a time frame is critical. Not only does it help with scaling operations (especially during busy seasons), the length of time it takes to answer a call makes a difference. One study showed an 89% abandonment rate of customers on a customer service call if it has not been responded to within 5 minutes.

4. Average wait time

Similar to the metric above, average wait times are important and can make or break a customer’s experience. Long wait times contribute to more frustrated customers and a potential dip in customer support quality.

5. Missed calls

Missed calls are important to take into consideration, especially if your team has been struggling with that metric for a while. This means that a customer’s issue almost certainly has not been resolved. They might decide to try a different channel to reach you, and by the time they do, they will be much more irritated due to a miss in first-contact with your organization.

6.Average time to return a missed call

While missed calls can be bad for business, a good recovery tactic is to simply return the call to the customer. This shows that you’re trying to help and want the issue to be resolved. Waiting too long to return the call, (often resulting in the customer trying to call you back) can result in decreased loyalty from your customers and eventually customer churn.

Call center KPIs for Outbound and Sales Teams

Outbound call center teams that focus on sales have a different focus than support teams. For instance, support-driven teams place a much higher emphasis on how they measure the average wait time compared to sales teams.

Here are the other big KPIs and metrics for sales-driven teams that differ from support or service driven teams:

1. Conversion rate

The conversion rate for sales teams measures how many phone calls on average it takes to close a deal or make a sale. This metric is important to help improve the sales methods the team uses to when reaching out to prospects.

2. Average call length

Depending on what you’re selling, this can vary greatly. There is no right or wrong answer to how long you want your call length to be. Of course, the shorter the call is, the more sales you can make in a day. However, if your quality of prospects or ability to sell is hindered by shorter calls then time spent on calls may be worth tracking.

3. The average speed of answer

The time it takes your sales reps to answer a call is a useful metric that can be used to support your team. If there’s one thing to avoid in sales, it’s missing a call from a potential buyer because their waiting time was too long. Making sure you’re ahead of the curve on this metric could go on to save you and your business a lot in the long run.

Call center KPIs for Customer Service

Customer Service KPI’s are one of the best ways to help track and improve customer experience across the board. For these operations, it’s vital that you keep KPI’s that are more customer service based, as they will help you interpret the level of customer satisfaction with the call. These could include:

1. First-call resolution

This is a vital metric when tracking customer satisfaction. Being able to solve a query or concern on those first incoming calls from a customer decreases the need to go through several channels and will increases the positivity of the customer interactions.

2. Percentage of missed calls that lead to a voicemail

Similarly to the first-call resolution metic, this KPI can give you good insight to your level of customer service. Additionally, while measuring this metric, you also get an idea of another KPI- how fast your team is at responding to incoming calls. This metric can help you improve your efficiency through more streamlined workforce management and better agent utilization to get the most out of your workflow.

3. The average age of query

With this KPI, the shorter the better. If a query has been sitting around in your queue for several hours or days (depending on your CX practices), your customers are bound to be unhappy. Studies show that customers usually rely on phone calls to resolve questions that are urgent or complicated. Failing to resolve them in a timely manner could be a sign that your team needs further support and training.

4. Customer call frequency

This KPI tracks the number of repeated calls from an individual customer. It is usually the case that if the same customer is repeatedly contacting your center, they are experiencing major unresolved issues. Perhaps the customer needs to be escalated to a different level of service to handle the concerns they are having.

And the most important KPI

Employee satisfaction

A high turnover rate can be a huge hindrance to the efficiency of offices and call centers. Keeping your agents happy in their work environment is key to avoiding high turnover (here are some great tips!). Employee morale might not sound like the most important factor in having a thriving and successful call center, but it’s probably the biggest KPI to consider. Without a motivated and happy team, the rest of your metrics are sure to suffer.

Try Aircall for free

Published on April 22, 2016.