One thing is true when it comes to Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). When handled correctly, they can significantly improve call center quality assurance. The difficulty is a long list of KPIs you could spend time measuring.
However, when it comes to assessing the effectiveness and efficiency of a call center, analyzing call center KPIs for quality assurance is imperative. While most call center managers are aware of the importance of this exercise, the decision regarding exactly which call center KPIs to analyze can get a bit foggy. Perhaps the best formula to follow is this - any metric that doesn’t directly lead to improvement in the support you are attempting to provide is immediately less helpful than those that do.
And another important rule of thumb is that it’s better to give managers a limited number of actionable KPIs and contact center QA metrics rather than delivering dozens of reports that make this process more daunting than it needs to be. Find a balance between helpful information and data overload, focusing on real-time and historical data to accurately measure that data’s impact and then use it to achieve goals. Using KPIs for quality assurance is a ‘less is more’ exercise.
Measuring call center KPIs associated with customer satisfaction, agent effectiveness and call center efficiency should be the primary objective of any manager seeking to optimize their call center’s performance.
All that being said, below, we outline the top 10 KPIs we think you need to pay close attention to in your goal to improve your call center’s QA.
ASA (also called average delay of calls) measures how quickly the call center took to answer a call.
This metric aims to track if reps can resolve customer problems on the first call or if multiple interactions are required.
The average time to successfully settle a call to a satisfying resolution. But, a low AHT with low customer satisfaction is detrimental to the call center. The goal is to resolve the issue, not get callers off the line as quickly as possible.
How satisfied customers are. For example, on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 is not happy, and ten is very satisfied.
NPS measures customer loyalty and the strength of your relationships with your customers. It tracks how likely a customer is to refer/promote you to a colleague or friend.
Measuring the call abandonment rate allows you to measure the success of call center customer service and experience. Call abandonment is when the caller hangs up prematurely, either before an agent can answer their question or address their concern or as an agent is trying to help them.
A call center abandonment rate between 5% and 8% is considered industry-standard. If the rate hits 10%, you’re hitting numbers getting too high and need to be addressed. The increase in mobile calls has complicated the numbers here, to a degree, as more recent studies have shown that here call center abandonment rates can reach as high as 20%.
They are also referred to as Average Wait Time (AWT). The traditional wait time for call center customers is 20 seconds. It is conventional for contact centers to aim to answer 80% of their calls within that 20-second window. As for many KPIs, this average wait time may not apply across all industries. Customers of one product/service may be willing to wait longer than others.
According to the Quality Assurance and Training Connection (QATC), turnover in the call center industry averages 30% and 45%. When you lose a call center agent, you don't just lose their expertise or years of experience with your company, but also the investment that it took to hire that employee, which can dramatically impact quality assurance.
A customer effort score (CES) measures how much work a customer had to put into a recent interaction with a business. In other words, how easy or difficult is an organization to do business with? In customer service, the customer effort score (CES) measures the amount of effort a customer had to expend to get an issue resolved or a question answered. Things like being transferred to multiple agents, repeating information, and switching channels will increase effort and, therefore, likely lower a business's customer effort score (CES).
Sometimes referred to as Net Income per Successful Call, the Revenue per Successful Call metric allows teams to monitor the amount of revenue gained from a single, successful sales call. By tracking the average amount gained by a successful call, your team can evaluate the monetary value of their calls.
By handling and analyzing the correct KPI data, call centers can significantly improve their customer service strategy and exceed customer experience expectations more consistently. By accomplishing this, your quality assurance has only one direction to go - and that’s up.
Get in touch with Scorebuddy today to learn more about KPIs for quality assurance. Request a demo now.
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