What Are the Most Important Call Center KPIs?

Key performance indicators are the metrics by which most contact centers live and breathe.

Among the most popular and important KPIs are

• Adherence

• Advisor satisfaction

• Customer effort

• Customer satisfaction

• First contact resolution

• Forecast accuracy

• Net Promoter Score

• Quality scores

• Sales volume

• Service level

In the call center, adherence addresses whether (or not) agents are working the amount of time they’re scheduled to work. “If you run a small call center with five to 20 agents, you might think schedule adherence isn’t all that important,” Monet Software’s Chuck Ciarlo explains. “But, if you take a closer look at all the different junctures throughout the day where agent time is lost, you’ll realize that it can add up to a serious loss of revenue over the course of a year.”

As for advisor satisfaction, CallCentreHelper.com explains that measures how happy the call center team is with the work environment. The article suggests 62 percent of the 380 contact center professionals it surveyed, consider this metric as very important.

Customer effort, meanwhile, defines the extent to which contact center callers have to work to get what they need. That work may entail, for example, filling out forms or repeating their requests to call center personnel.

Removing customer friction should be a key goal for businesses in today’s day and age, as I noted in a piece earlier this month. That’s because in the always-on information age, consumers have a lot of power. And they can easily drop your company and move on to another if you’re not delivering the experiences they expect.

Let’s explore just one more of these key performance indicators: customer satisfaction. This metric is an indicator of a customer’s propensity to recommend a company’s products or services to others. And it’s importance because customer satisfaction, according to some accounts, is related to business success.

“Our research has shown a direct correlation between changes in customer satisfaction levels and subsequent earnings surprises, which stands to reason since the customers are the people who directly contribute those earnings to public companies,” says Phil Bak, CEO of ACSI Funds, a sister company of the American Customer Satisfaction Index.

Edited by Mandi Nowitz