Ensure efficiency., productivity and quality service for every customer interaction.
Your contact center is a key touchpoint for interacting with your customers, and tracking performance is crucial to your business success. A happy customer is more likely to return, spread the word and believe in your brand.
Wondering why and how to improve contact center performance? You’ll need to start with performance monitoring to determine the overall health of your model and pinpoint specific agents’ strengths and weaknesses, so you can then offer individualized coaching and training.
Monitoring is also important for the improvement of internal processes, as well as giving you essential insights, so you can improve your products and services.
How to monitor contact center performance
We aim to give you a solid understanding of why and how to monitor contact center performance, and the best place to start is by setting our key performance indicators (KPIs.) We’ll show you some of the most popular ones, explain how they can benefit you, and even offer some KPI formulas you can apply to your own brand.
Customer experience KPIs
Measuring customer satisfaction levels is the quickest way for you to know what you’re doing right or wrong. Brands worldwide are shifting their focus onto the customer journey with 77% of customers likely to recommend a brand after a single positive experience, according to one survey by Tempkin Group.
And it adds up per customer too, with MailChimp reporting that 89% of customers are more likely to buy again from a company when they receive excellent customer service.
So, how can you attach a number to customer satisfaction?
Customer Effort Score (CES)
CES is a loyalty metric that analyses how hard your customers have to try to handle their issue. To find this score, give your customers a chance to give you a rating from one to seven, with one being strongly disagree and seven being strongly agree. The statement you’ll be giving is: “[Company] made it easy for me to handle my issue.
To find the average response, use this formula
(Total sum of responses) ÷ (Number of responses) = CES score.
Bear in mind that you don’t actually want to see a perfect seven, this could mean your customers are going to your support team for every little problem, rather than using the self-service help. It might mean that your agents are working too hard, on the wrong things. Instead, you want to see an average score of around five or six.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
To find your CSAT, you’ll want your clients to rate you on a scale of one to five, with one being very unsatisfied, and five being very satisfied. Now, you want to see what percentage of your clients were happy. To achieve that, you’ll need to find how many clients rated their satisfaction at a four or five.
Then, you can use this formula.
(Number of positive responses) ÷ (Number of responses) x 100 = % of satisfied customers
While the average score in your industry and region will vary, scoring around the 65% to 80% mark is positive.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Your NPS is a measure of how likely your customers are to recommend you to a friend. By asking your customers to rate this likelihood on a scale of one to 10, you can then divide them into three distinct categories.
-
Promoters: Rated nine or 10 on the likelihood to recommend, these are your most loyal customers.
-
Detractors: With a rating of six or below, these customers are unlikely to recommend, and may even damage your reputation.
-
Passives: Rated seven or eight. Passives are unlikely to help or detract.
Your NPS score is found with this formula. You want to see a positive score!
(Percentage of promoters) - (Percentage of detractors) = NPS
Agent performance metrics
Measuring your agents’ performance is also essential, especially as they are the ones interacting with your clients. According to one study by American Express, 68% of consumers think that a friendly agent is a primary factor in a positive service experience.
Here are some easy ways to measure your agents’ performance.
Average handling time
Not only do customers want your service to be good, they want it to be fast, too. To see the average time it takes you to get a positive result there is one basic formula which can be readjusted for different methods of communication.
(Total time on hold and in conversation, doing follow-ups) ÷ (Total number of enquiries) = Average handling time
Average speed or answer
This is the amount of time it takes for a contact center to answer a customer query. You want to bring down this number as much as possible, as speed is a sure-fire way to increase customer satisfaction.
Use this formula:
(Total wait time) ÷ (Total of answered calls) = Average speed of answer
Agent utilization rate
This number reflects how well you are utilizing every agent, and can be a great KPI when investigating how to improve contact center performance.
To find this metric, you need to see how much of your agents’ time is spent in a useful manner.
(Total time spent handling customers) ÷ (Total time on shift) x 100 = Agent utilization rate
Contact Centre Operation Metrics
These metrics look more closely at your internal processes to highlight room for improvement. It helps you analyze how sustainable your operations are, and pinpoint problem areas.
Cost per call
This cornerstone metric has been used for many years as a key way to measure return on investment in a call center. By dividing your total costs by the number of calls, you can see how much each call was costing you.
These days, the implementation of AI and self-service centers make this even more useful, as you can now analyze how much you have saved per call by introducing other technologies.
Call arrival rate
This is another term for the rate of incoming calls on a given day. Reporting this daily can help accurate reporting. To find this number, divide the number of calls received by the number of minutes or seconds in a day.
For example, there are 1,440 minutes in a day. If you receive 7,000 calls in a day, the resulting arrival rate is 4.86 (calls per minute).
Average age of query
This number refers to how long it takes you to solve problems that were not solved on the first attempt. It’s an analysis of how long it takes you to solve open queries, and you want the number to be as low as possible. To find this number, you simply divide the total time waiting by the total number of inquiries.
How to improve contact center performance
Improving contact center performance is vital, as it directly plays into customer satisfaction. Increasing customer satisfaction can, in turn, impact the lifetime value of a customer. It increases a company’s retention rate and creates brand advocates.
Across industries and geographical borders, customer service and satisfaction rates are recognized as one of the key indicators for a company’s success. A huge 89% of customers are likely to shop again with a brand after a positive customer service experience, according to a Salesforce study.
Additionally, one Zendesk report shows that 76% of consumers will switch to a competitor after just one bad experience. So, what can you do to improve your performance?
Provide constant training
Offer your agents the support and training they need to achieve their best results, and you’ll be surprised how quickly their performance improves. With personalized training plans, you’ll help them resolve customer queries quicker, learn how to better deal with customers, and build up the company culture.
Mentorships can also be a great way to improve your agents’ knowledge and interest in your company and services. Peer-to-peer training offers another way to improve internal communications.
However, opting for a flexible training plan can see the best results, especially when training agents on new software or AI tools.
Create SOPs and Scripts
A standard operating procedure (SOP) provides the guidelines your contact center needs to reach its potential. This is about collating a list of all your daily procedures, streamlining them to ultimate efficiency, and then helping your agents understand these workflows and business objectives.
SOPs can help you achieve a higher level of security, improve crisis management and comply with government rules and regulations.
Having a call script can also greatly improve efficiency, giving your agents something to fall back on. A good script should be structured, compliant to industry regulations, and use a positive tone throughout.
It’s useful for your script to cover the most common and critical questions too, greatly reducing your average handling rate.
Invest in software that streamlines processes
The good news if you’re trying to see how to improve your contact center performance is that there are many new technologies on the scene. These new technologies have helped contact centers evolve to be more efficient and cost-effective.
With a trend towards using contact centers to focus on the customer experience, these technologies make it easier for companies to monitor and improve their connection with their customers.
Conversation AI is one such tool that can help companies improve customer experience, cut agent costs and automate repetitive tasks. There are even new AI chatbots that don’t require any additional coding, making this accessible to all.
One company which utilized AI chatbots saw a 293% return on investment, according to a study by Forrester Consulting.
We’ve discussed the numerous methods of monitoring your contact center performance, ranging from your Customer Satisfaction Score to your Average Handling Time. With the formulas above, you know how to monitor your contact center performance, so now you can focus on improving it.
And one of the best ways to improve your performance is by incorporating an AI tool, such as an AI chatbot. If you want to see how a scalable AI chatbot for enterprise can help your company, you can request a demo here.