What are call center key performance indicators?

Call center key performance indicators (KPIs) are metrics that are specifically designed to measure the effectiveness of your call center, such as average handle time and call abandonment rate.

These metrics can then be used to identify areas of strength and weakness in your customer support experience, helping you to respond to customer feedback and stay up to date with call center trends.

5 call center KPI examples

Measuring the performance of your call center can be done through a variety of different metrics. Here are five of the most common call center KPI metrics:

1. First-Call Resolution (FCR)

First-Call Resolution (FCR) is a critical metric for call centers to track. It measures the percentage of customer inquiries or issues that are resolved on first contact, without the need for follow-up or escalation. Essentially, it tracks how often agents are able to fully address a customer's needs during their initial call.

To accurately measure FCR, make sure you define what constitutes "resolution" and "first call" for your organization. For example, some call centers might consider an issue resolved if the customer does not contact the company again within a specified period, such as seven days. 

By focusing on improving FCR, you can enhance customer satisfaction, reduce operational costs, and build stronger, more loyal customer relationships.

2. Call Abandonment Rate

The call abandonment rate metric measures the percentage of customers who hang up before they’re able to speak to an agent and get their issue resolved. A low call abandonment rate is often indicative of a well-run call center that promptly meets customer needs, contributing to higher overall customer satisfaction and loyalty.

If you want to check the quality of your technology or ensure that staffing levels are adequate to respond to people’s calls quickly, this is one of the best call center metrics to explore.

3. Average Handle Time (AHT)

To see how long it takes your agents to help a customer, the average handle time can be very useful. AHT is usually either measured up to the moment that a customer’s call is finished or to the end of the agent’s post-call tasks, such as updating records or sending related emails.

This gives you a general idea of the speed of response to customer queries — often the lower the AHT, the better. It also provides you with an average baseline that can be used to measure individual agents, pinpointing agents who need additional support to provide the best customer experience.

4. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) measures how happy your customers are with the service they’ve received. While CSAT can be applied across various aspects of your business, it’s particularly useful for evaluating your call center. One way to do this is by creating a survey asking questions about the customer experience, such as asking how satisfied they were with the support they received during their call. By gathering feedback specific to the call center, you can identify common issues and areas for improvement.

There are many other customer engagement metrics that you can use to assess the quality of your call center, including the next example on our list.

5. Customer Effort Score (CES)

The aim of a call center should be to make it as easy as possible for customers to resolve their issues. Measuring customer effort score — essentially the effort that customers have to put in during the call — is a good way of seeing the overall effectiveness of your call center.

To calculate CES, simply ask customers to rank how easy it was to resolve their issue, one to five. You’d then have to subtract the percentage of customers who found it easy from those who said it was difficult. The higher the CES, the more customers find it easy to use your call center.

How to choose the right call center KPI metrics to monitor

We’ve gone through just five call center KPIs, but there are many more that you could choose to monitor, such as cost per call and percentage of calls blocked. Ultimately, you can’t monitor everything — and even if you could, it would be pretty overwhelming to try to analyze it all.

Ideally, you should choose specific call center performance metrics to focus on. These KPIs should be chosen carefully if you want them to highlight and diagnose issues that are specifically relevant to your organization and its business goals. Here are the steps you need to take to identify the right call center KPIs for your organization:

Examine your overall goals

As a department or as a business, you should have a set of clear and well-defined goals that you’re all working toward. A good place to start when choosing the right call center metrics and KPIs is by working backward from your goals. What would the metrics show when you’ve achieved a certain goal, and what do they show now?

Let’s walk through an example:

If your customer service team is working on improving customer retention, you’ll need to have an accurate picture of the level of customer satisfaction among your users. CSAT would be an incredibly helpful metric to monitor as you work toward your goal of stronger customer retention.

Focus on bad reviews

If you want your KPIs to respond to customer pain points, you should identify metrics that respond to your bad reviews. By looking through negative feedback from customers, you’ll be able to collect data about the issues that really matter to your users — meaning that you make quicker progress on improving customer experience.

Let’s say your customers commonly complain about the length of time they’re kept on hold when trying to reach your contact center. You should probably look at the average speed of answer — a metric that tracks the time from when a customer first enters the queue until they are connected with a live agent. Assessing this metric will help improve efficiency and responsiveness in your call center, ultimately addressing those bad reviews.

Collect feedback from agents

As well as your customer reviews, feedback from your agents can also be a helpful source of information as you look to choose an appropriate KPI to measure. After all, they’re the ones who experience your systems and processes day in and day out.

A standardized agent survey that you ask all agents to complete every six months could be a good way to collect this feedback. If multiple agents say they have a lot of downtime, for instance, you might want to focus on monitoring agent utilization (which measures the amount of time that agents spend on phone calls) to boost productivity.

Researching call center KPI industry standards

When you’re in the process of choosing call center KPIs that are appropriate for your specific context, it’s important to remember that different industries will have different standards. This means you should have clear, evidence-based benchmarks that reflect the standards in your sector when establishing target metrics to aim for.

For instance, the average CSAT score changes between industries. According to the only national cross-industry measure of customer satisfaction by the American Customer Satisfaction Index, online retailers saw an average CSAT score of 80%. So, if you work in the ecommerce sector, this industry standard would make a good CSAT benchmark.

Call center KPI best practices

Beginning to monitor your call center’s KPIs might seem like a daunting task. However, there are some clear best practices that can make the process of measuring, assessing, and evaluating key performance metrics as simple as possible:

Use historical data to set reasonable targets

There’s no point in measuring KPIs if you set unattainable targets. This will quickly demotivate your team, as agents will be unable to experience success. However, targets are still important to improve practice and raise standards in your team, helping to provide a better experience for your customers.

You should set achievable and realistic goals which are both attainable and challenging. Once you know the general area that you want your targets to focus on — by considering your overall business goals and priorities — analyze your historical metrics to turn these ideas into specific targets.

Try to set KPI goals that demonstrate incremental improvement, by recording metrics at regular and short intervals. This will also allow you to review whether the goals have the right balance of challenge and support, while also ensuring that you can adapt targets if your business context changes.

Let technology do the hard work for you

Modern technology has made the process of collecting and analyzing call center KPIs easier than ever. Using software such as the VBC admin portal allows you to easily track crucial data points such as time spent on calls. Most KPIs can also be tracked by integrating your software with your CRM, meaning that data can be collected automatically.

When it comes to data analysis, artificial intelligence (AI) is also an increasingly useful tool. Well-trained and accurate algorithms can trawl through huge amounts of data in a short period of time, producing genuinely useful insights into your measurement of KPIs.

Have the right data architecture

Your overall data architecture — meaning your process of data collection and analysis — needs to be effective and appropriate for your specific context. If there are glaring weaknesses in your data architecture, you’ll soon find that measuring KPIs is harder than it should be — or even that your KPIs are inaccurate.

You should make sure that you’re handling qualitative data (written data, such as customer reviews) and quantitative data (numbered data, such as the seconds spent on a call) in different ways. Qualitative data, for instance, shouldn’t be treated as absolute fact and should be interpreted alongside quantitative data.

It’s also important to have consistency throughout your overall data architecture. This means using the same processes for collecting data over time, while also using the same models for all of your data analysis. Processes for data entry should be clearly identified and used consistently at each point in the data architecture.

Provide targeted training

Once you’ve collected and analyzed your KPIs, you should use them to improve the operations of your call center team. Constantly monitoring metrics will mean that you identify issues as soon as possible, allowing you to proactively deliver targeted training to agents or groups of agents.

This will enable you to quickly improve KPIs by responding efficiently to poor performance. The form the training takes will depend on the exact issue that is being addressed, although call monitoring — where a supervisor is able to silently monitor an agent’s call — can be used to easily provide a stimulus for a coaching conversation.

Treat it as an ongoing task

You shouldn’t see KPI measuring as a one-off task. Instead, it’s crucial that you’re constantly monitoring, evaluating, and changing your metrics and actions. This will allow you to integrate the continuous improvement offered by performance evaluation into your long-term business values and practices.

This isn’t just about constantly raising the targets for the same metrics that have been part of your team’s goals from the start. Rather, once a team or agent has met your goals, you should evaluate the other areas that you want to improve and set new realistic targets.

Visualizing KPI results

When it comes to presenting your KPI results — after they’ve been collected and analyzed — you’ll need to spend some time thinking about how you can effectively produce a KPI report. The most appropriate way to visualize your KPIs will depend on the nature of the data itself. Here are some commonly used KPI visualizations:

• Line graphs: If you’re showing changes in a quantitative dataset over time, such as how your CSAT score has improved over a year, you might want to plot this on a line graph. You could also use additional lines on the same graph if you want to evidence multiple KPI improvements.

• Gauge graphs: Looking like a speedometer, gauge graphs are good for demonstrating how close a certain KPI is to reaching its target. This means that it is a good motivational tool for ongoing KPI projects — you might present it in your call center to show how close the team is to reaching its average handle time target, for instance.

• Geographic maps: If you’ve set a goal that focuses on improving metrics for certain demographics of customers, such as improving customer effort score for customers outside the U.S., you can use a map to highlight the areas where this goal has been met. This makes the areas in which you need to improve as clear as possible.

• Progress bars: Just like gauge graphs, progress bars demonstrate how close the team is to meeting a specified target. This also has motivational effects — but you might want to choose just one of gauge graphs or progress bars in order to simplify your message and achieve your inbound call strategy or your customer satisfaction goals.

• Bar charts: Categorical data — where data is one of a limited number of values — is well-suited to using a bar chart. This means that customer feedback, where they select one of five responses describing their experience, might be presented effectively in this way. You could compare two bar charts over time to show progress.

Better call center management with Vonage

Creating, monitoring, and evaluating KPIs is a crucial part of running an effective and efficient call center. That’s why we put together this comprehensive guide.

If you want to make the most of your KPIs, it’s important to integrate them into a wider tech stack that can automatically collect and analyze KPIs, while also making it easier for your agents to make calls. That’s where Vonage Business Communications comes in.

With a fully customizable multi-channel inbox, an extensive virtual phone system, and in-depth CRM integration, VBC is the best tool to use to monitor and act upon your call center KPIs. What are you waiting for? Start using Vonage to boost your call center today!