According to a 2021 Gartner survey, 64 percent of customer service and support leaders said their top priority this year will be to “grow the business.” Meanwhile, 82 percent either have or plan to implement a value enhancement strategy for their support functions.
Many of these strategies will likely hinge on key performance indicators (KPIs). After all, tracking these KPIs reveals critical insights into customer, employee, and business needs, which propel the value of the contact center.
Alongside providing invaluable business insights, KPIs also support operations teams, resource planning, and even agents themselves, enhancing contact center efficiency.
There are many KPIs for contact centers to understand covering each of these areas. Here are 40 excellent examples:
1. Customer satisfaction (CSAT) score – It measures the satisfaction of individual customers with the company.
2. Customer effort score (CES) – It indicates how difficult or easy it was for the customer to complete their journey.
3. Average handling time (AHT) – It is the average time spent by contact center agents to answer customer calls.
4. First contact resolution (FCR) – It is the percentage of queries that agents resolve during the very first interaction.
5. Cost per contact – It calculates the cost of a single interaction for the contact center.
6. Service level – It shows the percentage of customer contacts that the contact center answers within its targeted wait time.
7. Agent occupancy rate – It highlights the percentage of time agents spend handling customer interactions while they are at their desks, logged-in.
8. Transfer rate – It measures the percentage of interactions that transfer to another agent.
9. Peak hour traffic – It tracks the average volume of interactions that the contact center receives during peak periods.
10. Wrap-up time – It is the average amount of time that an agent spends after an interaction completing after-call work (ACW).
11. Customer complaint volumes – It tracks the number of customer complaints, which contact centers sometimes tag for greater insight.
12. First response time – It is the gap between the time a customer first raises a ticket and when an agent answers it.
13. Net promoter score – It rates a customer’s likelihood of recommending a brand on a scale of one to ten.
14. Customer sentiment – It measures how customers are feeling, with speech analytics tools often pinpointing specific emotions.
15. Total shrinkage – It tracks the total time that agents cannot engage in customer conversations.
16. Customer churn rate – It is the percentage of customers who quit a brand within a specific period.
17. Schedule adherence – It compares the amount of time agents engage in work-related activities to when scheduled to do so.
18. Bounce rate – It tracks how often customers shift from one channel to another.
19. System availability – It measures the total uptime for contact center systems.
20. Average call volume – It monitors average contact center demand over a certain period.
21. Agent attrition rate – It measures the percentage of agents who leave the team over a particular amount of time.
22. Call abandonment rate – It is the percentage of calls where the customer joins the queue but abandons it before an agent is available.
23. Callback messaging volume – It is the average volume of callback requests per hour or day.
24. Customer lifetime value – It estimates the total approximate value that a customer generates for a brand throughout their relationship.
25. Idle time – It monitors the average time that agents wait between handling customer contacts.
26. Agent absenteeism – It measures how often employees fail to work their shifts.
27. Utilization rates – It tracks the percentage of time agents are either ready to take calls or actively handling calls while being paid to work.
28. Average wait time – It is the average duration customers wait to speak with an agent after being passed through to the call queue.
29. Average answer time – Although definitions vary, it is common to consider it to be the average length of time it takes agents to answer a call when it passes through to them.
30. Self-service usage – It measures the number of queries that customers resolve through self-service resources.
31. Quality scores – Call analysts monitor customer-agent interactions using a scorecard. Contact centers track and monitor these over time.
32. Agent availability – It is the amount of time for which agents are available and waiting to interact with customers.
33. Customer intent – It measures how often customers contact for particular reasons, enabling contact centers to assess critical demand drivers.
34. Agent proficiency – It analyses how long it takes for recruits to hit targets successfully.
35. Agent satisfaction – It measures how happy agents are in the workplace.
36. Cost of operations – It totals all costs directly associated with the contact center.
37. Contacts per hour – It tracks the number of interactions agents process in an hour, typically in an outbound setting.
38. Number of calls offered – It is the total number of calls sitting in the queue at any given time.
39. Forecast accuracy – It measures a percentage of how close forecasted contact volumes matched actual contact volumes.
40. Contact center spin – It monitors the number of callers that abandon the queue and call back within a particular period.
For more on KPIs and how they link to the broader business strategy, read our article: How Are Business Intelligence and KPIs Connected?
