As per latest Market analysis by the experts it has been observed that "key performance indicators (KPIs)" should be used on priority in the contact centre.
* Occupancy, expressed as a percentage – This helps identify how much time an agent is actually “speaking live” to your customers. As a rule, the higher the percentage, the better, but be careful it isn’t too high. Unless you’re in a highly specialised role (directory enquiries services spring to mind) too high a number might indicate either a lack of attention to after-call work, or an inaccurate measurement.
* Abandoned calls – pretty self explanatory and naturally, the lower the better
* Calls answered
* Calls offered
* Average wait time
* Grade of service (number of calls answered within x seconds)
Pretty simple so far. But this is also where it starts to deviate depending on the role of the contact centre. For sales-driven environments, There will be much higher emphasis on the average wait time compared to, say, a support or service line. There are also a number of other KPIs that will be important to any sales organisation, such as:
* Conversion – The ratio of calls to closed business (or appointments, or promises to pay, whatever your centre’s goals are). This can calculated through a simple result code that your agent can key into their ACD phone, assuming your ACD supports this).
* Average call length – Depending on what you’re selling, this can vary greatly, and there are no right or wrong answers to it. For example, someone selling a mortgage product will be permitted a much longer average call length than someone who places orders from a mail-order catalogue.
For BPO operations that are more customer service or resolution based – you could consider KPIs which will help interpret the level of customer satisfaction with the call. These could include:
* First call resolution (%) – Being able to resolve the customer’s query/concern on the first call made. A nirvana for most customer service centres, but much more difficult to achieve in real life.
* Average age of query – Failing to resolve the query on the first call, this metric calculates the average amount of time that a case remains open. Naturally, the shorter the better. And most organisations should be able to have the reporting capabilities to track/trend this.
* Customer call frequency – A metric to indicate the frequency of repeated calls from the same customer. This helps identify if correct information was given in the first place, or if there are repeated issues with a particular element of your business.
These terms are a bit generic, and many business will use their own jargon or acronyms to describe some of these concepts. There are lots of others that can be applied to other more specific operations too.
