Measuring KPIs to Improve Call Center Quality Assurance

When it comes to Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), one thing is true. When handled correctly, they can significantly improve call centre quality assurance. The difficulty is that there is a long list of KPIs you could spend time measuring.

However, when it comes to assessing the effectiveness and efficiency of a call centre, analyzing call centre KPIs for quality assurance is imperative. While most call centre managers are aware of the importance of this exercise, the decision regarding exactly which call centre KPIs to analyze can get a bit foggy.

Perhaps the best formula to follow is this – any metric that doesn’t directly lead to improvement in the support you are attempting to provide is immediately less useful than those that do.

And another important rule of thumb is it’s better to give managers a limited number of actionable KPIs and contact centre QA metrics rather than delivering dozens of reports that make this process more daunting than it needs to be.

Find a balance between useful information and data overload, focusing on both real-time and historical data to accurately measure that data’s impact and then use it to achieve goals. Using KPIs for quality assurance is clearly a ‘less is more’ exercise.

It’s All About Effectiveness & Efficiency

Measuring call centre KPIs that are associated with customer satisfaction, agent effectiveness and call centre efficiency should be the main objective of any manager seeking to optimize their call centre’s performance.

All that being said, below we outline the top 10 KPIs we think you need to pay close attention to in your goal to improve your call centre’s QA.

1 – Average Speed of Answering (ASA):

ASA (also called average delay of calls) measures how quickly the call centre took to answer a call.

2 – First Call Resolution (FCR):

This metric aims to track if reps are able to resolve customer problems on the first call or if multiple interactions are required.

3 – Average Handle Time (AHT):

The average time to successfully settle a call to a satisfying resolution. But, a low AHT with low customer satisfaction is detrimental to the call centre. The goal is to resolve the issue, not to get callers off the line as quickly as possible.

4 – Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT):

How satisfied customers are. For example, on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being not at all satisfied and 10 being very satisfied.

5 – Net Promoter Score (NPS):

NPS measures customer loyalty and the strength of your relationships with your customers. One way it does this is by tracking how likely a customer is to refer/promote you to a colleague or friend.

6 – Average Abandonment Rate (AAR):

Measuring the rate of call abandonment allows you to measure the success of call centre customer service and experience. Call abandonment is when the caller hangs up prematurely, either before an agent can answer their question or address their concern, or as an agent is trying to help them.

A call centre abandonment rate between 5% and 8% is considered industry-standard. If the rate hits 10%, you’re hitting numbers that are getting too high and that need to be addressed.

The increase in mobile calls has complicated the numbers here, to a degree, as more recent studies have shown that here call centre abandonment rates can reach as high as 20%.

7 – Average Time in Queue:

Also referred to as Average Wait Time (AWT). The traditional wait time for call centre customers is 20 seconds. It is conventional for contact centres to aim to answer 80% of their calls within that 20-second window.

Keep in mind, as is the case for many KPIs, this average wait time may not be applicable across all industries. Customers of one product/service may be more willing to wait longer than others.

8 – Agent Turnover Rate:

According to the Quality Assurance and Training Connection (QATC), turnover in the call centre industry averages 30% and 45%.

When you lose a call centre agent, you don’t just lose their expertise or years of experience with your company, but also the investment that it took to hire that employee, and this can have a dramatic impact on quality assurance.

9 – Customer Effort Score:

Customer effort score (CES) is a measurement of how much work a customer had to put into a recent interaction with a business.

In other words, how easy or difficult is an organization to do business with? In the context of customer service, the customer effort score (CES) measures the amount of effort a customer had to expend to get an issue resolved or a question answered.

Things like being transferred to multiple agents, having to repeat information and having to switch channels will increase effort and therefore likely lower a business’s customer effort score (CES).

10 – Revenue Per Successful Call:

Sometimes referred to as Net Income per Successful Call, the Revenue per Successful Call metric allows teams to monitor the amount of revenue gained from a single, successful sales call. By tracking the average amount gained by a successful call, your team can evaluate the monetary value of their calls.

By handling and analyzing the right KPI data, call centres can significantly improve their customer service strategy and more consistently exceed customer experience expectations. By accomplishing this, your quality assurance has only one direction to go – and that’s up.

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Scorebuddy – View the Original Article

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