Most Common Performance Measures for Contact Center

Its not easy task to develop a simple Contact Center into multichannel contact center overnight. This process requires to upgrade new call center technologies, and certainly skills of the customer service representative who are directly connected with customers through the phone, mails and chat.

In the recent time, call centers are always keep on improving the quality of services through quality evaluation of the their calling agents, live call monitoring, daily agent feedback and training programs, and enhanced reporting capabilities. However, It’s very important to rethink about what performance measurements are important to keep track, running call center operations. Are the measures of performance that served you well in the call center the same ones that will determine how well the multichannel contact center is working?

Here are numerous control variables are used to measure the performance of any call center. A description of the Key Performance Indicators that are most used to determine 'how quickly', 'how well', “how efficient” and “how effective” customer contacts are handled.

Four categories of Key Performance Indicators

Most common performance indicators for contact centers are described that can be classified into four categories, namely 'Service' (how fast), the 'Quality' (how good), the 'Efficiency' (how efficient) and the 'Profitability' (how effective) measure.

Service (how fast):-

* Blocking: An accessibility measure, blockage means what percentage of customers will not manage to access the center at a given time due to insufficient network facilities in place.

* Abandon rate: Call centers measure the number of abandons as well as the abandon rate, since both correlate with retention and revenue.

* Self-service availability: In the contact centers, self-service usage is an important measure of accessibility and is typically measured as an overall number, by self-service methodology and menu points, and by time of day or demographic group. In cases of Web chat, automated alternatives such as FAQs or use of help functions can reduce the requirement for the live interaction with a Web chat agent.

* Service level and average speed of answer: The percentage of calls answered in a defined wait threshold, is the most common speed-of-answer measure in the call centers.

* Longest waiting: Another speed-of-answer measure is how long the oldest call in queue has been waiting. Many centers use real-time longest delay in queue to indicate when more staff need to be made immediately available.

Quality (how good):

* First call resolution: The percentage of transactions completed within a single contact, often called the “one and done” ratio, is a crucial measure of quality.

* Transfer rate: The transfer percentage is an indication of what portion of contacts has to be transferred to another person or place to be handled.

* Courtesy: Monitors the quality of communications for each channel of interest. One of the critical factors that affect the caller’s perception of how well a call was handled is simple courtesy.

* Monitoring of procedures: Adherence to procedures such as work flow processes or call scripts is another essential element of quality. This is particularly important to perceived quality in terms of the customer receiving a consistent interaction regardless of the contact channel or the individual agent involved in the contact.

Efficiency (how effective)

* Agent Occupancy: Agent occupancy is the measure of actual time busy on customer contacts compared to available or idle time, calculated by dividing workload hours by staff hours.

* Staff Shrinkage: Staff shrinkage is defined as the percentage of time that employees are not available to handle calls.

* Schedule Efficiency: Workforce management is all about getting the “just right” number of people in place each period of the day to handle customer contacts. Schedule efficiency measures the degree of overstaffing and understaffing that exist as a result of scheduling design.

* Schedule Adherence: Schedule adherence measures the degree to which the specific hours scheduled are actually worked by the agents.

* Average Handle Time/After Call Work: A common measure of contact handling is the average handle time, made up of talk time plus after-call work

* System Availability: When response time from the computer system is slow, it can add seconds or minutes to the handle time of a transaction.

Profitability (how effective)

* Conversion Ratio: The conversion rate refers to the percentage of transactions in which a sales opportunity is translated into an actual sale.

* Upsell /cross Sell Ratio: The up-sell rate or cross-sell rate is measured by many organizations as a success rate at generating revenue over and above the original order or intention of the call

* Cost Per Contact: A common measure of operational efficiency is cost per call or cost per minute to handle the call workload, both in a simple call center as well as in a multichannel contact environment.