Contact Centre Metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) and how they apply to Contact Centre Agents

Description:

Contact Centres are complex places and there are many metrics that the average Contact Centre Agent will come across and be measured against. So why do we need them?

Let’s start with another more fundamental question… Why do we need Contact Centres?

The primary role of any Customer facing Contact centre is to provide a service to the customer and prospective customer base, to speed up their engagements with you and generally to make life so much easier for a customer, forget this at your peril. Your role as a Contact Centre Agent is to provide this ‘service’ to the customer. You are the Company as far as the customer is concerned and how you manage the engagement is the key factor in whether the customer has a good, bad or passive experience.

Leaders within your organisation need strategic KPI’s to ensure there is operational efficiency, budgets are met and to prove business cases for new initiatives and assess the impact of new initiatives and marketing campaigns etc. whilst balancing this with meeting the expectations of the customers. KPI’s also provide metrics for the contact Centre overall performance, highlight peaks and trends, whilst helping us to accurately forecast staffing levels.

Let’s look at some of the measures that are typically in place within contact centres.

First Contact Resolution (FCR)

FCR is a measure of how successful we are at resolving a customers query the first time they call us. In many contact centres this measure is considered amongst the most important as it results in higher customer satisfaction and lower repeat calls, which in turn results in a lower cost-to-serve.

There are two common approaches to measure FCR

FCR = Total No. of calls resolved on the first attempt

Total No. calls received

Or

FCR = Total No. calls resolved on first attempt

Total No. of first calls

The second approach is more accurate as it excludes repeat calls, but both are used in contact centres, so it’s important to understand how its deployed in you centre and tat you understand the parameters.

Questions to consider:

·        What stops you resolving customer queries first time, every time?

·        What could you do to help improve this?

Average Age of a Query

The average age of a query measures the length of time queries remain unresolved and open if they are not resolved at the first attempt. This metric accompanies FCR and is a great tool to help an organisation to understand which queries are causing difficulties and need different / additional solutions / processes creating to ensure smoother resolution. 

The formula to calculate Average Age of a Query:

Average Age of a Query =             Total days of open queries

Total No. of open queries

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS is a really popular measure used to measure customer loyalty and satisfaction. The great benefit of NPS is that it’s a simple question for customers to answer.

‘How likely is it that you would recommend …(XYZ Company)… to a friend or colleague?’

Customers are asked to use a 0-10 rating scale. NPS is then divided into three categories:

Promoters          -              9-10

Passive                 -              7-8

Detractors          -              0-6

The formula to calculate NPS:

NPS = % Promoters - % Detractors

Questions to consider:

·        If your Contact Centre uses NPS as a measure, how are they tracking?

·        What is your personal NPS?

·        What could you do to improve customer perceptions and drive these numbers up?

·        If your personal NPS is high, what could you do to help others in the team raise their metrics?

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Like NPS, the CES uses a simple question to gauge customer satisfaction, however, it asks a customer to consider how much effort they had to use in order to get their query resolved.

Typical responses range from very low to very high and can be measured using either a five point or seven-point scale.

A CES questionnaire will typically look like this

To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statement.

…XYZ… Company made it easy for me to resolve my query:

7 Point Scale                                                                   5 Point Scale

1 - Strongly disagree                                                    1 - Strongly disagree

2 – Disagree                                                                   2 - Disagree

3 - Somewhat disagree                                              3 - Neither agree or disagree

4 - Neither agree or disagree                                   4 - Agree

5 - Somewhat agree                                                     5 - Strongly Agree

6 - Agree

7 - Strongly Agree

The formula to calculate CES:

CES = % Agree - % Disagree

Questions to consider:

·        If your Contact Centre uses CES as a measure, how are they tracking?

·        What is your personal CES?

·        What could you do to improve customer perceptions and drive these numbers up?

·        If your personal CES is high, what could you do to help others in the team raise their metrics?

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

This metric is often used within Contact Centres to determine how satisfied customers are with your companies products and services. CSAT is measured at the end of a customer survey, using a

five-point scale using the responses, Highly Satisfied to Highly Unsatisfied.

CSAT scores are often expressed on a 0% to 100% scale. The top two scores are then taken as a measure of how likely a customer is to use our products or Services again (Customer retention)

The formula to calculate CSAT:

CSAT = No. Satisfied customers (those scoring - 4 & 5)   x100

No. of survey respondents

Questions to consider:

·        If your Contact Centre uses CSAT as a measure, how are they tracking?

·        What is your personal CSAT?

·        What could you do to improve customer perceptions and drive these numbers up?

·        If your personal CSAT is high, what could you do to help others in the team raise their metrics?

Grade of Service (GOS) or First Response Time (FRT)

The customers initial contact with a contact centre has a strong influence on the customer perception of how we perform as a business. A customer’s time is valuable and how you engage with them shows whether you value them and their business. So even before a customer engages with you, they are already judging your company based on how long they must wait for their call to be answered or their email to be answered to or their chat to be picked up and responded to. 

This metric is often monitored closely, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly and in some cases even minute by minute with someone watching ‘the board’ real time.

The formula to calculate GOS / FRT:

GOS/FRT = Total time waiting for all enquiries

                  Total No. of Enquiries 

Questions to consider:

·        What do you think can do, to have an impact GOS or FTR within your Contact Centre?

Average Call Abandoned Rate (ACA)

If a customer has to wait to long, they are likely to abandon their call, which again causes huge customer frustration and lose faith in your companies ability to handle their query and or provide a good service. Customers are often more willing to wait longer for technical support than they are if they are calling for a sales transaction.

As a general ‘rule of thumb’ a 5% abandonment rate is considered acceptable anything above this signals a problem. As a general rule a company usually exclude those calls that abandon within the first five seconds, as these calls are usually mis-dials or people who change their mind.

The formula to calculate ACA:

Abandonment Rate = (No. of Calls Offered – No. of calls handled)     x100

                              No. of calls offered

Questions to consider:

·        What is your Centre Currently running at?

·        Why is it important that we monitor this metric?

Calls Handled

The Calls Handled KPI literally relates to all calls ‘touched’ by an agent during a specific time frame. This figure usually doesn’t include abandoned calls and is often broken down into:

·        Calls handled by an agent

·        Calls handled by an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system

You can substitute calls with emails and chats here, it’s a similar process

Questions to consider:

·        Companies often provide agents with a target for customer interactions (calls/emails/chats etc.) handled why do you think this is the case?

·        What can you personally do to increase the number of customer interactions you handle each day, without affecting the quality of the customers experience?

Agent Utilisation

Customer service is a labour-intensive function and for this reason Companies are keen to ensure that they are making the best use of the resources they have available. The Agent Utilisation KPI allows us to make sure that this is happening, and everyone is getting their fair share of the work available.  Its also a vital component of forecasting to ensure the right agents with the right skills are available to handle the forested customer interactions in any given time-period. Of course to ensure this is fully accurate we have to factor in breaks, lunches, holidays, sick days and training… these elements are known as shrinkage.  

The formula to calculate Agent Utilisation:

Agent Utilisation = (Avg. No. of contacts handled by an agent in a month) x (Avg. handle time)  x 100

                                                       (Workdays in a month) x (total work hrs in a day)

Questions to consider:

·        What can you personally do to impact the utilisation metric? 

Average Call Length

This metric provides an insight into the average length of calls, in a given period. This figure again helps Operations and Forecasting to predict the number of agents required to manage the workload

The formula to calculate Average Call Length:

Average call length =      Total call time for all calls

               Total No. of calls

Questions to consider:

·        What’s your Contact centre currently running at?

·        Why is this an interesting metric?

Adherence to Schedule

Another productivity related contact centre metric is adherence to schedule, this relates to how well an agent manages their time. Forecasting usually work out how many staff they require in short fifteen-minute intervals to make sure they match agent availability with the forecasts of when the customer wants to interact with us.

For this reason its important that we take breaks and lunches at the allocated times and in the same way return when our schedule dictates, otherwise we won’t be available when customers need us.

Questions to consider:

·        What can you do to influence your personal adherence metric?

·        Do you know how your own personal metrics stack up?

Average Handling time (AHT)

This is the average time an agent spends on a call / email/chat etc. It starts as soon as the agents either picks up the call or opens the email /chat session. By tracking this metric is gives an understanding of any training requirements that might present themselves. Long durations could mean an agent doesn’t have the skills or tools required to their job and similarly if the duration of a customer interaction is well below than expected it could demonstrate that an agent is rushing through activities and not addressing customer issue correctly.

The formula to calculate Average Handling Time:

AHT = (Total talk time + Total hold time = Total after-call work time)

Total No. of calls

Questions to consider:

·        What’s your current AHT and how does it compare to the targets you’re working towards?

·        What can you do to influence your current figures?

·        What additional support do you require going forward?

Average Call Hold Time

Sometimes it’s necessary to put a customer on hold, to speak to a Subject Matter Expert (SME) or a Team Leader or to access additional information relating to the Customer and or their account. Whilst these hold times are necessary it’s important to keep these to a minimum and keep them as short as possible. They cause frustration for the customer and can send unwanted communications that we don’t know what we’re doing or even don’t care about the customer.

If this number is too high, it can highlight systems issues or agent performance issues

The formula to calculate Average Call Hold Time:

Average Call Hold Time = No. of seconds customer is placed on hold

     Total No. of calls

Questions to consider:

·        What factors are driving your ‘Hold Time’ at the moment?

·        What can you do to drive this metric down?

Transfer Rate

Once a customer has explained their issue there is a real feeling of disappointment and frustration when they must be transferred to someone else to handle their query and start all over again, the more transfers the more frustration.

Whilst some transfers are inevitable it’s important that we tray to keep them to a minimum and wherever possible do so via a ‘warm transfer’ to ensure the handover is smooth and the customer doesn’t have to repeat information.

The formula to calculate Transfer Rate:

Transfer Rate = No. of calls Transferred

                             Total No. of handled calls

Questions to consider:

·        What can you do to drive this figure down in your centre? 

Average After-call work time (ACW)

There is often a need to complete some after-call work following a customer interaction. This metric allows us to understand how much time an agent spends on these activities.

Again, this metric can highlight process and procedural issues or that an agent needs additional training and support. It could be that your adding steps that aren’t required causing you to be slower in this area or it could be that there are routines or processes that aren’t required and could be eliminated to streamline this

The formula to calculate After-call working time:

ACW =    Time to complete after-call work for all calls

                  Total No. of calls

Questions to consider:

·        How much time do you spend in after-call working?

·        What’s the current target in your department / centre?

·        Are you meeting your own personal targets?

·        What can you do differently to help drive this figure down without affecting quality?

Short Duration Calls

This isn’t a metric that is looked at as frequently as the others, but it is one that’s reviewed probably on a monthly basis. Short duration calls can be an indication of several potential issues.

A high number could be driven by system problems for instance automatic call dropping or customers ‘hanging up’ because they are not able to hear. It could also be due to agent error or sometimes, sadly, an agent trying to beat the system

Some Additional Questions:

·        Which of the measures we’ve outlined are in place within your organisation?

·        What do you think are the benefits of having KPI’s and targets?

·        What do you think the drawbacks of KPI’s and targets?

Provide the Agent with a copy of their own data: ‘Here’s an example from your Contact Centre’.

·        Take a look at your data given the information above which areas, do you think, you would be asked to focus on?

·        Why do you think these areas are important?

·        What do you think you could do to influence the results?

·        What impact do you think this could have on your customer base?

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