Customer experience and productivity go hand-in-hand in a call center. The recipe for success is a nice balanced combination of the two. Call center metrics help you to find that balance.

Customer experience is critical for your bottom line. Research from McKinsey & Company found that improving the customer experience can increase sales revenues by 2 – 7% and profitability by 1–2%. Now, the best customer experiences aren’t just those that are thorough and high-quality. They also need to be timely and efficient.

You can lose customers forever if you aren’t serving them within a time frame that matches their expectations. Productivity and customer experience should be a priority to deliver what your customers want and need. Supercharge your productivity and provide better customer experiences by assessing quantitative and qualitative call center metrics and KPIs.

8 Customer Service Metrics That Show How Your Team Performs

Quantitative call center metrics are those that quantify your team’s performance using numerical data.

Using call center metrics, you can evaluate how your team performs and identify performance gaps, training needs, and where to improve processes for a more productive customer experience.

1. Transfer Rate

The first quantitative metric is your transfer rate. This is the percentage of interactions transferred to another team member or department. Maybe an agent gets a question meant for a different department. Or maybe they just don’t know an answer and need to route the call to someone else. No customer wants to be passed from person to person to get an answer. And your agents want to feel empowered to answer questions on their own. With every transfer, your productivity slowly goes down the tubes.

A high transfer rate is indicative of inefficient processes and a lack of agent training. By decreasing transfer rates with improved routing and better agent training, you can improve both your agent and customer experience.

2. Average Handling Time (AHT)

AHT is the average amount of time an agent spends on a single interaction. Sure, certain customers and problems demand more time and attention. But let’s be real — you don’t need an agent striking up a conversation about their dog with every customer either. You want to find the balance between quality and speed.

With more training, skills-based routing, and clear scripts, your agents can stay focused during every interaction.

3. Call Abandonment Rate

Your call abandonment rate reflects the total number of customers who hang up while waiting to speak with an agent. This usually means your wait time is high or your IVR or IVA isn’t doing its job well.

Lower your abandonment rate by adding features like queue callback to your center. Or, build out your self-service options to give customers quick, autonomous access to answers. And, of course, bolster your training and find the right tools for your agents. In doing so, you’ll boost efficiency and lower abandonment rates.

4. Agent Utilization Rate

Agent utilization rate quantifies the average amount of time an agent spends on customer calls during their work hours. Are your agents taking long breaks between calls? Are they scrolling Reddit during their shift? This metric is incredibly useful in tracking productivity, agent experience, engagement, and general performance. It also helps assess whether your team is using their time well overall so you can zero in on improving agent motivation and time efficiency.

5. Cost Per Call

Cost per call (CPC) tracks the average cost of each call handled by an agent. Every second counts in a call center. And so does every dollar. This metric gives you insight into the cost-effectiveness of your operations so you can properly divide resources. Then, you’ll see a ripple effect when resources are distributed effectively. By reducing the cost per call, you can invest where the real ROI is — your agents and technology.

6. First Contact Resolution (FCR)

FCR is the number, or percentage, of interactions an agent resolves on the first call. Customers don’t want to repeat themselves or call back over and over (and over) to resolve their issues. FCR makes it clear if your agents are meeting customer expectations the first time, highlighting the quality of their knowledge and abilities.

Improving FCR means your agents are more empowered to do their job well on the first go. And it leads to better CSAT. In fact, there’s a direct one-to-one correlation between FCR and CSAT. For every 1% improvement in FCR, you see an equal improvement in CSAT.

7. Average Speed of Answer (ASA)

ASA identifies how long it takes agents to answer inbound calls, beginning from the moment a customer enters the queue. Customers want speedy service. And they detest waiting on hold. One recent survey found that CSAT scores start to drop as soon as hold times exceed three minutes. But if your agents answer quickly, the reward is better customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Improve your ASA by streamlining processes and workflows and adding ongoing agent training. When your operations are more efficient, you’ll see ASA skyrocket.

8. Service Level (SL)

Your service level is another critical metric that measures overall service quality by tracking agent performance during real-time interactions. Think of SL as the big-picture quantitative metric, measuring the number of interactions answered within a time frame while giving you a sense of the health of service at a glance. Tracking service levels makes it easy to ensure your team is properly staffed and customers get top-notch help consistently.

Want a more in-depth look at other metrics you should be tracking? Check out our blog.

7 Call Center Metrics That Reveal How Your Customers Really Feel

Now on to the qualitative call center metrics. These metrics gather feedback from agent-customer interactions to gauge the quality of service. Here are seven call center metrics that show how your customers feel about your customer service.

1. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Score

Maybe the most significant metric, your CSAT score shows how satisfied customers are with the service they receive. CSAT is gathered via a survey sent after an interaction that asks customers to rate their satisfaction or respond to specific aspects of the experience.

One study found that by focusing on improving CSAT, businesses keep 74% of customers for at least another year. That’s a substantial boost in your revenue stream. Tracking and responding to CSAT helps you know how to drive a better customer experience and support growth everywhere.

2. Customer Effort Score (CES)

As many as 96% of customers who put in high levels of effort during a service experience become more disloyal to that brand over time. If your customer has to jump through hoops to get help, you’re not doing your job right.

CES indicates how hard it is for a customer to get their needs achieved — be it because of process, product, or tools. Track CES through surveys, giving customers a chance to describe whether it was easy or a huge pain to get the help they needed. With CES insights, you can improve service and target when customer health is going awry.

3. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS helps identify happy customers (who are more likely to promote your product or service) and those who are unhappy with your service. NPS surveys ask a single question: “How likely are you to recommend this company to a friend or colleague?” and provide a rating scale of 0–10.

Before they began tracking NPS, the job and recruiting website Glassdoor only collected feedback from users who reported bugs or website issues. While this let them make small fixes to their customer experience here and there, they weren’t getting the full picture of how their customers really felt about their services.

When they pivoted to track NPS, Glassdoor could see valuable information from a previously untapped audience and identify where they needed improvements. This then helped them engage their users (and become wildly successful in the process). That’s the power of tracking NPS.

4. Customer Churn Rate

Customers leave you sometimes. That’s the nature of business. But, when they go, it’s important that you know why they left — and if there’s anything you can do to avoid it happening again. Your customer churn rate shows how many of your customers have stopped using your products or services in a given period. This information can raise red flags that it’s time to reassess performance and productivity. By tracking your churn rate, you take a temperature check on your service quality and can respond as needed to improve your customer experience.

5. Quality Assurance (QA) Scores

Your quality assurance (QA) scores measure the quality of agent interactions against a QA scorecard. For example, to determine QA scores, you might listen to an agent’s conversation with a customer and fill out a scorecard to grade different aspects of the interaction. The final score is a percentage of the total points earned during the interaction.

Agent scorecards are related to metrics, but they also give you a better sense of how customers and agents feel. Plus, QA scores can help you understand the root cause of poor customer experiences and the reasons behind customer churn.

6. Call Recordings

Your customers reveal a lot in their interactions with your agents. Through their tone of voice and words, they’re showing you how happy or discontent they are with your service. Call recordings might not give you hard and fast numbers about your performance, but they provide use cases and examples for good and bad interactions. This can help reveal where to target coaching with agents.

7. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Your customer lifetime value helps you understand the growth and revenue value of each customer. The CLV is the amount of revenue you expect the average customer to generate during their relationship with your business. This may seem like a sales metric, but in tracking CLV, you can identify your ideal customers and adapt your CX strategy to meet their needs. Over time, you boost customer loyalty, reduce churn, and improve strategic decision-making. By increasing CLV, you also increase your revenue over time.

Need customer experience software to help you track the end-to-end journey? Reach out to our team to schedule a demo.