Effectively Measure and Manage Your Contact Center Operations
Effectively measuring and managing contact center operations is crucial for any organization striving to provide exceptional customer experience while staying within budget.


Tailored Contact Center Indicators
The traditional one-size-fits-all approach to contact center metrics is no longer effective. Every industry and brand has its own unique priorities and areas of concern, which determines the appropriate key performance indicators (KPIs) to use. However, certain metrics, such as first contact resolution (FCR) and abandonment rate, remain relevant for all industries and customer experience goals. To determine the most important metrics, it's essential to have a clear understanding of your business goals and how your contact center contributes to achieving them. Additionally, it's important to consider how metrics traditionally used for voice interactions can be applied to digital channels, including self-service, live chat, and chatbot performance.


Critical Contact Center Indicators
It's also essential to adopt a minimalistic approach, as tracking too many metrics can hinder performance. This can lead to decreased efficiency in the contact center as employees, supervisors, and managers find it challenging to determine which KPIs are the most important or where to focus their efforts to drive improvement.
Task-Specific Indicators
While metrics are essential for daily contact center operations, carefully selecting the right KPIs can provide valuable insights that can inform the management of overall business operations. These KPIs can reveal opportunities for improving products or services, and ultimately enhance customer experience across the organization, not just within the contact center.


Single-Touch Resolution (STR)
Single-Touch Resolution (STR) is the percentage of all incoming customer inquiries or questions that are resolved by the initial agent who receives them, without the need for transferring the customer to a superior, different department, or scheduling a follow-up call. There are multiple ways to calculate STR, such as by dividing the number of resolved contacts by the total number of contacts received, or by dividing the number of resolved contacts in the first interaction by the total number of first contacts received. However, the most effective method is to ask customers directly through post-contact surveys.
40% of U.S. consumers consider STR as the most crucial aspect of a positive customer experience. This metric not only highlights the ease of access to the right information or customer data for agents but also any potential gaps in agent training.
STR is an essential metric for organizations that aim to optimize customer satisfaction, thus it's important to measure it properly and ensure that all of your organization's contact center partners are aligned.


Single-Call Close (SCC)
SCC is to outbound sales teams what single-touch resolution is to inbound customer service teams.
SCC measures the number of sales an agent makes during the first customer interaction. By aligning this metric with agent behavior, it can reveal trends in SCC that can be replicated by others in the outbound team to improve their closing rate and increase productivity. The higher the SCC rate, the greater the overall business efficiency, as it allows for faster and more revenue generation.


Average Duration of Handling (ADH)
Average Duration of Handling (ADH) is the average time a contact center agent spends handling a customer inquiry or question. It includes any time the customer spends on hold or completing tasks as a result of the conversation, as well as the length of the conversation itself.
When most contact center work was telephone-based, ADH was often a key metric; the idea being that the longer an agent needs to handle a customer's issue, the more it would cost the company and the less time the agent would have available to service other customers.
However, contact centers now handle various forms of customer interactions, such as chatbot interactions or self-service, in addition to traditional voice interactions and live chat.


Escalation to Live Agent
Escalation to live agent is the percentage of interactions that are escalated from your digital agent to a live agent. While there will always be instances where a live agent is necessary to fully resolve an issue, if your organization has an omnichannel engagement platform, escalation should be the exception and not the norm. Monitoring this metric highlights areas for improvement in self-service options, such as outdated information for common customer inquiries. As more organizations adopt chatbots for enhancing customer experience, tracking the instances of escalation to human agents will provide valuable insights into chatbot performance. If the escalation rate is too high, it may indicate that the chatbot needs further training to handle more customer inquiries.
Escalation is a crucial aspect of measuring customer experience, regardless of the method an organization chooses. In fact, 60% of U.S. consumers say that not wasting their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide a good online customer experience. If it's necessary to move to a different channel for resolution, 75% of customers expect their information to be transferred with them, so they don't have to repeat themselves. In cases where escalation is inevitable, ensure that the customer remains in their preferred channel. If the customer started with a conversational interactive voice response (IVR), then moving to voice with a live agent is preferable. If the customer started with self-service or a chatbot interaction, escalation should be to online chat.


Compliance With Schedule
Compliance with Schedule is the amount of time agents spend working according to their assigned schedule.
Compliance with schedule measures the time agents spend interacting with customers and completing post-call tasks, but not including time needed for breaks and training. Analyzing it can reveal opportunities for improved efficiency and productivity. This metric is easier to track for organizations that use outsourced contact centers as they typically use proprietary workforce management tools to track and calculate compliance with schedule.
Unlike other KPIs, compliance with schedule is a metric that agents have the most control over. This makes it a valuable tool for identifying best practices that can be shared with other agents to increase their productivity and operational efficiency.
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