Two of the best features available with today’s contact center management solutions are live call monitoring and real-time metrics. These tools allow you to see what is going on in your call center at any time, and listen to your agents on calls in progress. But without historical contact center metrics, you aren’t really seeing the big picture. The day-to-day details of your call center are important, but they are always informed by how your agents are performing over time.
How often do you review your call center’s historical reports? Do you regularly review month-over-month or year-over-year data? If you do look at historical contact center metrics on a weekly or even monthly basis, what do you do with the insights that you gather?
Below are just a few of the key contact center metrics that you should be reviewing over time, and how you can turn those metrics into actionable items for call center success.
Depending on your industry, your call center may experience different levels of call volume at different times. For example, retail distribution centers typically see a surge in calls just after the holiday season as shoppers call in with questions about returns or recent holiday purchases.
If you aren’t prepared for sudden jump in call volume, you could be faced with the problem of too few agents with far too many calls to handle. In turn, this lack of agent coverage can cause your average wait time to skyrocket – leaving you with frustrated customers waiting on hold for extended periods of time.
Sounds like a nightmare, right? Thankfully, historical contact center metrics make this problem entirely preventable. Start by pulling your call records for the past year (at least), and identifying peak calling times. If you see that your contact center experienced spikes in call volume during the month of October, for example, you know that you will need to scale up during that time in the coming year. Talk to your contact center software provider in advance and communicate your plans to scale up or down at particular times during the year.
As you review your call center’s real-time reports, you probably notice 1 or 2 missed calls a day. In the scope of a day during which your agents answer hundreds of calls, that may not seem like much. But, trust us – every missed call is important, and they add up.
But, if you aren’t sure when those unanswered calls are coming in on the whole, you don’t really know to address the problem. You could add another agent to your team, but agent time is costly, and you want to make sure that you allocate resources efficiently.
To do this, pull your unanswered call records for the past year or more. Pinpoint where you are seeing the most missed calls, and adjust your agents’ schedules accordingly. For example, if you are seeing a large influx of missed calls to your support line from 5 PM to 7 PM, you may want to add an agent to your support call queue during that time.
When it comes to customer satisfaction, first call resolution is one of the most important call center metrics to track. First call resolution rate represents the percentage of customers who contacted your business with a problem, and had that problem resolved on the first call. It can be difficult to track first call resolution with just one metric; but, you can look at different historical call center reports to get a clearer picture.
To identify how many of your customer’s have to call your business repeatedly to resolve a problem, choose a time period. For our purposes, we’ll say that we choose the last 6 months. Look through the calls and remove any that aren’t legitimate customer calls. These might include wrong numbers or internal calls. From there, you can determine the total number of calls that you received during that time period. Pull out all the repeat calls, then identify which repeat calls came within a standard contact window. We’ll use 24 hours for our contact window.
If you are seeing a high number of repeat calls within your contact window, you’ll know that you have a problem with first call resolution. Use call disposition code reports to dig deeper and identify which agents or departments appear to have the most trouble resolving customer issues on the first call. You can then use this information to develop optimized training programs that help agents address customer concerns in a more timely manner.