Whether you like it or not, the employees interacting with your customers (and potential customers) are the face of your business. For many companies, as they reach scale, the choice to invest in call center resources to handle the influx of customer inquiries is a no brainer. However, implementing processes to manage and control your call center resources and employees is a bit trickier. Understanding the right metrics to strategically drive your call center is important for managing call center services.

Getting success from call center services isn’t as difficult today as it was in 2003, when Gartner reported that 50-70% of CRM implementations were failures. 69% of large B2C businesses view their call centers as “critical revenue generators,” according to a Loudhouse Research study. However, call center adoption hasn’t completely smoothed out the kinks, 60% of businesses cited the need for better integration of inter-departmental customer data as a key focus in the next 12 months, according to the same Loudhouse Research study. Managers are still struggling to find the best call center software metrics to focus in on when looking to strategically drive their business.

First Call Resolution One of the most important call center metrics is first call resolution rate. First call resolution (FCR) is the number of calls resolved on first contact divided by the number of calls received in a given period of time. This number gives management a measure of how many phone calls it takes for a happy customer. Improving your FCR can give you improvement in efficiency and effectiveness in your call center.

This metric is particularly important for managers because when your FCR % is high, you know your call center is operating at maximum efficiency. A high FCR also lowers costs for your business because your employees can focus on other, potentially more revenue oriented tasks.

Abandon Rates Measuring your abandon rates are important for understanding how well your call center is operating. If your call center is operating at capacity your agents might not be able to get to every inbound call. Therefore the decision to hire / scale operations is based heavily on abandon rate. Abandon rate is the number of abandoned calls / number of incoming calls.

The faster  your call center agent can answer a phone call, the lower the abandon rate. Typically, larger businesses that scales their operations rely on abandon rate to measure success of their call center. The faster a call is answered and catered to, the more opportunities for sales. Around 30 percent of the contact centers do not have a reliable method of measuring customer satisfaction, it’s important you set up performance indicators before implementation of a call center service.

Cost Per Call

The cost per call is a good metric for gauging general success of an outsourced calling service. Most outsourced call centers will report on hourly metrics, and if you are billed hourly, you can calculate how much each call costs you. You calculate cost per call on an hourly billing service by dividing total number of calls in a given hour by the cost per hour of your services. Don’t put too much weight on cost per call, call volumes fluctuate, so measuring your call center agent success on cost per call may be unfair.

Overall, there are a myriad of tools you can use to leverage success with your call center. Whether you have decided to outsource call center services or keep them in-house, keep in mind FCR, cost per call and abandon rate metrics to help manage the success of your call center.

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