Analyzing KPIs is no doubt a vital way to measure how your contact center responds to your callers. But there’s a virtual avalanche of data within those figures. You can get just about every bit of information you need from your key performance indicators - but does that mean you’re getting the right information?

How can you tell which indicators mean the most to your contact center? Which ones should you favor over the others? It’s a potentially confusing subject, and all organizations are different, but here are some tips on which KPIs might be the most important ones to consider.

Contact quality

Most, if not all, contact centers record their calls so they can be analyzed later, and the quality of the experience a customer has can be one of the most important KPIs to measure.

Was the employee courteous? Did they get the information needed from the customer to handle whatever the issue was? Did they do so in a professional manner? If you typically use a script, did the employee do so correctly? Was the problem resolved by the end of the call?

These are all factors to examine closely.

Accessibility

If, like many contact centers, you use an automated system for your incoming calls, it’s important to analyze how that system is working. Remember, the idea behind these systems is to solve relatively simple issues so that your customer service professionals can save their efforts for the more complex problems a caller might have.

So, with that in mind, how many customers completed their calls without speaking with a representative? How many calls were abandoned by the customer without resolving the issue? Is it time to analyze your automated system further to see if it’s properly designed for high call volume?

Employee scheduling

One of the most vital aspects of a contact center’s efficiency is making sure that your employees are meeting their call goals. This one factor, if left unexamined, could cause a whole host of issues, including increased wait times, lower customer satisfaction, and fewer resolutions.

This is also an area where there’s been a shift in thinking. Until recently, the conventional wisdom was that average call time and calls per hour were the most important numbers to examine.

But the truth is that your employees have no control over call volume, and they may not have a lot of control over the amount of time it takes to resolve an issue. This is particularly true now that automated systems play a larger role in a contact center’s business. The simple problems typically get solved there, leaving the more complicated ones for your employees.

The truly important measurement now is whether or not your employees were in the right place at the right time. Yes, it might have taken longer for a resolution on one particular call to be reached, but there are more important things to consider.

First, were there enough employees present to handle the rest of the calls, while that one agent was tied up? And second, did the employee have the necessary knowledge and tools to resolve the problem without excessive hold time? The answers to these questions will give you more insight into the workings of your call center than just the call time or calls per hour numbers alone.

First call resolution

It might seem obvious, but by far, the most important KPI is first call resolution. In fact, first call resolution KPI ranks even higher than overall customer satisfaction, in terms of importance for contact center managers. But as it turns out, the two are definitely connected.

According to the customer contact research and consulting firm Service Quality Measurement, for every 1% improvement in first call resolution, there is an overall 1% improvement in customer satisfaction.

To put that on a larger scale, SQM determined that within a study group of 150 contact centers, the centers that achieved an 85% or higher level of first call resolution earned a “world-class” customer satisfaction rating, while the satisfaction level declined sharply when first call resolution dipped below 70%.

Despite some occasional fuzziness in what constitutes “a resolution,” it’s harder to think of a KPI that has a more direct effect on your contact center’s success than first call resolution.

If you’re having trouble meeting your KPI goals, workforce optimization software can help. Learn more about what this contact center software solution can do for your organization here.