Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are a great way to focus your contact center on improvement by using the data that you generate every day. The idea is that you use several KPIs to measure different parts of your performance—call time, agent turnover rate, or first contact resolution, for example. By monitoring and measuring these KPIs, you can see exactly where you need to improve, and chart a course to do so.

But how do you know which KPIs to focus on? The problem is that if you spread yourself too thin when it comes to KPIs—if you’re evaluating too many at once—then you’re not going to see much change in any of them. Deciding that you’re going to measure and aim to improve every aspect of your contact center at once isn’t realistic, but how do you know which KPIs

will be most useful for your contact center?

The answer to this question really involves knowing your contact center well, and having a firm view of where you want to improve things. Let’s say your contact center is being overwhelmed by calls, and you want to not only reduce the amount of time that your agents spend on the phone, but you also want to reduce the number of calls entirely. In this case, you could focus on KPIs like average time on hold and percentage of calls blocked when there isn’t an agent available. But you could also monitor the nature of the event that led to the call, or the web page that was visited directly before the call. With those KPIs, you can get a better sense of why customers give up on solving the issue themselves and instead make a call. You could potentially find a flaw in your FAQ or Help pages, as well.

If your goal is to improve the service that your agents are giving customers, then you may want to focus on KPIs like abandoned calls, call resolution, customer satisfaction, and the amount of time spent speaking with customers. Once you begin measuring your agents’ performance in these metrics, you may come to a better understanding of what causes problems with customer service. You’ll also be able to see whether certain agents are causing a problem, or whether the entire process that you have set up is actually the issue.

You could also focus on your agent turnover rate, as constantly retraining new agents is both costly and inefficient. Keeping track of trends in the reasons for agent turnover will help you acknowledge if there is something that management can do to lower the turnover rate.

Deciding what KPIs to use can be a tricky choice, but it really comes down to a decision about where you want to improve your call center. The decision to measure a specific metric is the first step towards improving it. If you’d like to learn more about KPIs that your contact center might want to use, then read our article, “The Contact Center KPIs That You Should be Tracking.”