3 Ways to Improve Your Contact Center Metrics and KPIs

The success of a contact center is predicated on its operational infrastructure, and the most critical components of that infrastructure are the front-line employees.

Today’s customer service agents spend their workday navigating different technologies and channels, communicating with customers, and reviewing their performance (individually, or with supervisors) through contact center metrics and KPIs (key performance indicators).

Agent performance is pivotal, especially as their work becomes more complex – spanning new systems and channels and meeting customer expectations. To navigate this issue, we need to adopt the right approach to KPIs and metrics. Specifically, we need to consider a few factors:

If you answered “no” to any of these questions, read on to find out how to improve your contact center KPI metrics by focusing on these fundamental questions.

Through cloud-based omnichannel contact center metrics and KPIs, everyone involved in the contact center is on the same page.

When used correctly, contact center metrics and key performance indicators can allow:

Omnichannel contact center metrics and KPIs, when done right, provide one major advantage to your contact center – improving agent efficiency – which ultimately has a spiraling effect on other key metrics, such customer satisfaction levels, agent retention, and the ROI of omnichannel self-service.

For example, cross-functional self-service channels such as SMS, chat apps (such as WhatsApp and Viber), and conversational AI chatbots can assist customers through automated service, and produce:

The success of the contact center is centered around data insights, or reporting metrics, to improve contact center KPIs. That can be automated omnichannel, self-service reporting in conversational AI, or a real-time interaction between an agent and customer.

Cloud contact center solutions have one goal – to improve your KPIs and metrics by helping agents produce efficient, quality interactions and making reporting easier.

According to a recent IBM study, the three top skill areas CEOs now want are:

Never have these concepts been more important in today’s contact center, especially when it comes to agent efficiency.

While hard skills, such as data aggregation, are still in high demand, automation and AI (more specifically, cloud contact center solutions) can handle many tasks that we once had to.

Soft skills (such as innovation, time management, and communication) in the contact center, are imperative for this reason, but they must be recorded in order to benchmark large-scale contact center and small-scale agent KPIs.

Call centers have historically been great at measuring the hard skills, but they struggle to figure out how to quantify the soft ones that are in demand today. And that’s a problem, because metrics are how we define performance and condition agents to interact with customers. They’re also how we identify breaks in systems and processes, pain points, and more importantly, operational areas of improvement.

When you combine agent soft skills with technical cloud solutions, you get both sides of the equation – producing optimal agent efficiency and call center productivity.

Simply put, call center metrics are crucial to coaching agents on how best to communicate with customers. Today’s omnichannel contact center needs to use call center metrics to identify pain points in technical job functions, such as data silos, or soft-skill interactions in order to improve soft skills, such as agent tone.

But it doesn’t have to be a challenge.

The most popular examples include:

Agent efficiency is modified, coached, and strengthened through success metrics and KPIs.

The more call center metrics we have in place, the more tools our contact center is equipped with to increase overall agent efficiency, contact center productivity, and customer satisfaction rates.

According to a recent CCW Digital Market Study, legacy systems are one of the top 5 technology challenges in the contact center. Companies are struggling to scale their operation, let alone incorporate new channels and conversational AI.

A cloud platform allows them to do that, simultaneously enabling the contact center to grow, incorporate remote agents, and communicate in an omnichannel manner thanks to seamless integrations with digital channels and AI solutions.

Cloud contact center solutions, when paired with the right KPIs, can:

These goals are most achievable through a channel-agnostic approach in contact centers, including omnichannel chat capabilities mentioned previously with channels including SMS, Viber, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Live Chat.

These applications are freeware, cross-platform messaging and Voice over IP services that allow users to send text messages and voice messages, make voice and video calls, and share images, documents, user locations, and other media to increase consumer engagement and customer satisfaction – truly defining the “omnichannel” approach to the contact center.

Customer-centric businesses and impatient consumers are reflecting the need for the surge in implementation of such cloud communication. And contact centers can improve their key performance indicators by cross-functionally using them to satisfy large customer bases across different demographic regions.

The success of the contact center is predicated on its operational infrastructure. Cloud contact center solutions have one goal: to improve your KPI metrics to produce efficient results. The ones that can combine cloud technology to complement humanization will complete both sides of the equation in the KPIs of today’s contact center.