Best Metrics for Remote Contact Center Performance

Operating a contact center isn’t cheap. From agent training to paying for infrastructure, there’s a lot that goes into ensuring your company is offering great customer support. Businesses can save money with a remote contact center because there’s no need to pay for office space, but it’s still important to use the right metrics to track performance and productivity.

Without insight from key performance indicators (KPIs), your contact center might be losing money. Even worse, customers might not be getting the experience they should be because of long wait times, poor service, and other issues.

But, by tracking the most useful remote contact center metrics, managers and business leaders have the insights they need to determine how effective their contact center actually is. They can also spot negative trends and take steps to turn them around.

If you’re operating a remote contact center, here are the metrics you should be looking at to gauge performance.

5 Important KPIs for Remote Contact Centers

1. First Call Resolution (FCR)

Ideally, customers call and have their issues resolved on the first call. First Call Resolution shows you the percentage of calls that are taken care of during that initial call – which means the customer doesn’t have to call again and your agents don’t have to spend time on outreach.

2. Blocked Calls

When a customer can’t get through to your agents – for example, because there won’t be an available agent so your system tells them to call back – they’re considered a Blocked Call.

If this metric starts to go up, you might want to look deeper into other productivity metrics like Talk Time intervals to make sure agents aren’t taking too long on each call. If they aren’t, you can hire more agents to cover peak times or implement more self-service options like IVR (interactive voice response) and automated chat support.

3. Service Level

This is an important performance metric as it shows the percentage of calls your agents are answering during a specific time interval.

If they’re moving too slowly, you could have blocked or abandoned calls. But, on the other hand, if they’re answering the calls too quickly, they might not be spending enough time on each customer interaction.

Basically, if your Service Level goes out of your expected range in either direction, there could be an issue with your agents’ performance you’ll need to address.

4. Average After-Call Work Time

Here’s another performance metric that shouldn’t move too far up or down.

If agents are spending too little time on after-call work, they’re more likely to make mistakes or not be thorough enough when recording interaction data. And if they’re too slow here, managers need to find ways to make this step in their workflow more efficient, either through coaching, templates, or other tools.

5. Interaction Sentiment

With interaction analytics powered by AI, you can filter out calls with a certain sentiment and view the transcription or listen to the call recording to find out what happened.

This type of deep dive into potentially problematic calls can cue contact center managers into what’s driving a critical concern, such as caller frustration or low customer feedback scores.

Keep an eye on all of this performance data to make sure your agents are being productive and your contact center is offering high-level customer support. You can also use these insights to understand where your agents might be struggling. If the service level drops or if agent performance is low, you can look at ways to better support your team.

How Leaders Can Support Remote Contact Centers Agents

With the normalization of remote and hybrid work during the pandemic, remote contact centers are becoming more popular. But working from home doesn’t make the job of the contact center agent any easier. In fact, today’s agents are facing unique challenges.

In a 2018 survey of 50 senior customer-care executives, 94 percent said they expected the skill demands placed on their contact center agents to go up in the coming years.

And that’s exactly what has happened. As companies today have better digital capabilities, customers are addressing a lot of their transactional and information-based issues themselves through digital channels. This leaves contact center agents with more complex concerns.

This can make their job more difficult and result in poor employee engagement.

Low engagement levels usually translate to higher turnover – a big problem in the contact center industry. Typically, contact centers experience high turnover, with rates ranging from 20 to 60 percent a year.

If agents aren’t well-trained and equipped with the right tools, they can’t be effective, and they’re not likely to thrive in their work.

So, if you want to help your agents be more productive, you’ll want to use your contact center performance metrics not just to monitor productivity and service levels but also to determine if your agents have what they need.

If you notice a problem, consider increasing training for agents. You might also need to switch to a better contact center solution.

Choose Software that Empowers Contact Center Managers and Agents

Modern contact center software from Intermedia empowers remote agents to provide exceptional customer experience with features like smart routing and multi-channel outreach capabilities.

It also lets managers access all the performance insights they need with real-time analytics, AI-powered interaction analysis, and custom reporting features.

Take the first step to a better remote contact center – learn more about Intermedia Contact Center today.

Rob Oscanyan

Robert Oscanyan is a Senior Director of Product Marketing at Intermedia, where he focuses on helping businesses improve their customer experience using Intermedia's award-winning cloud communications solutions. Rob has over a decade of experience spanning market research, messaging, and elevating the voice of the customer. In his free time, he constantly creating new adventures with his wife, seven kids, and a small army of pets.