A complete guide to call center KPIs: What to track and why

Your agents work hard to chase leads, connect with customers, and close sales — and it’s important that they work smart. When every second counts towards your targets, you need a quick and clear grasp of how your team’s performing and where they can improve.

Tracking your call center metrics brings your people and processes into focus so that you can help agents to be their best and keep the dollars dialing. Read on to discover which call center KPIs you should monitor and how they can be used to build momentum and scale your business.

1. Lead conversion rate

How many calls did it take for your agent to make a sale? This call center KPI is important to measure for a couple of reasons. If your conversion rate is high, you can examine what sales and engagement tactics worked in those interactions and replicate them with new prospects. Low conversion rates, on the other hand, are a cost to your productivity and bottom line; tracking these can help you spot whether the solution needs to come from fresh sales training or gathering new leads.

2. Connection rate

Connection rate tells you how many calls were answered out of your total leads. Track it on a daily basis, and you’ll get a good idea of how effective your targeting is — doing this per agent will further contextualize how they’re performing. Your reps might be the best, but they can only go so far without quality prospects. Of all your call center analytics, keep an eye on this one to figure out if you need to sharpen your lead gen.

3. Call length

Tracking how long agents spend talking with customers and prospects on the phone can reveal a few aspects of their performance. Some calls take extra care to land a sale — and if your agents are at a stage of developing relationships, longer calls can suggest more in-depth and satisfying customer interactions. If they’re in problem-solving mode, however, then your reps might benefit from more support to quickly address customer needs. When tracked over time, this metric can give you an accurate impression of each agent’s performance.

4. Wait or pause time

This call center KPI tells you how long your reps spend between calls. It’s important to let your agents take a breather to stay on top of their game, but you can’t let a potential sale slip through your fingers. Track wait time along with other agent stats to get a good sense of how long your people need to recharge and stay productive.

5. Wrap time

An agent’s work doesn’t stop once they’re off the phone — making call notes, sending emails, updating databases, and other admin tasks all take time. Tracking wrap-up activity lets you determine how much time to allocate for post-call work, and helps you see which of these tasks can be automated to keep your people dialing.

6. Calls per agent

This shows how efficiently your agents are dialing. While call length, wait time, and wrap time all reasonably affect how many calls your reps place, this is a helpful call center metric to track as abnormally high or low call figures can point to issues with productivity or call quality.

7. Hold time

Placing customers on hold is perfectly natural — but if hold times grow too long, your prospects’ patience will wear thin, causing them to abandon calls. Monitor your hold times to identify how long is “too long,” and set targets based on that. Tracking this will help you better organize your agents’ availability to make and handle calls, and prevent customer loyalty from crashing due to wait times.

8. Abandon rate

Abandoned calls can happen for a few reasons, but they’re often due to hold and wait times. These calls represent lost leads, and they can also point to issues with your dialer settings that prevent these calls from coming through. You’ll want your abandon rate to be as low as possible, but it’s still a good idea to track it and identify the cause. Pro tip: leave out the first few seconds of calls to screen out incorrect and wrong number dials.

9. Transfer rate

Transfer rate tells you how many calls agents have to transfer elsewhere to complete. Whether you measure transfers per agent or transfers in a given window of time, you’ll get a better sense of how many calls require further steps to solve. High transfer rates can suggest uncertainty from your agents, particular requests from your customers, or calls being routed through to the wrong agents.

What if we told you there’s an easy way to track these call center KPIs and more? ReadyMode has just the thing. Our reports give you the metrics you need in a set of customizable dashboards, so you can spot how to keep your processes sharp and your agents dialing with confidence.

New to ReadyMode? We track everything you need to run a call center. Take a look at our most popular reports: Call Logs, Agent Report, Dialer Report, and Office Map.

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