Call Center KPI's 101

00:00Hi guys, Tom Laird here. You've heard me break down contact center technology on the podcast time and time again. Now it's time for me to help you with your challenges. As your contact center technology advisor through our new company Expivia Digital, I can help you with things like CCaaS selection, any type of AI implementation, and nice studio and integration services. It's the same honest advice you hear on the geek applied specifically to your operation. Visit ExpiviaDigital.com to get started. That's ExpiviaDigital.com. This is advice from a call center geek, a weekly podcast with a focus on all things call center. We'll cover it all from call center operations, hiring, culture, technology, and education. We're here to give you actionable items to improve the quality of yours and your customer's experience. This is an evolving industry with creative minds and ambitious people like this guy. Not only is his passion call center operations, but he's our host.

00:54He's the CEO of Expivia Interaction Marketing Group and the call center geek himself, Tom Laird. Hi, everybody. Welcome to another episode. I believe that this is episode 49 of advice from a call center geek. My name is Tom Laird. I'm the CEO of Expivia Interaction Marketing. For those of you who do not know yet, Expivia is a 500 seat call center outsourcer. So we work for clients looking to outsource their customer service or any type of other call center functions located here in Northwestern Pennsylvania. Merry November, merry kind of getting in the holiday spirit a little bit, it's, you know, my wife just had me take all the decorations out for Christmas just to do the inventory, so we're at the inventory stage right now. Next is kind of the hanging and putting up stage as we get here closer to Thanksgiving, but again, thank you guys for joining.

01:53Again, if you have not listened to one of these podcasts, We're just trying to give you some actionable call center items that you can take back into your contact center, improve your quality, improve your agent culture, and hopefully maybe learn something along the way to improve the overall customer experience. I'm gonna do some teaching in this podcast, and for some of you who have been in the industry forever, you know, this might be a good refresher for those of you who are newer to the industry. And we're gonna really talk about the call center kind of KPIs and metrics and things to look for in your call center. So this would be a good podcast, you know, as you go and maybe as you're hiring new call center managers and hiring new supervisors, wanted to kind of do one for those guys that are maybe a little bit newer to the industry.

02:38I've had a ton of questions about this kind of stuff too. So I forget that there's a range of listeners and which makes this podcast and what you guys are doing from a even what we're doing on Facebook and how you guys are kind of contact me so awesome. So there's the people who have been in the industry for 40 years and we're talking about some intense and higher level stuff, but there's a lot of you newer guys out there too that are breaking into the industry or you're brand new in the customer service world and I got to remember that we have a range of people here listening to the podcast because that's pretty cool. We've had almost 13,000 downloads of the podcast now, so it's going really well. So again, thank you guys very much, but I kind of broke this down into the two segments of calls, right, so kind of some inbound and some outbound type KPI.

03:24So some of it is very self-explanatory and some of it is not. If you have followed me, if you follow me on LinkedIn, I think you should because that's probably the medium that I post to the most and I've just been kind of doing the last couple days a call center metrics made easy postings where, you know, we were talking about shrinkage and after co-work and wrap time and just giving some examples. So I would suggest, again, follow us on all the social media. So we have advice from a call center geek Facebook page. We have a Twitter account. I have my own personal Twitter account, but if you can only do one, well, I guess it'd be be two. Great. Follow us on the Facebook advice from a call center geek. And then if you want to follow me, Tom Laird on LinkedIn, post a lot of stuff.

04:08But anyway, okay. I tried to kind of group these from a lot of easier ones up at the front, up at the top here and then we can get into some of the things that maybe there are a couple questions on. But number one, all right, so these are your kind of your hardcore, you know, we just real quick, we did a podcast on kind of the next level metrics, right, when we talked about sentiment scores, we've CSAT and NPS, we're not going to talk about those today, we're going to talk about really the baseline, you know, hardcore KPIs that your agents really need to work on to really check and make sure that your your call center is being totally efficient. So number one, super easy, right? So looking at this from a day standpoint, looking at when I say interval, I'm going to use 30 minute intervals.

04:52So again, so there's 9 to 9.30, 9.30 to 10, those type of intervals. So when I say that, so again, the first thing is you need to know your total calls handled. So you need to know your total calls handled, and then you need to know your total calls overall that are coming into your center. You need to know that by interval, you need to be able to track that by interval because then that will kind of correlate to what your staffing is. So if you don't know that, if you don't have that anywhere, you know, you need to even track that in an Excel sheet, but you need to know that. Number two is your talk time slash handle time. What's the difference? And I get a lot of these kind of questions or people confuse the both, right? So your talk time is literally what? The amount of time that your reps are talking to a customer. So that doesn't include any type of pre-queue, doesn't include any type of after call work. It's just literally the time that it takes on average for your agent to talk to a customer.

05:50Well, your handle time, right? Your handle time is whole time that they're on that interaction. So from the time that they take the call, any type of hold time, any type of after call work, if there's any type of thing that you're doing at the end of call for memoing, if you're calling it wrap time, all of that. So the total time that interaction takes to be handled, That's your handle time. And the reason you need to know both, right, so your total handle time really plays into your staffing, but if your talk time's low, but your handle time's long, then you got some after call work, or you have some wrap time, or you have some of those issues that you gotta work through. So make sure you know both of them. Should know that off the top of your head, what your talk time is and what your handle time is.

06:34Number three, which goes into now service level type things that we're gonna talk about is your average speed of answer. So you need to know how long, really, basically, customers are in queue. So ASA is your average speed of answer. From when that customer places the call, it hits your switch. It hits your telephony piece of equipment to the time that the agent actually answers it. Long ASAs normally mean, irritated customers. And that correlates really closely then to service level. So the service level is kind of the core metric of any call center. And it is the amount or the percentage of calls I answered within a certain period of time. So let's take a breath there and say that again. So the industry average for service level is in 80-30, which means for kind of a quality high end center, 80% of the calls need to be answered within 30 seconds or less.

07:32Now again, we go over with our clients. Some of our clients want a 90-10, 90% of the calls answered within 10 seconds or less. So this goes to the culture of the organization you are. This also goes to your budget and what you can do from a staffing standpoint because the quicker you need to answer and the higher percentage of calls answered within a shorter period of time, you're going to need more people. You can also try to really work some efficiencies out of this too using some other things Things like what we're going to talk to next, which is after call work, ACW, right? So your ACW or your wrap time. We always grew up, when I grew up it was after call work, but a lot of companies are using wrap time, right? So basically it's the time that the customer's not on the phone anymore, but there's work to be done still.

08:19So a lot of times there's memoing or there's some type of account updating. [QA coverage remark omitted] So let me say this too is understand your after call work and use it to your advantage or your reps will use it to theirs. So and what I mean by that is don't tell them that they have five seconds of after call work and they got to get on the next call, right? You got to make sure that you give them a time to breathe, to recalibrate themselves for the next call. On average, we try to get all the memoing done during the call, if we can be efficient in that.

09:05But then we still will give them 20 to 30 seconds of after co-work. So again, they can breathe, they can kind of take it just a second before they go on to the next call and then we're going. So make sure you know you're up to co-work, make sure you benchmark your up to co-work, make sure all your reps know what the goal is, and make sure you're tracking that in real time all the time. One of the other things then that plays into all the things that we talked about, average speed of answer, your after call work, your abandon rate, your talk time is in your occupancy. An occupancy is a number or I should say a percentage that really tells you how efficient your agents are doing. It tells you if you are overworking your agents, if you're burning them out, but it also tells you if you're not as efficient as you should be.

09:51So occupancy, so for us, is our talk time plus our after call work, which is basically your handle time, right, divided by the total time that an agent is logged in. So for us, it's basically in a, if we're getting billed by the minute, they're in a paid state. How many minutes of the hour and what percentage of the hour are they in a paid state or are they in a, for most of you guys, for an internal center, in a kind of an agent working state, right, where they're actually talking or working on an account compared when they're kind of not only relaxing but maybe just waiting for another call to come in. So for benchmarking purposes we benchmark that we want occupancy at 75 to 80 percent of the hour which basically means for 45 minutes out of each 60 minutes you know the rep is in some type of talk time or after call work time. Some people take after call work out of that and just kind kind of do a straight on how much your handle time is or your talk time is.

10:50But I think the fact that she kind of planned it. So again, you can't burn your reps out. You can't have a 90 to 95% occupancy, which means the reps are talking and working 55 minutes out of the hour. I mean, maybe that's your culture, but I don't think it's good for your agents. So make sure you kind of understand that. Make sure you benchmark that and try to work that to get to that 45 minutes, 70 to 80 75 to 80 percent of the time We have other kind of I don't say weirder stats But but some that you guys will have some of you won't some that will mean something some of you that you know This won't mean too much. But one we we like to know the longest delay which basically means what's the longest call and cue for the Day, all right, so, you know, we've been good We have an 80% surface level, but you know we see that, you know, for we had a, the longest call that took to get answered was six minutes and 32 seconds. And that just kind of tells me, wow, do we have an interval that's screwed up. So that's kind of a, you know, a red flag that kind of goes off or a red, red alarm, siren, siren, siren that goes off, let's try that. That says, hey, this interval is probably screwed up with your staffing or something happened there. So I can my eyes go right to that interval. And I'll know that, you know, something happened there, even Even though it looks like we're fine for the day, it's kind of a detailed thing to make sure that for us, that it's good.

12:11We track our callback percentage, so we do virtual callbacks. So again, if we do have a client that does get caught in queue, we get caught in a spike. The customers have the ability to schedule an instant callback, right, where their place in queue does not get taken away, right, they don't go back to the line. So we kind of make sure that we're tracking how many percentage of those customers are opting in and then you know how many of those are we actually getting because a lot of times if there's a longer wait time we we will abandon that call when the call them back because nobody's there. They're not answering. So that's another one. And then obviously you have you want to track your self service usage, you want to check your your IVR finalization. So how many of your calls are getting finalizing your IVR with a positive outcome? How many of them are getting kicked agents and that's kind of obviously a way to kind of figure out if your IVR is getting screwed up. The last kind of main call center one is you need to be able to track your shrinkage, and for me, growing up, shrinkage is just basically your call-off percentage.

13:14So if you have 10 people needed for, let's say 20 people, because the math is just easier to see, 20 people are scheduled at 9 o'clock, or I'm sorry, 20 people are needed at 9 o'clock in the morning for your program based on the amount of calls and how long the calls are. Well, then you need to schedule with a 10% shrinkage added in two more agents, right? So you would schedule 22 to make sure that you're getting to that number. So there's two types of shrinkage now that I kind of have grown into this. So we have our external shrinkage, which again is, you know, your paid time off, call off, those types of things. Then you have your internal shrinkage, which is your, you know, you're going to pull somebody for training. You're going to go play a game with them because they did good on a call.

14:00All those types of things, bathroom breaks and those types of things that agents do. So you just basically take your external plus your internal divided by the total time times by 100, you get your percentage. And then that's the number that you use when you're staffing to make sure that you plus it up by that percentage. Now if you are, if your shrinkage is like 25%, you got issues. So 10 to 15% is normally the norm for your shrinkage. So if you do have a higher 20, 25% of shrinkage, then you need to make sure that you're probably looking at the attendance podcast because there's probably not a lot of people there or they're calling off a lot. And then that kind of goes just again with schedule adherence. So after you have that shrinkage number, then make sure you're looking the next day at how many reps did you really need and making sure that those numbers are jiving together.

14:56So again, from total calls handled, your talk time, your handle time, average speed of answer, your after call work, your wrap time, abandon rate, service level, occupancy, your longest delay, the amount of customers that use the callback percentage, your self-service, how many reps or how many customers got finalized in your IVR or in your self-service model, your shrinkage and your scheduled adherence. If you kind of have that core group of I guess 12 or 13 type of metrics then you can have a really good handle on how well your call center is doing and you're also going to know where from an efficiency standpoint you need to tweak some things. From an outbound standpoint, these go less telephony and probably more salesy. So when I say outbound, you're probably doing a little bit more sales. So again, everything, a lot of this is done by the hour to benchmark and to have metrics to compare reps and to compare different programs.

15:54So for us, we're looking at sales per hour, or if we're trying to collect a payment, it's a mop, a method of payment per hour. We're going to look obviously at our dials per hour. So whether you're using a predictive dialer or whether you're using a power dial, where the reps are just kind of clicking a button and it dials for them, make sure that you have that benchmark you know it's good for your organization, make sure that you have all the reps kind of adhering to that. Don't make it too high, don't make it too low, make it attainable, but nothing that's gonna burn anybody out. And then we have the difference between your contacts and your connects, right? So your connects are just basically somebody on the other end of the phone picked up and said hello, right? Could have been the right person, might not have been, could have been their daughter, but somebody picked it up, means it was a good number. But the more important one is your your connects, which means you talked to the right person. So if it's a somebody that you know, you have to talk to Jamie Smith, you're actually talking to Jamie Smith, that will go as a connect. And that rolls into your conversion.

16:57Right? So we basically take a kind of a qualified and an unqualified conversion, which means we take our unqualified, which is the conversion, the sales that we get out of our connects, which means out of the whole universe of calls that we're really dialing, right? Now we do qualify them a little bit. You could do it off the total amount of dials. So if you have 5,000 leads that you're dialing, you could do that percentage. I don't know really what that tells you other than if that file is good or not, which, you know, I guess maybe that's that is important. But when we're looking more at like the rep level and what reps are doing, a good job. You're going to look at the connects and in your conversion which is this basically the sales divided by the connects that they have and then your contacts right and that's the really important conversion number so that's gonna tell you if they can sell or not so basically every time they got a yes or no what percentage of them are yeses so if you have one yes out of every 10 you knows you have 10% conversion for that agent benchmark that and then that's the number that you're gonna kind of work on I think that's almost more important than sales per hour because that's the long term, you know, how good really the agent is because everybody can get lucky for a couple hours and have a nice high sales per hour.

18:10But your conversion kind of doesn't lie over that long period. And then the other important one is, and this is for those of you guys who are using a predictive dialer, and please, please, please, from a TCPA regulation, you have to know your abandonment rate, which basically means if you have a two to one ratio of calls going out, so let's say you have 10 agents, your predictive dialer is going to dial two lines for each of those, and as customers answer the phone, the dialer is going to give them to your agents, well, those ones that are left at the end, they get just abandoned. So for TCPA, you got to be under 3%, I believe. We've stopped using the predictive dialer as about six months ago for TCPA. We're just using PowerDial here in my center. But normally, we always try to keep that under 3% from a TCPA to make sure that we're following with the regs of that.

19:01And then the last metric that whether you're inbound or outbound that you should know is your cost per call. So basically you're adding up your expenses, dividing it by the amount of calls that you're taking or the amount of calls that come into your center and find out what really your cost per call. There's a ton of different ways. It's like accounting, right? You can do all your accounting and all of your cost per agent and add up all of the expenses divided by the amount of agents and you know how much your agent cost is. Just another way to break that down is to do the same thing and do it divided by the calls that come in. So you know how expensive each of your calls are and that's probably an important number for kind of some of the higher ups. All right, so guys, that's kind of what I have.

19:46I wanted to get this one out. A lot of you guys have asked about it. So again, those are my kind of hardcore efficiency metrics for the call center. If you have any questions, please let me know. Again, follow us on Twitter, follow us on Facebook. Check me out on LinkedIn. We have the book, More Advice from a Call Center Geek, that is on Amazon. That's selling awesome. So check that out as well. That gets into a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about as well. So again, thank you guys very much, and I will talk to all of you next week.