Decoding the Call Center Menu: A Tasty Guide to Metrics and KPIs- Must Listen for all New Contact Center Managers!

Ever wondered how the hustle and bustle of your favorite restaurant correlates with the operations of a call center? Picture yourself at a bustling eatery as we break down the ins and outs of call center metrics in relatable terms. We’ll be interpreting essential terms like incoming calls, cue calls, and abandoned calls in an easy-to-digest format, perfect for those just venturing into the industry.

Now, imagine the chefs at a restaurant, working tirelessly to keep up with the flurry of orders. This is akin to the pressures of metric conversion in service industries, and we'll carefully explore strategies to prevent burnout. We'll discuss key metrics and KPIs like occupancy, average handle time, average talk time, and average queue time. We'll also analyze the longest delay, a crucial element in customer satisfaction, akin to the longest time a patron had to wait for their food!

As we bring it all together, we'll elaborate on how requests from clients can impact metrics such as handle time, and guide you on making decisions that uphold the interests of both your customer and client. Refused calls, working time, occupancy, average handle time, and average profit margin - all these elements will be addressed. Regardless of your background in the call center industry, this episode promises to enhance your understanding of call center metrics and KPIs. Tune in to gain pivotal insights that will elevate your call center's operational efficiency and customer service quality.

If you are looking for USA outsourced customer service or sales support, we here at Expivia would really like to help you support your customers.
Please check us out at expiviausa.com, or email us at info@expivia.net!

Follow Tom: @tlaird_expivia
Join our Facebook Call Center Community: www.facebook.com/callcentergeek
Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tlairdexpivia/
Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@callcenter_geek
Linkedin Group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/9041993/
Watch us: Advice from a Call Center Geek Youtube Channel

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:25

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. He's the CEO of Expedia Interaction Marketing Group and the call center geek himself, tom Laird.

Speaker 2: 1:01

Welcome back everybody to another episode of advice from a call center geek the call center, contact center podcast. We try to give you some actionable items Take back in your contact center, improve the overall quality, improve the overall customer experience as well. My name is Tom Laird. I'm the CEO here at Expedia Interaction Marketing. Expedia is a 600 plus call center outsourcer located here in sunny, northwestern PA.

Speaker 2: 1:26

As I'm recording this, it is July 3rd, so it's a kind of a I don't want to say a lazier day. But I know a lot of people are off with the holiday tomorrow, which is kind of like this quick, weird Mondays here And then we're going right back to a holiday and the day off tomorrow. So I thought today would be a really good day to record the episode for this week, where it's kind of a little bit laid back And I wanted to talk and get back to the roots of this and talk about contact center and call center metrics and KPIs. And you know I always I've done a couple episodes on kind of like my five favorite efficiency metrics or my five favorite sales metrics, you know those kind of. You know kind of broke it down that way, but I wanted to give kind of an overall, almost everything that you need to understand, especially if you are newer in the industry, if you're not really sure what these KPIs mean And I want to give you some analogies with them, right. So, being that it's almost the fourth and we're all planning on eating a ton tomorrow, i wanted to do maybe something that kind of ties in with a restaurant theme where you know we can talk about this, where I think it's it makes sense that you know when we talk about, like you know, incoming calls being that kind of line that's around your business that maybe they're trying to get into eat, and they kind of break it down that way to make it easier.

Speaker 2: 2:42

I think, for for some of you guys that are brand new or maybe you were just, you know, becoming a call center supervisor and you need to kind of really understand what, what some of these KPIs are And I have about 20 KPIs Again, so this is for hardcore call center people. No one else is really going to enjoy this. But I think if you are brand new to the industry, you know looking for some things that to help you kind of understand what some of these reporting aspects are when it comes to KPIs and the contact center and customer experience and sales. Some of this may hopefully be able to help you. So.

Speaker 2: 3:12

So let's, let's start here with kind of some of the I guess category one I'm just going to kind of call basic call center metrics, right, and some of these are very self explanatory. Some of these are kind of like I don't understand that and it's hard to grasp. You know really what they are. But number one is incoming calls. I think we can really get what what incoming is. This is basically, you know, just the amount of the total amount of calls that are received by the call center in a given period. Now this breaks into some other things, so it's not as, maybe as objective as we think, but let's just keep it basic right.

Speaker 2: 3:44

So again, imagine, you know, as the kind of the door to your business, every ring is a potential customer kind of knocking, want to come in. The more rings you get, the better right. So these are the people that are, just they're coming up to your business. Learn the incoming calls right and then we have our cue calls right. So incoming calls come in first and then they, for most of us, become cute, even if they're going to kind of drug you to an agent. There's a foot second where they get cute into a skill. Sometimes they're you're cute a little bit longer, right, if they're, if they're waiting in queue.

Speaker 2: 4:15

The number of calls that are waiting in a queue because maybe the agents are busy, it's kind of like if you have a really popular restaurant, right, this would be the people that are waiting for tables, waiting for your service, the people that are just kind of outside, and you know how that goes right. Some of them are happy, they're okay to wait. Some of them are starting to probably get ticked. It's the same thing in the contact center, you calls, right, and then we have abandoned calls. Thinking about those again, these are the number of people that have hung up while they were waiting in queue. Now we have something called pre queue abandons Let's just talk about the banding calls, right?

Speaker 2: 4:52

so the people that are leaving the restaurant line because they waited too long They waited too long pre queue abandons are the people that drove up to the restaurant and then just ended up driving away, right? they didn't even get into queue, right? maybe they saw again for the restaurant now that the line was long, or they just said, oh crap, we just pulled into the wrong place, right? because a lot of times you will get that where maybe you get wrong numbers. You get some of those types of things which are your pre queue abandon, so they abandoned before they got into queue.

Speaker 2: 5:19

Abandon calls are, you know, the, the calls that they're waiting in line to come into your restaurant, like I'm not waiting any longer, right? so Let's talk about those kind of abandonment metrics again. Pre queue abandons we kind of get right the abandoned percentage, right, the percentage of callers who abandoned their calls out of the number of total incoming calls that are coming in, right? it's like the, the fraction of potential diners who decided to go eat somewhere else. So the, the, the amount of of Abandoned, right that? a band of percentages, kind of that abandoned percentage, right, the amount of people who are in there that abandoned, what is that percentage to the total amount of people who kind of stayed? And then again, average abandon time I think makes sense, right measure. You know how long are the people willing to wait for a table Before they left, right? so that's your average abandon time, the amount of time that they, on average, are staying in queue before they abandoned, or the abandoned while they're staying in queue, kind of saying the same thing.

Speaker 2: 6:19

So I think that that makes sense, right, you can kind of picture the restaurant, right, the people that are coming in your incoming calls, the people that are waiting for tables that your queue calls, the people that said, hey, i wait, i don't want to wait any longer, they bail, people that pulled up, maybe they made a mistake, they pulled into the wrong restaurant, or they see the line Right, those are your pre queue abandons and I think that kind of maybe paint a an easier picture of what some of the stuff means, because it does get confusing. We have a lot of clients that see a report and they'll see incoming Queue calls, right answered, which we'll talk about right now. Whoa, what is all that right? and then abandoned, right, so really your Your abandoned and your queue call in your answer calls should equal your queue calls and then you know you have the total amount of incoming calls that actually hit your switch. So hopefully that that kind of makes sense, you know from that standpoint. Now let's talk about Some of the, i guess, efficiency metrics that we talk about, right, so those are just kind of your core what's coming in those kind of metrics but let's talk about efficiency.

Speaker 2: 7:24

Metrics is the number one is that your SLA, your service level, and that is basically the the A set agreement, right that you have with the amount of calls that you're going to answer within a specific period of time. For example, right, we always talk about an eighty, thirty service level, which means that we want eighty percent of the calls Answer within thirty seconds or less, right, so that's your, that's kind of your SLA. And it's like you know, promising your customers that they'll be seated within fifteen minutes. Right, that's your SLA, right, we guarantee, right, we're really trying. Our goal is to see our customers within fifteen minutes, within thirty minutes, within five minutes, whatever. That is that's kind of your SLA. And then you have your SLA in SLA out, right, so how many of those were in that SLA? how many? how many of those calls did you answer within that thirty seconds or less? How many of those, those restaurant people that want to come eat in your restaurant, did you, did you see, within that fifteen minute period? I think that's kind of a good analogy for that. And then we can kind of measure how many were out of that as well. All right, and then we have occupancy And it's really the almost the working time for an agent.

Speaker 2: 8:37

You know, picture this is kind of the ratio of the time that your chefs are actively cooking, right to the time that the amount of total time that they're at work Again, occupancy can get a little bit hairy because I know some people calculate it differently, right, but for us it's basically the amount of time that they're on a call, they're talking, they're on hold, even an after call work, right, they're in a working state, right, again, how many times the chefs are actually working compared to the time that they're that they're at work. And again, you see chefs get burned out all the time because they're just grinding, right, they are just there the whole time, especially when tickets are coming in. It's the same thing in the contact center. You have to be careful. So if you see that your calls are coming in, they're absolutely getting slammed and they're taking one call after another, after another, after another, after another, you have a very high occupancy, right, chefs are working the entire time. They're going to get burned out, like call center people are and call center agents.

Speaker 2: 9:32

That's why I play around with after call work. I understand after call work is kind of part of occupancy. But if I see that we're taking call after call after call after call after call after call, i'm going to give my agents a little bit longer after call work While it's still kind of included in that occupancy as a human being they're getting a break, at least a 30 second, 45 second break, 15 second, whatever that number is right. So they're between when they're taking their next call. So I think hopefully you can kind of see that again. We don't want to burn our chefs out. We don't want to burn our agents out by taking call after call or just making meal after meal after meal the whole entire time every single day. So I think hopefully that gives you a little bit of time.

Speaker 2: 10:10

There I mean available time. I think it's the amount of time that agents are kind of ready and available to take a call. We clear the queue out. That chef has taken a break. He's going to have a smoke, right, because they just cleared dinner service And they have plenty of time, and that's kind of the same thing with an agent. That's our available time that we have for them. All right, let's talk about some of our time metrics, right, so we have our average handle time. And average handle time is really the amount of time that we're handling calls, right. So it's that kind of cradle to grave scenario, right, when we take a call to, when we're out of after call work and we're available to take another call, right, it includes everything from talk time, what we're going to talk about. All right, it includes whole time, includes after call work time. If we had to put somebody on mute to go talk to our customer, all of that is there.

Speaker 2: 11:06

And think about this is kind of the. It's the time that it takes us to flip a table right In a restaurant, right, so, right. So a customer sits down at your restaurant, they get their menu, they get their water, they get their drink, they're ordering it, they're ordering food, they have dessert right, they get their check and they leave. So that's the average handle time. It took your, the person that's waiting on that table right The cradle to grave. When the customer sits down, eats does everything to the point of when they actually leave, right, so same thing in the call center right, it's the amount of time that we're actually handling and talking while that customer's eating, right, aka doing their job or asking all their questions and getting their stuff fixed, right? You know, the average talk time is kind of a little bit weird for the restaurant analogy, but again, this is the amount of time that an agent is actually talking. So I guess we could say it's the amount of time that wait staff is actually at the table, so the amount of time they're actually talking to the actual customer that's eating there, right? So it doesn't include, you know, when they're looking over the menu. It doesn't include, you know, paying for the check It. Just how long is the average wait staff at a table? And I think that that gives a good analogy of what average talk time really is as well. All right, and then again, average queue time. I think that that makes sense. You know the average amount of time that somebody has waited to come into your restaurant. I don't think we need to go too deep into that. All right.

Speaker 2: 12:41

Longest delay right, is something that's a little bit. I think it's a really important stat. It's got to be used appropriately and it's got to be measured appropriately. But longest delay is the longest time that a caller was in queue for a certain period of time. So normally we do it for the day, right? What was the longest queue length that we had for that day that we answered that call, or answered that call, i guess, for the call center side. And then basically this this would be the longest customer that waited for us, right? So we said our SLA is going to be 15 minutes to seat you, but we made them wait 45 minutes. We're going to track that number and we know that 45 minutes is the longest time, right, which, which is a long time. But this also gives her a. It takes away the average.

Speaker 2: 13:25

You have to be careful. A lot of times we've seen mistakes get made here too, because we do average or the longest delay and we don't realize it's between the business hours, right? So if you're open nine to five, you want to make sure that you're doing the longest day between nine to five, because sometimes you will have customers that maybe they call in five minutes before five and you have 25 customers in queue and you kind of never get to them and they just sometimes they just wait for hours and hours and hours and kind of screws you up. That would be like somebody your restaurant closes, right, And they just stand there and they stand outside and they wait, which that doesn't make sense because that normally wouldn't happen and it shouldn't be part of really our metric. And it's the same thing with the call center stuff.

Speaker 2: 14:09

All right, let's talk about some after call stuff, right? So again, we talked about our talk time. Right, so let's talk. We talked about our handle time And then we broke that down into our talk time. Right, the amount of time that the waiter or waitress is actually at a table right. And for after call work, it's like cleaning the table right After the customer leaves. That amount of work that we're doing after the actual call, if we're, we need to write notes, we need to fill some things into our CRM, you know, whatever we have to do after the customer hangs off. So, again, for after call work, this is like when the bus boys come, they clean the table, they clear all those off, setting it up for the next customer, and then boom, we kind of that table is then quote unquote available And then we can go to okay, so unavailable time. Unavailable time is the amount of agents are not available to take calls, right? So again, this is when you're on break, this is when you're on lunch makes total sense. That your time unavailable. All right, let's talk about some conversion and cost conversion and cost metrics. So conversion is it's kind of the rate at which we're we're finding a desired outcome.

Speaker 2: 15:24

A lot of times this is this is sales. We can take things like conversion of the total amount of inbound calls. So let's say we're on a sales program, right, and we have a hundred calls that come in and we are able to sell on 15 of those. Our conversion would be 15% of our total calls. A lot of times you don't want to do that, you want to do it on qualified calls. So qualified calls, meaning you know if, if somebody really has an, you have the opportunity to sell. Sometimes customers will call them like okay, i want to cancel, like you don't really have an opportunity to sell them at, so we don't include those in the actual conversion, right? Hopefully that that kind of makes sense. And again it's, it's the amount of same thing, the amount of customers that really sold. You sold and you maybe you sold. You want to do conversion on the specials for the day, right, and you really want to push the specials. So what is the conversion? What is the percentage of tables that came and sat, that that wait staffed and pushed that specific sale And then you were able to find, like the conversion number on those, which I think kind of makes sense.

Speaker 2: 16:27

Cost per lead right. A lot of times on, on outbound calling, leads will come in, say from social media, and we will, then you'll have a specific cost per lead. So you're taking the, the amount of of fees that we're charging, divided by the amount of leads, right, and you kind of get an overall cost per lead. That I think kind of makes sense And it's that's kind of your think about advertising expense, right. The, the, the amount of people that came in, based on something that you did from an advertising standpoint in in your restaurant.

Speaker 2: 17:00

All right, let's talk about some other kind of ancillary metrics that I really like, but a little bit different, right? So calls per position right, it's basically the calls that an agent is taking per hour, but they call it calls per position. It's the number of tables that your wait staff serves in a restaurant, and we can do that by agent, we can do that by the staff as a whole, right, and we can see who the most efficient is right And who's taking the most. Now, granted, we might have to to look at some handle time and some things right, make sure that they're not just blowing through their tables and trying to turn them right, but also that's kind of a metric that I like to use too, to see you know that we have agents that are should be, within a certain calls per position, which also means a certain handle time, which also means a certain talk time, and it all kind of funnels that together.

Speaker 2: 17:45

Refuse calls happen sometimes in a contact center. This would be, like you know, turning a rest customers away, right, or certain agents or certain wait staff says I don't want to deal with that table. Now, a lot of times this is turned off, but it is the feature where an agent can actually refuse a call, right, and it goes back in a queue, right. Just so you can see that. If you see that on your thing we don't really allow refuse calls, but you know that's something that is there. And then you know working time right, the total amount of agents spent is logged into the system, ready to take active calls. So you know we talked about occupancy as their working time This is the, or their occupancy is the amount of time that they're actually working, talking, all right, working time is the actual time that they're getting paid right. So, and again, that's the entire time when your wait staff clocks in to when they clock out at night. That's their entire working time, the amount of hours that they're going to get paid.

Speaker 2: 18:42

Quick question there's a question about the clock behind me. I don't know. I like it, i liked it, and the thing is, the thing breaks about every every time I put a new battery in. It's got about a 10 to 15 minutes hold time. It just was something that I had a bigger office at one point. Well, actually two of these look kind of cool, but now I know it looks a little ridiculous, but it gets a lot of questions. So again, i wish I had some a better story for you, okay, but then that. But yeah, that's just, it's always been with me and it's kind of turned into my baby. Even though it doesn't work, i normally put it on five o'clock and you know I'll say it's five o'clock somewhere And yeah, we laugh at that a little bit. But yeah, as you see, it's really not ticking right now. It's just kind of frozen to where it normally is. So Sean had a question here on on LinkedIn Do you also track the average time per agent to make a sale.

Speaker 2: 19:34

Yeah, i mean, we can definitely track the amount of sales and then look at the handle time for those sales And we also look at sentiment for that as well. Right, so we can see. You know, are we? what was the the, the type of agent that came in? did they turn a difficult agent into a positive agent and then sell them? Right, there's a lot of metrics that we can do for that, but normally we will see that sales calls are longer. I think you know, more importantly than doing that, we can see that if somebody has a lower average handle time, so how someone has a lower talk time, they're probably not selling. If we have some type of cross seller upsell at the end, so those are red flags for us because they normally have a direct correlation to your conversion. So, to answer your question, yes, but I think we kind of use it almost the opposite, right, so if you have and if you have a longer handle time, you're probably are are selling a little bit more on average. If we looked at, kind of the overall stats, what is the average profit margin of your call center? We're right in the average of about a regular BPO. We're about a. We have about a 12 to 15% profit margin And I think that kind of.

Speaker 2: 20:41

We did a couple. If you look back on the podcast called it again for those of you guys are new here, it's called advice. You can't trust me with a giant broken clock. I know well to tell that to my wife too. But now that's about we did it. We did a bunch of BPO stuff. If you're interested in that, check the podcast out. We had a couple M&A guys. Come on, talk about the actual metrics, what you should be doing from a financial aspect in a BPO onshore and near-shore, offshore. So if that's something that interests you, that that's something that You know. We went in depth on. There's a, there's a bunch of videos on that and then there's a podcast on that as well. Anything else that you guys have, if I know, i'm live right now on on tiktok. I'm live on LinkedIn.

Speaker 2: 21:22

I appreciate you guys that that had some questions here again. That's kind of what I wanted to go over it. I don't know. I just I think some of the stuff when we talk about like calls and queue, like what does that mean? But when you can put it into an analogy of of looking around, you know, looking around the the restaurant Like that's what I do all the time, like I will sit at a restaurant I will see servers just waiting and I'm like, oh, they're over staffed, right They're. They're not where they should be from a workforce management standpoint right, their occupancy is going to be too low. And then I see other restaurants that people are just running around like crazy. Wait times are long and you see what? their occupancy is High. Their service levels are low. They need more staff, right. It really does correlate really really well from a Restaurant standpoint to kind of a call center standpoint. So again, hopefully that helped you. K. I got you. No problem, buddy, that was just having a little bit of fun with the stupid big clock that I have, but I do appreciate it.

Speaker 2: 22:15

Any other questions that you guys have, ask away here or, if not, please hook me up, look me up on on On LinkedIn and please any, any question I can help you with with your contact center, call center. I'm more than happy to to give any answers or try to help you guys in any way possibly can. But if not, i hope you all have a amazing 4th of July, especially those you guys are in the States really excited to kind of take the day tomorrow. I know we got a big party kind of going on at my house to hopefully you guys enjoy yourselves as well. So hopefully this was a little bit informative, especially for anybody who's newer in the contact center industry. Hopefully that that this up.

Speaker 2: 22:51

Oh good, sean, do you have an average talk time goal? Do you have an average talk time goal per agent per day on various campaigns? Absolutely So. You know, i would say there is about a 25, 20 to 25 percent drop In your average handle time in a good way, from a brand new agent, you know, to somebody that is say 60 to 90 days. So we will, we will benchmark that right, so we'll know where you should be at the beginning, where you should be after the end of 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, and Every program is different, right? I mean we have some programs that are 10 to 15 minute handle times, as I'm sure you do too. We have other ones that are really quick three, three and a half minutes. There's no sales is get on, get off, help them and move on. So it all just depends on what they are. But yeah, that is for sure.

Speaker 2: 23:37

Benchmark supervisors know they're. They know their goals for all of these right. So they know their goals with, with what their their service level should be for the overall program. They know what their average handle time should be. They know what their talk time should be. They know what they're after call work. Most of the time. Again, i know a lot of you guys don't do this, but we kind of dictate after call work. Most of the time We give 30 seconds, no matter what, depending on on what that that program is. And again, if we're getting slammed I might give them a little bit more to make sure that they can breathe and they have some time.

Speaker 2: 24:04

We definitely look at that. It's one of the main things because, again, we are a BPO right, we have to be efficient. We have to make sure that we're maintaining a service level. I can't over staff things. You, we have to be at a, at a number that makes sense. I mean I can argue a lot you know for for what our average handle time should be in a.

Speaker 2: 24:21

Client's sometimes have a total different Idea, but I think once they see what my metrics are with, they see what we do from a. From an analytics standpoint, it makes sense to be where we are. So but yes, you know, depending on what the program asks for, whether it's just quick service or their service, detailed issues, text support, longer cross-sell, upsell, longer, right, all these other little things add to longer handle time compared to, you know, just regular type quick customer service, three and a half minute type calls, but it just really all depends on the client and what they have. So, all right, guys, i love you guys. All you guys are the best. Thank you guys for listening. Hopefully this helps you and I will talk to all of you guys next week.