What Are Call Tracking Metrics?

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Customer Support teams handle complaints. They also help you to identify pain points and standardize the customer experience. But you need the right call-tracking metrics to assess your team's performance. 

The vast majority of consumers prefer to speak with a company representative when they have a question. But more and more, customers appreciate knowing that they can communicate with a company via text or through other communication channels. Either way, consumers expect more personalized service than ever before.

One great way to improve your customer service and sales processes? Set essential call-tracking metrics.

With call metrics, you have a standardized way to evaluate your customer support team's performance. Analytics can also provide you with insights into areas of improvement and promote accountability for achieving your call center's performance goals.

In this guide, we provide an overview of what call metrics are and why call-tracking software is so essential for modern businesses. We'll also discuss how to use call center software to benchmark and improve call center performance across various industries.

What Are Call tracking Metrics?

Call-tracking metrics are used to measure call center efficiency. They provide insights into the qualitative and quantitative aspects of customer experiences. In turn, this helps understand customer demographics, measure campaign ROI and make data-driven decisions to maximize customer satisfaction.

Call-tracking metrics are a way to measure data associated with voice calls to track:

• Call center agent performance

• Customer satisfaction

• Call volume

• Length of calls

• Efficiency

It's common for people to use the term “call-tracking metrics” in connection with KPIs (key performance indicators). While the two terms are inherently connected, they have different definitions.

Call metrics track the status of various business processes while KPIs help you track how close you are to hitting your business goals. Generally, KPIs provide e targets with specific time frames and have a direct impact on business outcomes.

There isn't a single metric or KPI that determines the entire customer experience, but the collective set of metrics provide a good picture of how your call center performs. By setting up the right call metrics and KPIs, you can learn a lot about your customers and how they interact with your call center agents.

Which KPIs are the most important for sales?

There are many KPIs that can be used to measure team performance and ROI. Some of the most important sales calls KPIs include:

• Conversion rate

• Average call duration

• Calls per hour

• Wait time

• Call volume

• First-call resolution

• Call abandonment rate

• Number of leads, deals, and opportunities in each pipeline stage

• Customer satisfaction metrics

• Revenue per sales rep

Keeping track of these sales KPIs and using the insights gained can help enhance the effectiveness of sales efforts and strengthen customers’ loyalty to the brand.

The Importance of Call-tracking Software

It's tempting to set up a call center for inbound calls and outbound calls and let it run itself, but it's highly doubtful that such an approach would have any degree of success. There would be no way of knowing whether your call center agents were giving good customer service or whether your customers were satisfied.

With a call-tracking system, you don't have to operate in the dark or hope that your call center agents are delivering the kind of customer experience today's customers have come to expect.

Here are some of the biggest reasons why call-tracking software is a valuable solution for your call center. With a call tracking software you can:

• Operate a successful inbound or outbound call center.

• Set up a virtual call center with remote and/or distributed teams.

• Set up a call center for sales or customer support.

• Get insights from your call center dashboard, whether teams are working on-site or are remotely or geographically-dispersed.

• Get real-time data that will help you make quick decisions about scaling your call center teams.

• Use your call analytics dashboard to understand how efficiently your call center is performing.

• Get data that give you an objective way to evaluate your call center on an individual, team, and overall basis.

• Collect data to improve sales forecasting and address customer support needs.

Now that you know what call-tracking metrics can do for you, we'll look at how to leverage call center metrics.

How to Leverage Metrics to Improve Performance

Let's break down the definition of call center metrics. Call center metrics are much like call-tracking metrics, in that they use measurements and call center KPIs to assess your call center's performance.

But getting data from your call center dashboard is only half the battle. The other half is knowing what to do with your call center metrics. There are two distinct ways to leverage call center metrics:

• Using historical data

• Using real-time data

Leveraging historical data is the best way to predict future needs and will help you make more effective decisions. Call-tracking metrics give you historical data on voice calls during specific timeframes. You can easily access your call center’s data for the year, the quarter, or even a season, specific shifts, or a special promotion period.

While historical data is certainly helpful, it's also good to know what's going on in the call center on a day-to-day basis. Call-tracking metrics can offer instant insights into what's happening in your call center at any time, even if your call teams are working remotely. Real-time data are helpful for identifying immediate issues within the call center—such as an increase in call volume—so you can address them quickly.

Benchmarking Against Call Center Metrics Industry Standards

Nearly every industry can benefit from call center software, but research still needs to be done to identify specific benchmarks for a wide variety of industries.

In this section, we’ll look at call center benchmarks in general and in the e-commerce industry. We will also discuss how two specific industries—healthcare and financial—can leverage call center metrics for better performance.

Call Center Benchmarks Across Industries

• Answer: 80% of calls within 20 seconds 100% of emails within 24 hours 80% of chats within 20 seconds 80% of text messages within 40 seconds

• Monitor 1-2 customer interactions every week

• Resolve 70% to 75% of problems on the first call

• Average call-handling time is 6 minutes and 3 seconds

• Achieve a Net Promoter Score above 0

• Aim for an occupancy rate of 85%-90%

E-Commerce Call Center Metrics

• Answer emails within 6 hours

• Answer phone calls within 1-2 minutes

• Resolve problems on the first call 45% of the time

• Prioritize call center agents according to the type of service, for example: top performers handle questions about returns/exchanges, delivery status, and billing

• Asign call center agents according to the type of service

• Offer self-service options for customers who prefer handling tasks independently rather than speaking to an agent (over 67% of them do)

• Offer multiple communication channels and track each of them (73% of customer like to use more than one)

Healthcare Call Center Metrics

While we don't have specific data on call center metric benchmarks for the healthcare industry just yet, we know that call centers help healthcare organizations to improve access to care and clinical outcomes.

Here are some of the benefits of call center metrics for healthcare institutions:

• Provide more personalized service

• Support HIPAA compliance

• Promote efficiency with options for live agents and self-service

• Provide a multi-channel customer experience

• Analyze call volumes by segment including patients, providers, caregivers, researchers, and pharmaceutical companies

• Track types of inquiries: insurance, health, medicines, COVID-19, etc.

• Facilitate appointment reminders

Financial Services Call Center Metrics

These are some of the ways that finance companies use call center metrics:

• Measure call volume

• Assess call-handling time for various types of financial transactions (average is 282 seconds)

• Calculate the number of contacts to make conversions

• Evaluate customer satisfaction

• Assess average wait time

• Understand the cost per acquisition

• Keep track of the number of sales per agent

• Measure the call abandon rate

Leveraging Call-tracking Metrics to Improve Agent Performance

You can use a variety of call-tracking metrics to motivate your call center agents to improve their performance, such as:

• Scaling your call center to ensure call agents are not too busy or to reduce idle time

• Giving agents targeted feedback on the number of calls they handle

• Setting up fair reward systems for call center agents

• Setting up goals for agents and evaluating their performance objectively

• Monitoring the call center in real-time to make timely decisions about scaling and call-handling

• Monitoring calls to assess training needs

Achieving Your Call Center Goals and Metrics With Call Tracking

First, you need to set your sales teams or customer support goals to get a good idea of the metrics you’ll have to track. Then, you need to identify the type of data that will help you to achieve those goals.

You can take a look at the call metrics that are in your dashboard and select those that will give you the data you need to reach your goals.

These are just some of the many call-tracking metrics that you can use to help your teams and improve your processes:

1. Volume of calls

2. First-call resolution

3. Average call time

4. Number of calls answered

5. Average speed of answer

6. Number of missed calls

7. Average amount of time to return a missed call

8. Conversion rate

9. Average call wait times

10. Customer call frequency

To summarize

The business world is a data-driven world. Likewise, successful call centers rely on analytics—specifically call metrics and KPIs—to measure their performance.

Aircall's cloud-based phone system offers a comprehensive analytics dashboard with a call-tracking system that:

• Gives you many options for setting up call metrics

• Provides data and reports you need to inform good decision-making

• Improves efficiency and effectiveness across the board

Try Aircall for free for 7 days and see how our telephony software can optimize your customer service operations.

Published on March 3, 2021.