Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, the focus has shifted from customers to employees. Organizations today are more worried about the health of their employees than about customer satisfaction. Enterprises that understands the importance of happy and valued employees are trying every trick in their satchel to make the contemporary situation a smooth ride for employees.

While organizations are leveraging remote working wholeheartedly, it is necessary that employees reciprocate with tantamount dedication and contribution. The good thing about the traditional workplace setup is that managers can look after the needs of agents and take them in confidence and bring the best out of them.

When working remotely without any supervision, employees often become lazy and start keeping things for the last minute. Dedicated employees leverage productivity tips to keep offer optimum performance but some employees just lose track.

When offering customer support, enterprises cannot afford cynicism or gloomy outlook of employees. Here we discuss a set of contact center metrics that will come handy when managing remote contact center agents:

Must Read: The Ultimate Guide to 30+ Contact Center Metrics

1. Agent Utilization

Agent Utilization and Average Handle Time are the two primary call center metrics to focus on when trying to measure an agent’s productivity. In simple words, agent utilization is defined as the ratio of work completed by the work capacity. For example: If a contact center agent is on call for 6 hours out of a nine-hour shift, then the utilization will be 66.66% for the day. (6 hours of work produced ÷ 9 hours of work capacity).

Calculating agent utilization for a month is a bit difficult because it then involves sick days and other variables like training time. The traditional formula for calculating agent utilization is:

How it can help during Lockdown?

Measuring Agent Utilization can help organizations identify employees who are working efficiently and who are not. With clear information related to agent productivity, enterprises can take measures and ensure proper production hours.

Ignoring agent utilization can lead to issues like

• Unattended customers
• Agents being underproductive
• Dipping quality of customer support

2. Average Delay of Delayed Calls

Average Delay of Delayed calls is the average duration for which the delayed calls were delayed. This is an important metric to quantify because it often has a great impact on overall customer satisfaction. A long waiting time can upset customers and lead to churn. Average Delay of Delayed Calls is often calculated by dividing total delay of all calls by the number of calls that had to wait in the virtual queue.

Average delay of delayed calls is often referred to as latency and 220 ms is considered to be the upper limit for Average Delay of Delayed Calls.

Measuring Average Delay of Delayed Calls during Lockdown can help with

• Proper allocation of agents to cater to the growing needs of the customer
• Management of service requests raised by customers efficiently
• Up-scaling of customer experience provided through contact centers

3. Net Promoter Score

Net Promoter Score is an intricate measure of how many users are likely to promote business among their peers. In NPS, there are promoters and detractors, while promoters are expected to promote the service, detractors urge not to buy a particular service.

In contemporary times where customer experience is a key differentiator, the Net Promoter Score is very important. A good NPS means customers are satisfied with the experience catered to them.

Net Promoter is calculated by Subtracting Percentage of Detractors from Percentage of Promoters will give you Net Promoter Score. Where the Percentage of Detractor is the percentage of people who answered NPS Survey question in-between 0-6 while the Percentage of Promoters is the percentage of people who answered NPS Survey question either 9 or 10.

How Net Promoter Score can help Organizations during Lockdown?

 The difference in NPS when agents are working remotely versus the score when they were working from traditional workspaces will highlight the challenges. By estimating NPS during the lockdown, enterprises can identify challenges in catering quality experience and work on it.

 Other benefits include

• Instant allocation of top agents to control customer churn
• Identification and removal of data silos for offering quality support
• Upgrading agents in real-time to ensure full customer satisfaction

4. Customer Satisfaction

Customer Satisfaction is perhaps the most important customer experience metrics, which is generated through the CSAT Survey. In CSAT Survey, customers who have made any recent purchase or transacted recently are asked to answer a simple question like “how satisfied were you with your purchase today?

It is indispensable to measure customer satisfaction during a lockdown or when a huge number of agents are working from home because it is a direct reflection of how well agents are catering to customer’s needs. Dipping customer satisfaction means contact center agents are not performing to their optimum levels.

In a study, Harvard Business Review found that improving CSAT will help businesses retain 74% of customers for another year leading to a substantial increase in revenue. The study also discovered customers with the best customer experiences spend 140% more compared to customers who had a poor experience, vindicating the fact “improving on key customer experience metrics can help businesses double the revenue”.

Measuring CSAT during Lockdown can have the following benefits:

• Allows enterprises to identify challenges faced by agents and customers
• Identify and train agents who are unable to offer quality support
• Prompt enterprises to take preventive measures to protect brand reputation

5. Average Sales Per Agent

This contact center metric is a measure of the average number of sales made by the contact center over a period. Calculating average sales per agent when working from a remote location to the previous score can explain how well agents are performing when working from home. A Stanford study suggests that employees working from home are 13% more productive than their colleagues working from traditional offices.

Estimating Average Sales per Agent can help enterprises

1. Identify agents who are unable to perform to the best of their capacity and train them
2. Check if the sales volume per agent is declining or increasing
3. Identify and take measures that can keep the sales growing

6. Call Completion Rate (CCR)

Call Completion Rate refers to the number of calls that were connected successfully in comparison to those that failed. One can calculate Call Completion Rate (CCR) by dividing the total number of successfully connected calls during the day/ by the total number of calls that were attempted during the day.

Estimating this metric will throw light on well contact center agents are catering to customers. CCR also highlights any technical difficulties that lead to calling cancellation or disconnection.

Call Completion Rate can be used to garner the following benefits during Lockdown

• Identify and remove the reasons why calls were not connected
• Add more resources to ensure that every customer is catered with the same priority
• Upgrade IT infrastructure to help customers reach agents working from home easily

7. Call Center Shrinkage

Call Center Shrinkage is the measure of the amount of time wasted by the agents on inefficient tasks like bathroom breaks, callbacks, and paperwork and team meetings. Shrinkage is often divided into two groups namely:

Internal Shrinkage 

• Sick
• Public Holidays/ personal holidays
• Lateness

External Shrinkage

• Team Meetings
• Coaching
• Training
• Unplanned breaks due to technical errors
• Special projects at the office

Enterprises should measure Call Center Shrinkage metric because 

• Identify collateral duties that are taking too much of productive hours
• List areas were agents are wasting their valuable productive hours
• Identify and restrict tasks that eat up too many tasks

 8. Call Abandon Rate

In the case of inbound call centers, the abandon rate is the measurement of inbound calls that were abandoned or disconnected by customers before speaking to a contact center agent. Call Abandon Rate can be a true reflection of how attentive agents are when working from a remote location.

Call Abandon Rate can be measured by dividing the number of calls that were abandoned by a number of total inbound calls. Compare the Call Abandon Rate to the previous rate and it will explain whether work from home is helping or affecting the enterprise.

Measuring Call Abandon Rate metric during lockdown will reveal

• If the total number of incoming calls on normal days have increased or not
• If available bandwidth of agents is okay to cater to customers or not
• If the enterprise needs more agents to attend every customer with equal priority

Final Thoughts

Working from a remote location is a win-win situation for organizations as well as contact center agents because it allows an enterprise to save money per seat while agents are free to design their days.

In the coming times, working from a remote location will become mainstream, and organizations will be required to monitor agents incessantly to ensure proper productivity. The call center metrics listed here are will reflect the performance of agents efficiently and help organizations take measures to upscale it.