Top 3 Contact Center Metrics to Measure in 2024

We’ve all seen it—contact center scorecards that look more like laundry lists and dashboards that look more like Sudoku puzzles. You can measure many metrics in your contact center, but just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

We know it’s tempting. After all, data and analytics are the lifeblood of your contact center’s success. You can’t improve what you can’t measure or measure what you don’t track.

And with so many competing priorities across operations, customer experience, and employee performance, it can be hard to hone in on the metrics that actually matter. In the vein of “less is more,” we’ve narrowed the list to the top three contact center performance metrics we think you should measure in 2024. All three significantly impact both employee and agent experience and are leading indicators to some critical outcomes.

Self-service containment

Self-service is on the rise and will only continue to increase as digital natives become the lion’s share of the global population. 62% of millennials and 75% of Gen-Z customers prefer self-service, even when contacting support is an option. Customers want the flexibility to find answers and perform transactions wherever and whenever they want.

However, many companies still fall short of customer expectations regarding self-service. Only 13% of customers experienced complete resolution of their issue or question through self-service, and the remaining customers required additional agent support.

Although we can blame shortcomings in self-service’s capabilities for this inability to wholly resolve customers’ issues, these failures are also partly due to the “set it and forget it” approach taken by many contact centers. Even the best, most intelligent AI-powered self-service solutions must be continuously tracked, monitored, and improved.

Your self-service containment rate measures how successfully your self-service channels answer customers’ questions and how effectively they meet their needs. It’s the percentage of customers who satisfactorily start and end their interaction within a self-service channel and don’t need to elevate to an agent.

You can calculate your self-service containment rate as:

You can calculate your self-service containment rate, or as we like to call it, self-service success, on a cumulative level across all your self-service channels and on a per-channel basis. For example, you can track FCR for your interactive voice response (IVR) system, chatbot, knowledge base, etc.

Self-service is a leading indicator of customer satisfaction, effort metrics, and agent efficiency.

Effective self-service execution can increase brand loyalty and satisfaction. It also positively impacts agent-related metrics, like retention, by eliminating mundane, repetitive tasks from their workload.

Agent engagement

As the “face” of your company, agents are a critical ingredient to the customer experience. And while we all want to improve the customer experience, we often overlook how agents impact customer satisfaction and overall contact center business outcomes.

Ask any contact center leader their customer satisfaction score (CSAT) or average handle time (AHT), and they can tell you. But their agent engagement score? Probably not.

That doesn’t mean it’s not on their minds, though. 47% of managers indicate that high agent turnover and absenteeism are their most significant challenges in effectively and efficiently operating a call center.

Although standard operational metrics like average handle time (AHT), number of interactions handled, and wrap-up time are “agent” metrics, they focus on their output, not the individual behind the number.

That’s why generating an agent engagement score for your contact center is so valuable—and critical. It’s a leading indicator of agent turnover, and by proactively monitoring and taking action to improve agent engagement, you can improve your agent retention. Agent engagement also influences customer satisfaction, and 78% of contact center senior leaders feel that agents play a pivotal role in customer retention.

While agent engagement might sound hard to measure and calculate quantitatively, it’s actually straightforward.

Regularly conduct anonymous surveys asking agents direct questions about their:

• Job satisfaction
• Likelihood to recommend their job to friends
• Empowerment
• Wellbeing and work-life balance
• Perception of growth and learning opportunities
• Perceived contribution to the team and company
• Top challenges

We recommend keeping the survey short and sweet and using a sliding response scale similar to a net promoter score (NPS) or a multiple-choice survey.

You can supplement your quantitative engagement insights with regular qualitative data points gathered from 1:1s and team conversations, but avoid including too many open-ended questions in the survey. Too many qualitative questions can make it harder to analyze and interpret, making regular monitoring cumbersome and unsustainable.

The latter is essential, as consistency is critical when measuring agent engagement. Like all metrics, you should continuously track and monitor agent engagement at least quarterly. But unlike operational metrics, NOT measuring it can have a direct negative impact on the outcome. Starting agent engagement initiatives and not seeing them through gives agents the impression that you don’t care—ultimately hurting what you set out to improve.

Too many contact centers fumble when measuring agent engagement by overcomplicating it and creating complex formulas based on escalation rates, training investment, absenteeism, etc. Running a contact center is complicated enough. Do yourself a favor, keep it simple, and don’t try to read agents’ minds—just ask!