Important Agent Performance Metrics to Measure Success

The success and failure of any organization can be defined by how well they take care of their customers and most importantly their concerns. Since Customer Service Agents are the front line of any business, measuring Agent Performance can be a crucial aspect of improving Customer Service Performance and driving success. But many businesses fail to understand that there is so much more to measuring agent performance than monitoring how many calls they take in a day, if they come to work or not, or tracking their interactions with the customers.

No matter how good a help desk process you have in place, it’s always good to know your agents and their work and even bring transparency into the equation to motivate the workforce to work better towards the business goals. When you do decide to take that step towards quantifying agent efforts and gathering data, you want to ensure that the customer experience remains a priority. In this article, we’ll discuss the crucial Agent Performance Metrics that can help maximize your Customer Service team’s efforts.

Measuring the Performance of Customer Service Agents

When it comes to measuring the performance of Agents, there are specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that can be taken into account. Although these KPIs vary from one industry to another, there are some specific Customer Service Metrics that can be monitored to measure the performance of agents at Contact Centers and Organizations. Those metrics can illustrate how the productivity and efficiency of one agent can affect the overall performance of Customer Service Teams and the business itself.

Important Agent Performance Metrics to Measure Success

To ensure high-quality services that can truly transform the customer experience, organizations can and must put their resources into measuring crucial KPIs that can give insights into the working of agents. With so many customer concerns handled every day, it can be a bit difficult to get off a clear sight of what’s going on in an absence of relevant metrics. And when you do focus on the right Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), you make room for improvements and effort that can define success.

It’s also true that there are so many metrics out there, making it difficult for many to choose the right ones. This is why we have narrowed them down to the most crucial Agent Performance Metrics which you can get started with immediately.

Customer Experience Metrics

This Agent Performance Metrics give businesses an idea about the overall Customer Experience, their perspective of the brand, and their overall sentiments after engaging with your Customer Service Teams. 

1. Customer Effort Score

Topping the list is the Customer Effort Score (CES) which gives crucial data on identifying the amount of effort customers have to put into getting their concerns or issues resolved, using your product, or interacting with your Customer Service Agents.

While the easier you make it for the customer, the better it is for retaining them, although it can’t always be possible. This is why this metric can be a game changer in giving you just the data you need to make the Customer Service experience seamless for them and improve agents’ efficiency.

The metric can be calculated by conducting surveys post-customer interactions. The Customer Service Surveys may ask questions like –

1. “To what extent do you agree that our Customer Service Agent made it easy for your to handle your issue(s)?”
2. “Did the Customer Service experience meet your expectations?”
3. “How prompt were we at addressing your concerns?"

You can check out Zonka Feedback's Customer Service CES survey template to get started:

Post survey, if the score comes out low, the data can be used to assess the loopholes in your product, Customer Service, and agents’ efficiency. Using the insights, you can work towards reducing customer effort and eventually enhance their satisfaction with your business.

Another way to ensure a good CES score is by optimizing Customer Service channels like live chat, email, social media, or text messages for seamless communication so that customer issues can be addressed and solved quickly.

2. Customer Satisfaction Score

Customer Satisfaction Score is essential to track the overall satisfaction of customers with the agents and services provided by them. It can give you direct access to their feelings and a way to measure Customer Service Performance which can be extremely useful while trying to improve agents’ efficiency in handling customer concerns.

CSAT surveys can be sent along with CES surveys to get reliable data on customer experience. If the results come out in your favor, it can tell you where you’re going well. But if it comes negative, you can use survey logic to redirect customers to questions like – “Sorry for your inconvenience. Can you elaborate on what went wrong?” to pinpoint the exact issue with your services.

Get started with the Agent Performance CSAT survey with Zonka Feedback's pre-built template:

With workflows in place, you can automatically send follow-up emails to survey respondents with low CSAT scores in an attempt to close the feedback loop.

3. Net Promoter Score

While this is not just limited to Agent Performance Metrics, Net Promoter Score can give you data on customer loyalty with your organization and how likely they are to recommend your business to someone.

NPS surveys ask only one important question that can uncover the satisfaction and loyalty of customers and allow you to segment your respondents on the basis of Promoters, Passives, and Detractors. Based on the responses, Promoters (9-10 rating) are the happy customers who are more likely to promote your product or services, Passives (7-8 rating) are those who might be happy but not enough to promote your business, and detractors (0-6 rating) are unhappy customers who might leave soon.

Here's an example of a pre-built Product NPS survey template from Zonka Feedback:

Once the data is collected, you can put strategies in place to turn passives into promoters and work towards closing the feedback loop by addressing the concerns of detractors and eventually turning them into promoters.

Agent Productivity Metrics

Agent Productivity Metrics count in the ticket records that efficiently measure the agents’ performance and how effectively they close a ticket. By tracking these metrics, your business can manage and Improve Agent Performance and understand where the team is lacking so the right improvements can be made. Here are the top Agent Performance Metrics you should track:

4. First Call Resolution Rate

First Call Resolution (FCR) rate offers insights into agent performance when it comes to resolving customers’ issues after the first interaction. By measuring these agent performance metrics, you can figure out the overall efficiency of your agents and how satisfied your customers are with you.

Studies have shown that companies that track FCR rate report over 30% improvement in their performance. When your FCR rate is high, the overall customer effort to get issues resolved gets lowered, thus improving satisfaction.

When you calculate the First Call Resolution Rate and find out how many customer issues are getting resolved without a follow-up call, you can highly improve your team’s efficiency by finding loopholes in your system. Then you can also focus on training agents so they can handle more complex issues.

5. Issue Resolution Rate

Issue Resolution Rate tells about the overall percentage of issues resolved by Agents out of the total queries received. It not only indicates the team’s efficiency but also uncovers possible complex issues that need to be handled with priority. It’s not possible to be able to resolve all the issues but if that’s the case, there might be some deeper issue that needs to be addressed.

One of the best ways to handle the Issue Resolution Rate is by offering some solution or at least an answer to the customer regarding their query rather than just ending the call and leaving the customer empty-handed. Another good practice is informing the customer about the time it will take to resolve their issue. This comes under setting up a Service Level Agreement policy for the Customer Service team.

6. Average Handle Time

Another effective way of measuring Agent productivity is by measuring the Average Handle Time metric. It provides you data on how long the agents spend time closing a ticket or completing an interaction with the customers. This metric calculated the average time it takes from the initial customer contact to the time they disconnect. It also counts in the hold time and the call transfer time.

This metric gives you an idea of agents’ efficiency in resolving customer issues quickly. Agents who have faster AHT rates are considered good and more effective. When this time is too long, it may indicate that agents are struggling at resolving customer issues and concerns.

Also, in case the AHT is too short, it may also mean that they aren’t really providing any real assistance and most probably rushing to close the tickets. This is why it might not be a very good idea to put emphasis on Average Handle Time alone. For instance, if the agents focus too much on closing tickets soon, it can impact the CSAT and FCR rates.

The best practice is to use these metrics along with other metrics in order to measure agent performance because you surely don’t want to look like your organization focuses too much on being productive rather than caring about the customers.

7. Backlog Metrics

No matter how much you try to close the tickets that are generated every day, it so can happen that some might go unresolved and get accumulated over time. Being a data-driven business, you might want to cut down on this number but it can be overwhelming at times to manage too many tickets at once without proper tools in place. This can reflect badly on your Customer Service Efforts.

The higher the volume of accumulated tickets, the harder it is to deal with the customers who might leave due to a lack of response to their queries. If you start seeing an incline in the number of backlog tickets, it can indicate bigger issues that your business needs to address soon. One of the reasons could be the lack of agents to handle tickets and that might call for new hiring in your Customer Service department. But if you have enough agents and a ticket ratio and yet it’s getting hard for them to close the tickets, there might be some complex issues with your product.

To get a better understanding of it, it’s best to start by calculating the backlog metrics by establishing a particular time frame for resolving the issues. Then you can start to track which tickets are taking more than the established time to get fixed.

8. First Response Time

First Response Time (FRT) is another crucial Agent Performance Metric that can tell you how much time the agents take to respond to a new ticket. It’s undeniable that customers expect a fast response from a business they put money into. It might make sense to greet them with an automated message that says, “Our support agent will get in touch with you soon.” But it all comes down to the time it actually takes for the agent to respond to that customer and address their issues.

FRT metric can help you set the right expectations for the customers if you establish some guidelines in your team. For instance, if the query is generated via social media, it’s best to respond within 60 minutes, and for email and online forms, 24 hours or less.

Once you have these guidelines in place, it gets easier to track the FRT metrics as you can find out if the Customer Service Agents are able to respond to generated tickets on time or not. Then you can put focus on finding out why it’s happening and work towards resolving it.

Conclusion

It is undeniably essential to establish an overview of KPIs used to measure agent performance and their effectiveness to create an understanding of how to best use the technology and training to help them succeed at their jobs. Keeping track of Agent Performance is key to improving the Customer Service Team’s productivity, business profitability, and Customer Satisfaction. It’s easy to measure Agent Performance metrics than ever, so get started now!

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