5 Contact Center Metrics for Modern CX Teams

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Still measuring satisfaction and loyalty by asking customers to rate how likely they are to recommend your brand on a scale from one to 10? By relying solely on a net promoter score (NPS), you’re missing out on crucial data and insights into new opportunities to improve the customer experience.

More and more, brands are tracking, analyzing, and acting on a wider range of contact center metrics designed to help measure customer experience. In this article, we’ll dive into five must-have contact center metrics: net promoter score (NPS), the customer satisfaction score (CSAT), customer effort score (CES), internal quality score (IQS), and first contact resolution (FCR).

How Do You Measure Contact Center Performance?

The best way to measure contact center performance is to use a combination of contact center metrics that cover customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and customer effort. By taking this holistic approach, you can get a more complete picture of your contact center (including what’s working well and where there’s room for improvement) and its impact on your business.

5 Contact Center Metrics to Measure Performance

1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS is a popular metric that has helped many businesses gauge customer loyalty. With NPS, you can easily identify which of your customers are most likely to be promoters (people who answer with a “nine” or “10”), passives (“seven” or “eights”), or detractors (“six” or unders). Calculating NPS is similarly simple to the questionnaire itself: After collecting the data, you subtract the percentage of detractors from the sum of promoters and passives.

However, by only showing you how likely customers are to recommend your company or product to others, you’re only getting a small snapshot of the customer experience. That’s why we recommend using NPS as a starting point and using the other metrics in this post to fill in the gaps.

2. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

CSAT works similarly to NPS, but rather than asking about the likelihood that customers will recommend your brand, you ask a variation of this question: “How would you rate your overall satisfaction with the (goods/service) you received?”

Typically, customers respond using a one (“very unsatisfied”) to five (“very satisfied”) scale, which you then plug into this formula to calculate your score: (Number of satisfied customers who rated “four” or “five” / Number of respondents) x 100 = percentage of satisfied customers.

CSAT helps you track customer satisfaction over time, predict churn, and identify unhappy customers whom you can proactively reach out to. It’s also used in a variety of service use cases, including individual agent interactions, overall performance, and fulfillment experiences.

3. Customer Effort Score (CES)

Customer effort score is a contact center KPI metric to complement NPS. A CES survey will typically ask customers a question like, “On a scale of ‘very easy’ (five) to ‘very difficult’ (one), how would you rate the ease of resolving your issue?” The higher the score, the more likely customers will be loyal.

Like the other contact center metrics listed here, it’s easy to deploy and track over time, and can help you identify new customer service opportunities. These can include finding areas throughout your customer experience that can be streamlined, pinpointing agents who should handle specific tasks, or even turning a routine task that involves agents into something that self-service can handle.

4. Internal Quality Score (IQS)

The inward-facing sibling of CSAT, IQS measures how a support center measures up to your own customer service standards. IQS is an internally sourced metric that helps build more precise standards across support roles to ensure consistency in performance.

This measurement is tailored by the support center’s own service goals, often consisting of a five-point scale for essential qualities like tone, product knowledge, personalization, or even CX revenue generation. This type of internal quality assurance can even help managers set a standard for employees in order to bolster their overall performance, giving them targeted goals for improvement so they feel more empowered in their day-to-day work.

5. First Contact Resolution (FCR)

FCR is a measurement of how often a support center solves service issues upon first contact from the customer. A high FCR rate means your customer experience is successful at clearly explaining and tailoring solutions to individual problems, or that the majority of problems are solvable with minimal agent input (i.e. through self-service).

Tying Your Contact Center Metrics Together

Though NPS is a solid contact center metric, it’s not enough. By exploring other KPIs like CSAT, CES, IQS, and FCR, you can unlock a deeper understanding of the customer experience and identify opportunities for improvement.

Ready to collect and analyze better contact center KPI metrics? Gladly offers a dashboard of actionable data, as well as real-time insights about customers, and historic insights across agents, channels, and conversations. Our out-of-the-box reporting gives brands clear answers to how support staff is performing using metrics, with an added insight builder to create custom reports that explain everything in granular detail.

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