Call tracking metrics: What should you track to ensure call center efficiency?

Call tracking metrics are a crucial way to track whether or not your call center is operating at peak efficiency. When you know what metrics you should be tracking, you can successfully understand your customer’s demographics, measure the ROI of your sales and marketing campaigns, and make quantitative decisions to improve customer satisfaction as well as your bottom line.

What is call tracking?

Call tracking is the recording of calls and collection of data around calls in a call or contact center for analytical purposes. When you track calls, you can see how many calls you receive, the length of each call, who answered the call, among other statistics, and use that information to come up with a set of metrics to measure how well your organization is doing in terms of customer interaction.

So, what are call tracking metrics?

Call tracking metrics are both a qualitative and quantitative measure of call center activity and performance. From looking at a call tracking metric, you can determine call center efficiency, evaluate how well your customer support team is performing, and understand where you stand in terms of both your customer support and other business processes.

Some worthwhile call tracking metrics to pay attention to

Some worthwhile call tracking metrics include:

• Call volumes

• Average call duration

• Caller sentiment

• First-call resolution rate

• Conversion rate for sales calls

• Call abandonment rate

• Customer satisfaction scores

• IVR menu metrics

These metrics can help you determine your call center KPIs, or key performance indicators.

Call volumes

Tracking call volumes allows you to see how many people are calling. Large call volume, paired with a high conversion rate, means that your organization is doing well in terms of gaining customers.

On the flip side, large call volumes with poor conversion rate means that you may be losing money hiring more staff to field calls when you’re not making additional income.

With Dialpad, you can track your answered and unanswered calls, callbacks, missed calls, abandoned calls, and even spam and canceled calls.

Average call duration

Average call duration is important for tracking customer engagement. If a call time is relatively short, the caller may be asking quick questions like, “What time are you open?”

On the other hand, if your average call duration is extremely long across several calls, it may mean there’s a bigger issue that needs to be resolved and your staff may need more training.

That being said, sometimes call times may be longer because a customer wants to know about your product and reflects customer engagement, which is positive.

Whichever the reason is, your average call duration can potentially give you valuable insight into how smoothly your organization is operating if you interpret the information correctly.

Caller sentiment

When you use call tracking, you can get insight into caller sentiment by analyzing phone calls and customer conversations for words that suggest positive or negative sentiment. By gauging caller sentiment, you have an opportunity to improve customer satisfaction and boost customer loyalty, therefore raising customer retention rate.

Dialpad Ai uses AI-powered sentiment analysis to analyze all conversations to give supervisors a snapshot of how calls with customers or prospects are going in real-time.

First-call resolution rate

The first-call resolution rate measures the percentage of calls where the agent is able to resolve a customer’s issue within the first call. This means that the problem was resolved without having to transfer, escalate, pause, or return the call.

The higher your first-call resolution rate is, the better, because it means your customers are happy that their problems were solved quickly and well.

Conversion rate for sales calls

Your conversation rate for sales calls shows you how many callers convert into paying customers and helps you understand which campaigns give you the most conversions, aren’t performing well, or are failing.

Call abandonment rate

Call abandonment rate is a measure of the number of callers who hang up before they speak with an agent.

Ideally, this call tracking metric is zero (or close to it) because high call abandonment rates mean you’re likely understaffed, your support staff is performing poorly, your call technology is lacking, or there’s something wrong with your processes.

Customer satisfaction scores

Your customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) are a measure of how satisfied customers are with your product, services, customer service, and business. They’re calculated using the results from customer experience surveys.

There is no standard survey or scoring methodology, but usually customers are asked how satisfied they were during different parts of the call on a scale from one to five. The CSAT would then be the percentage of satisfied customers from the total.

Dialpad Ai CSAT helps you track your customer satisfaction in real time. The Dialpad Ai models infer customer satisfaction from 100% of your calls (compare this to the 5% response rate of traditional CSAT surveys!) with 87% accuracy and improves with use over time.

IVR menu metrics

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is an automated voice system that interacts with your callers, gathers specific data, and uses information provided by your callers to route the phone call to the right department or person.

IVR menus provide a good metric to track because you can see if your menus are doing what you need them to do. You can see if your IVR is routing to the correct department or person, whether your IVR can answer questions without needing to involve an agent if you prefer your customer support be as automated as possible, and if your menu is offering the self-serve options your customers want.

Do you need a dedicated call tracking metrics app?

There are, of course, dedicated call tracking metrics software providers who collect and analyze call data. However, there is no singular call tracking metrics best software that will solve all of your call tracking problems. One factor when considering whether to use a dedicated call tracking metrics app is cost.

How much will adding an app for call tracking metrics cost? Call tracking metrics pricing depends on a lot of factors, but adding a dedicated call tracking metrics app will definitely not be cheaper than what you’re currently paying because you’re adding another service on top of the ones you already use.

Therefore, instead of looking for another software to add to your existing stack, it’s much better to invest in call tracking capabilities in a built-in holistic contact center solution. That way, you can solve your call tracking metrics pain point while enjoying other benefits a holistic contact center solution provides.

How do call tracking metrics work in Dialpad?

How to set up call tracking metrics? You can effortlessly set up your call tracking analytics and contact center analytics with Dialpad.

Using Dialpad’s admin panel, you can track call volume, specific call items, CSAT scores, call duration, the number of unanswered calls, service level percentage over time, text messages sent, agent status, concurrent calls, calling habits, leaderboards, and your IVR menu tab.

With Dialpad, you can measure and analyze your total number of calls by type, label and filter your data, create heat maps, and analyze the data you tracked by generating exported reports.

Dialpad's Custom Moments feature can be used to identify the number of times certain keywords come up on calls, to help your team market better. For example, say a mold remediation company in Atlanta notices a surge in calls mentioning "MOLD" from a specific city. This can help you understand where potential customers are located and which areas require focused attention.

Setting up and using analytics is easy with Dialpad. Simply select “Analytics” from the Admin portal and you can filter, save, or export your data. You can filter by user calls, group calls, and coaching team calls, by date, duration, call content based on Ai keywords and call items, labels, and internal or external call data.

You can also save your filtered searches, bookmark saved searches, and break down your data and analytics into graphic visualizations over time. Even without filtering for a specific keyword or item, you can view the total number of inbound and outbound calls as well as more granular data on the total number of calls.

For example, you’ll be able to see the total number of answered calls, unanswered calls, callbacks requested, number of calls initiated by Dialpad User, and callbacks, which are further broken down into the total number of missed calls, abandoned calls, unanswered transferred calls, other voicemails, messages, spam calls, connected calls, and canceled calls.

Analyze key call tracking metrics with ease using Dialpad

We now know how important call tracking can be for an organization to see how well they’re doing in terms of their processes and customer support. With Dialpad, you can have call tracking, contact center analytics, and other solutions all in one convenient, easy to use, out-of-the-box solution.