What Contact Center Benchmarks Should You Be Setting?

If improving customer service is on your radar, you can’t make progress without first setting contact center benchmarks. This is the baseline measure for how well you (or competitors) perform. It serves as an expectation, a goal, and a minimum requirement.

You know you must use contact center benchmarks to improve your business, but which ones are the most appropriate? This guide will explore this question.

Rather than inundating you with metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs), let’s start by explaining why you should bother with contact center benchmarks.

Why Benchmarking Is Important for Contact Centers

Benchmarking establishes a clear standard by setting quantifiable targets aligned with business objectives and customer expectations. By benchmarking, contact centers can spot easy wins and long-term opportunities for improvement, execute those tactics, and optimize resources.

Identifies improvement opportunities

Comparing current customer engagement metrics against industry standards highlights areas for operational improvement.

Think about key measures like response times, customer satisfaction, and cost efficiency. If you’re aware of the wider market’s expectations, you can take steps to hit (and then exceed) those goals. For example, if you know the rest of the insurance industry answers 75% of its phone calls within 30 seconds, you have a baseline for your own business.

Sets CX enhancements in motion

When you stick with benchmarking, it helps track customer satisfaction and loyalty over time, making it easier to adapt processes and stay competitive.

If you’re always aware of how you’re performing compared to any other moment in time, the rest of your industry, and contact centers in general, then you can take steps toward continuous improvement.

If you become more productive as a result of contact center benchmarking and making marginal improvements, you’ll see results in other areas, too.

Ontrak Health, for example, experienced a 40% increase in agent productivity in one of its segments and a 60% increase in another, resulting in an average productivity increase of 50%. With these improvements, Ontrak’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) rose to 74, indicating high customer satisfaction.

Leads to optimized resource allocation

Data-driven benchmarks support strategic planning and staffing, especially during peak periods, ensuring a well-prepared, efficient team.

Whether you discover you need to improve customer-facing processes or behind-the-scenes components, the changes you make often lead to improvements in staffing levels, call queue assignment, and routing planning.

The better aligned your resources, the better you’re set up to serve your customers.

Helps businesses adapt to changing industry standards

As customer expectations evolve, benchmarks help contact centers align with industry trends and adopt best practices for omnichannel support.

If you think back 10 or 15 years, callers’ main expectation was that you answer the phone efficiently. Today, this expectation has multiplied across different contact channels.

Customers still expect the same or faster responses, but they also expect this via email, web chat, SMS, and social media. What’s more, when you log an issue, they expect a remedy the first time. Over time, paying attention to shifts in expectations means you’re one step ahead of a competitor who doesn’t have their eye on the ball.

How to Benchmark Your Contact Center for Next Year

1) Evaluate current agent performance metrics

Your starting point must be to analyze current call center metrics. These are likely your headline metrics (real-time and historical):

• Average handle time (AHT), including post-call work
• First call resolution (FCR) rate
• Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)
• NPS

Without a baseline, you’re going in blind, so it’s basically guesswork.

Start by identifying consistently strong or weak areas. These will serve as the foundation for setting targeted improvements.

2) Align benchmarks with strategic goals and call center operations

Once you’ve got your benchmarks, it’s time to match them up with specific goals. For example, you might be striving to improve the amount of time taken before answering inbound calls or cutting operational costs. Taking the example of improving response times, you’ll want to focus on metrics that reflect your center’s efficiency (e.g., the average speed of answer).

Likewise, if your business objectives revolve around improving customer retention, your focus must be customer loyalty metrics like CSAT scores and NPS. The happier your customers are, the less likely they are to churn.

3) Use omnichannel metrics for holistic insights

If you run an omnichannel contact center, you’ve got more than just talk times and response rates to think of. Make sure you factor in channels like email, chat, SMS, and social and set cross-channel benchmarks for consistency.

These may differ from basic phone expectations. Customers could be more lenient, as they know call center agents also have to answer any number of calls. But some will expect web chat inquiries, for example, to be the quickest way to contact your business.

Begin by benchmarking each channel individually to understand variations in customer expectations and interaction patterns. From here, you can apply per-channel benchmarks rather than an overall benchmark for your contact center.

4) Factor in AI and automation impacts

If you’re a more forward-thinking contact center, you may have already embraced contact center AI. But for those that haven’t, what’s the consequence?

Consider how artificial intelligence (AI) and automation influence average times, routing accuracy, and resolution rates.

If you’re using these technologies, set benchmarks for automation success, like the percentage of inquiries resolved by a self-service IVR, skills-based routing, or chatbot FCR.

Old vs. New Benchmarks to Focus On

For a long time, call center managers have been guilty of tracking the wrong metrics “because that’s what we’ve always done.” Now, thanks to communities like CX Network, we have access to modern, continually evolving call center KPIs that translate into genuine business benefits.

Let’s compare the old versus the new benchmarks to see where you can make immediate changes.

Average handle time vs. customer effort

When interviewing customers, they’re happy that you’re focused on handling their call quickly. But they’re happier when the call is frictionless, requiring minimum effort and input from them — so much so that they’re happy for a slightly longer wait time for this to be the case.

Shift focus from merely reducing average handle time to minimizing the customer effort score (CES), which gauges the ease with which customers can resolve issues, reflecting a more customer-centric metric.

Service level vs. first-contact resolution

While service level is the benchmark for how frequently you hit your average speed of answer target, first-call resolution (FCR) factors in how often the customers you interact with receive a genuine remedy without them needing to call back a second time.

Move from focusing solely on speed to improving the FCR rate, a strong indicator of customer satisfaction and service quality.

Customer satisfaction vs. lifetime value

While customer satisfaction (CSAT) remains useful, customer lifetime value (CLV) provides insights into customer loyalty and the financial impact of customer interactions on the business.

You can measure CSAT multiple times yearly, conducting surveys with different criteria. But CLV provides the overriding factor of how happy customers are and whether they’re willing to stay with your business rather than find a new supplier.

When they do stay, do they become profitable? Or are you keeping happy customers at a loss because you’ve lost your high-paying, high-profit customers?

Channel-specific metrics vs. omnichannel journey success

It’s one thing measuring how well your web chat and email responses perform. But if customers use more than one channel to contact your company, they might receive a different (and unexpected) experience.

For example, when Julie calls your support number, she expects an answer within five rings and a remedy to her problem the first time. But when Julie logs on to web chat, she expects the same experience. Therefore, having different benchmarks for different channels is counterintuitive to customer expectations.

When you implement an omnichannel contact center, transition from tracking isolated channel metrics to measuring the success rate of digital customer journeys across multiple channels.

Industry-Specific Benchmarks and Examples

While metrics like CLV and FCR are no doubt vital for all businesses, there are some differences across industries. Customer expectations are higher in certain areas, and call queues get clogged up with long hold times in industries with technical customer support requirements.

If you fall into one of the following categories, you’ll find the following industry-unique benchmarks helpful.

Healthcare — 72% FCR

A study by SQM Group indicates that the average FCR rate for the health insurance industry is 72%, with top performers achieving higher rates.

Tip: Set healthcare best practices around empathy and thoroughness rather than speed alone to prioritize quality patient interactions.

Banking — AHT of 4.7 minutes

The industry standard for AHT in the financial services sector is approximately 282 seconds. This is considerably faster than the call center industry average of six minutes (360 seconds).

With financial call center software, it pays (no pun intended) to focus on finding the optimum setup for the entire customer experience rather than just providing quick service. Moving a financial business to the cloud can drastically help speed up interactions.

Simmons Bank, for example, moved 3,200 finance employees to the cloud and continues to scale today. While the financial sector is typically slow to transition to new technology, there are many benefits to doing so.

Tip: Set benchmarks for fraud prevention and quick account servicing to strengthen customer trust and loyalty.

Retail — 78% FCR

SQM Group’s research shows that the retail industry has an average FCR rate of 78%, indicating strong contact center performance in resolving customer issues on the first contact.

Retail giant IKEA uses Nextiva for reputation management and customer feedback. It takes a proactive approach to ensure customers are happy, alongside hitting its numeric benchmarks for a holistic approach.

Tip: Set separate benchmarks for peak and off-peak seasons to account for fluctuating call volumes and service expectations.

Insurance — 6% call abandonment rate

In the insurance industry, the standard call abandonment rate is 6%. This is in line with the average call center benchmark of between 5% and 8%.

Tip: Focus benchmarks on claims efficiency and follow-up. Swift, effective claim handling is a primary driver of customer satisfaction in insurance.

Exceed Your Benchmarks With Nextiva

The core of any successful contact center is happy customers. To provide and maintain customer satisfaction, you must juggle the speed of answering and the efficiency of call handling while providing a friendly and helpful service that remedies your customers’ queries the first time.

With many spinning plates, it’s vital to track how each KPI is performing and whether you’re exceeding or falling short of your internal or industry benchmark.

If you’re new to contact center benchmarking or simply need a refresher, watch our free on-demand webinar now. 👇