Talkdesk released a report about their KPI and benchmarks in 2021. The information looks at the performance metrics of five contact centres with a sample size of 2 200+ customers from North America, Oceania, South America, Europe, Africa and Asia.
Furthermore, the data was collected from their platform between January 1, 2019, and December 31, 2020. Therefore, during the first year of the pandemic. This is an overview of that report.
Importance and benefits of benchmarking
When the world went remote, contact centred had to change with the times. This made them more essential to the industry since customer relationship management fell on them a lot more with the absence of person-to-person interactions. Talkdesk asked if benchmarking is even needed, and once the dust settled, they saw the answer as being “yep”.
Contact centre benchmarking is a systematic process of examining, reviewing, deploying, etc., the best practice to maintain and gain competitive advantages. It is a way for businesses to bring about changes while also taking a closer look at their companies.
The benefits of benchmarking (which the report goes into a ton more detail) is:
- Finding areas in the business that need improvement now, or at least soon
- Uncovers areas for improved efficiency
- Evaluating successful or unsuccessful actions in the business
Metrics and more metrics
If you are a lover of metrics than this report is undoubtedly for you. The main point of this section goes beyond the numbers and statistics. 2020, as you know, is a significant change. What you may not have known is that 13% of agents were permanent remote workers prior to March 2020. But that percentage jumped up to 86% during lockdown. Furthermore, even customers moved to a remote workforce. One of the takeaways is that 27% of the employees are considering staying in a remote workspace for the foreseeable future.
The change in the workspace pushed digital development to move faster than no one saw coming. Of course, companies had to adapt quickly. But now, it would seem the changes are here to stay. Talkdesk understands that businesses must comprehend their relevant KPIs for their business goals. While also comparing their performance against the competitors to see where they are or where they can go. Furthermore, establishing benchmarks can truly improve their KPIs.
Beyond the metrics
The report goes into detail about the meaning behind their metric findings. For example, the average abandonment rate is calculated as the number of abandoned calls in cue divided by the total number of inbound calls minus the abandoned calls not in the queue.
Talkdesk theorizes that the reason for the abandonment rate in 2020 to increase from 4.21% to 5.91% is due to the impact of the pandemic in terms of the increased call volumes. Contact centres struggled a lot to keep up with the increase. However, the customers who called were willing to wait about 4. 22 minutes to reach an agent. This is an increase of 69% from 2019.
Regarding the abandonment rate issue, Talkdesk has suggestions on how to combat this problem. They believe that companies should use workforce management tools while also improving call peak forecasting. Plus, allowing automation for repetitive tasks to come onboard can help free up agents to focus on helping as well as delighting customers. Also, to implement an omnichannel strategy.
These are only some of the strategies to be used. However, the report goes into a lot more detail while giving advice. Therefore, if you want more information and view the full report, you can download it here.