Today, contact centre analytics gives you visibility into nearly every performance indicator you could think of. Contact centre analytics is projected to reach $2.66 billion by 2026, making it easier to drill down into the various granular components of agent performance. A major focus area for contact centres should be to accurately break down agent activity into three categories and improve them to enable better workforce utilisation.
Agent Talk Time – A Tricky Metric
Agent talk time captures the total time spent by a contact centre agent on handling calls every day, calculated as an average for your entire workforce or an individual metric for each agent. It is closely related to average talk time or average call duration, which measures agent talk time against the call volumes you process.
Someone with a high talk time is spending most of their day handling calls, meaning there is very little resource leakage. On the other hand, if call handling volumes are low, it could indicate too much time and effort spent on each call, potentially risking long queues and a sub-par CX.
For individual agents, extremely high talk time could be a sign of poor work-life balance and excessive workloads.
Agent Idle Time – The Lower, the Better
Agent idle time can be defined as the time agents spend logged into the call portal, but is not engaged in a call (either live interactions or post-call activities). It can also be described as agent available time. At any given point, you can calculate idle time by subtracting agent occupancy from the total number of seats in the contact centre.
Keep in mind that idle time is less of an agent performance indicator, but more a signal of your contact centre’s demand-supply efficiency. On rare occasions, an agent could log into the portal but intentionally/inadvertently switch to a “not available” mode. But much more frequently, the contact centre is likely to experience troughs in demand where few or no calls come in.