Contact center metrics

Abandonment rate

Abandonment rate is the share of customers who give up before their issue is handled, whether by hanging up in a phone queue or closing the browser tab, and it is the correction that keeps a containment figure honest.

After-call work

After-call work is everything an agent does after the customer leaves, from writing notes to coding the disposition, updating systems and creating follow-up tasks, and it counts as part of average handle time even though planning routinely ignores it.

Agent assist

Agent assist is AI that helps a human agent during a live interaction by surfacing information, suggesting responses and handling documentation, rather than replacing the agent.

Average handle time

Average handle time is the mean duration of a customer interaction, including talk time, hold time and the after-call work done once the customer has gone; it is a cost driver, not a measure of quality.

Call deflection

Call deflection is the practice of moving a customer contact out of an expensive channel, usually the phone, into a cheaper one such as self-service, and it counts the contact that never arrived rather than the problem that got solved.

Containment rate

Containment rate is the share of conversations an automated system finishes on its own without handing the person to a human, calculated as conversations resolved without human involvement divided by total conversations handled.

Conversation completion rate

Conversation completion rate is the share of conversations that reached a natural ending rather than being cut short, a technical health metric that measures whether interactions finished, not whether they succeeded, and it is frequently mistaken for a quality metric.

Cost per call

Cost per call is the total cost of handling one customer interaction, including agent labor, technology and overhead, and it is the headline figure in every automation business case even though an honest one has to include the interactions the automation handles badly.

Cost per minute

Cost per minute is the unit price of voice processing, covering speech recognition, language model inference, speech synthesis and, in telephony, carrier charges, and it is how voice platforms bill and how voice unit economics are modeled.

Cost per resolution

Cost per resolution is the total cost of actually solving a customer problem across every attempt and every channel it took, divided by resolved issues, and it is the honest version of cost per call because it counts the failed attempts, escalations and repeat contacts that cost per call conceals.

CSAT

CSAT, or customer satisfaction score, is the percentage of customers who report being satisfied with a specific interaction, measured by a single question asked immediately afterward and answered only by the self-selected minority who respond.

Customer effort score

Customer effort score measures how much work a customer had to do to get their issue resolved, usually with a single question asked right after an interaction, and lower effort predicts loyalty better than higher satisfaction does.

Escalation rate

Escalation rate is the share of interactions an automated system hands to a human, the inverse of containment, and it is a better-behaved metric than its reputation suggests because correct escalation is a good outcome rather than a failure.

First contact resolution

First contact resolution is the share of customer issues fully resolved in a single interaction, with no callback, no follow-up and no second attempt, and it only holds up when it is measured across every channel rather than within one.

Intent recognition rate

Intent recognition rate is how often a system correctly sorts a customer utterance into one of a predefined set of intents, a legacy accuracy metric that stops being meaningful in generative systems because they have no fixed intent set to classify against.

Net promoter score

Net promoter score is a relationship metric that subtracts the percentage of detractors, who score zero to six, from the percentage of promoters, who score nine or ten, on a zero to ten recommendation scale, producing a number between minus one hundred and plus one hundred.

Occupancy

Occupancy is the percentage of logged-in time that agents spend actively handling interactions rather than waiting for the next one; it measures how intensively staff are used and has a sustainable ceiling above which it drives burnout and attrition.

Resolution rate

Resolution rate is the share of interactions where the customer issue was actually solved, which is a different question from whether the conversation ended without a human, and it is the metric containment is routinely mistaken for.

Service level

Service level is the percentage of contacts answered within a target time, conventionally written as two numbers such as 80/20, meaning 80 percent of contacts answered within 20 seconds.

Task completion rate

Task completion rate is the share of interactions where the customer accomplished the specific thing they set out to do, an outcome metric that suits generative voice agents because it needs no intent taxonomy, only a definition of what completion means for each task.