If you’ve worked in or around contact centres for more than five minutes, you’ll know one thing for sure: there’s no shortage of data! So, what metrics really matter in a modern contact centre? Every second, someone somewhere is tracking something. From handle time to abandonment rate, first contact resolution, CSAT and SLA. You name it, someone in the business has got a dashboard for it.
But here’s the thing no one really says out loud:
Just because you can measure it, doesn’t mean it matters.
Furthermore, just because you’re tracking it, doesn’t mean it’s helping!
Half the time, most teams are drowning in metrics that look good in reports but say absolutely nothing about the customer’s actual experience as well as how the agent felt delivering it. And worse still, they’re using those same numbers to make decisions, reward performance, or create pressure. Which might make you feel like you’re in control, but often, you’re just rewarding the wrong behaviour.
So, what should we really be paying attention to? And what are the metrics that help us get better rather than just not look better in reports?
The metrics that seem useful, but rarely tell you much
Let’s start with the classics, the ones every contact centre swears by.
→ Average Handle Time (AHT)
→ Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
→ Customer Satisfaction Scores (CSAT)
→ They’ve been around forever, and on paper, they do make sense.
→ Shorter calls mean more efficiency.
→ Hitting your SLA means customers aren’t waiting.
→ A high CSAT means people are happy, right?
But in reality? It’s not that simple.
Take AHT, If you’ve ever watched an agent rush a call just to “keep their handle time down,” you’ll know exactly what I mean. The focus shifts
from solving the problem to ending the call as quickly as possible, even if that means the customer has to then ring back later, start over, or in some cases, escalate it further.
It’s like timing a doctor’s appointment and rewarding them for getting the patient out the door fastest… regardless of whether they were actually treated properly the first time around.
The same goes for SLAs.
You can hit a “response time within 2 minutes” target and still deliver a terrible experience if all the customer gets is a templated, useless answer.
And CSAT?
It has its place, but it’s also only just a snapshot, and not the full story. It’s just one moment in one interaction, and often only captured when someone’s annoyed enough to respond. It tells you how someone felt in the moment and not how they feel about your brand overall.
These aren’t inherently bad metrics; they’re just misunderstood. But when used in isolation, they become dangerous because they shape behaviours that prioritise speed and surface-level satisfaction over meaningful service and real outcomes.
The metrics that actually move the needle
If you seriously want to improve service and not just make the dashboard look green, then you’ve got to look deeper.
The metrics that matter most aren’t the ones that show you what happened at surface level. They’re the ones that give you context, clarity, and insight you can act on.
Start with First Contact Resolution (FCR).
Did the customer get what they needed the first time they reached out? If not, all your AHT targets and SLA stats mean nothing because the problem still isn’t fixed. And if they had to switch channels or repeat themselves along the way? That’s even worse.
Then there’s conversation quality.
Not just “was the script followed”, but was the customer actually helped? Was the tone human? Did the agent listen properly, explain things clearly, and leave the customer feeling supported?
You don’t get that from a 1–5 rating.
You get it from tools like Conversation Analysis and Automatic QA.
The kind that look a every interaction and show you what’s really happening across your contact centre, not just the handful you’ve manually reviewed.
And let’s not forget sentiment data.
It’s one thing to say a customer got their issue resolved. But did they feel annoyed the whole way through? Were they frustrated, confused, unheard? Or did they leave feeling like someone had actually taken the time to help?
You wouldn’t assess a restaurant just by how fast the food came out. You’d look at the service, the vibe, the quality and more importantly, whether you’d go back again. The same applies here.
It’s not about adding more metrics to the pile.
It’s about picking the ones that show your something real.
The behaviour trap, when metrics drive the wrong outcomes
Here’s where things start to get messy, because once a metric becomes a target, it changes everything. Not just how people work, but how they think. And often, that’s not in a good way.
Take AHT again, if an agent knows they’re being judged on how quickly they wrap up calls, they’ll do just that, wrap them up quickly. Even if the issue isn’t solved properly. Even if it means leaving the customer confused or their issue half resolved. It becomes less about doing the job well, and more about getting off the phone fast enough to avoid a coaching session.
It’s the same story across so many contact centres.
Agents are working the system, not the customer, and supervisors are watching dashboards and not listening to the conversations. And execs are making decisions off numbers that don’t tell the full truth.
It’s not laziness, it’s human behaviour.
Because when KPIs are set without context, or worse, without asking the people who actually do the work, they stop being useful and start becoming pressure points. The kind that slowly eats away at morale, trust, and common sense.
And before you know it, you’ve got a team that’s technically “performing,” but in reality, the experience is clunky, more and more complaints are creeping up, and no everyone’s wondering why.
It’s not because your agents don’t care, It’s because your metrics are driving behaviours that don’t serve your customers.
What should you track, and how do you use it properly?
There is no one size fits all answer to this one, but here’s a simple way to think about it?
If a metric only tells you WHAT happened and not WHY it happened, it’s not enough.
And if your team can’t see how it helps them do their job better, they more than likely ignore it. Or worse, they’ll work around it.
The best metrics are the ones that:
✅ Focus on outcomes, not just outputs
✅ Encourage the right behaviour, not the fastest fix
✅ Reflect reality and not just what’s easy to track
✅ Start conversations, not just scoreboards
When you pair things like:
First contact resolution, conversation quality, sentiment analysis, and issue resolution trends, you get a much clearer view. Both of how your team is performing and what your customers are actually experiencing.
And the trick isn’t just to track those metrics.
It’s to make them useful.
→ Use them to coach better, not just catch mistakes.
→ Use them to spot patterns, not just punish people.
→ Use them to fix broken systems, not just measure broken processes.
Because at the end of the day, the best-performing contact centres aren’t the ones with the shortest calls.
They’re the ones with the clearest picture and the confidence to act on it.
See the full picture with QContact
QContact gives you more than just dashboards.
You get real visibility into every interaction, every trend, every friction point.
From sentiment and language detection to conversation analysis and automatic QA, it’s all in one place.
→ No more second-guessing what’s going wrong.
→ No more managing performance by gut feel.
→ Just insight you can act on.
If you’re ready to track what really matters, we can show you how.
