Duration of Answered Calls

What is Duration of Answered Calls?

The Duration of Answered Calls shows the amount of time your agents have spent in conversation with clients, measured from their most recent calls.

This KPI is especially useful for sales and customer support departments, where agents usually have a call handle time target to hit. Knowing the time spent in their calls can bring them knowledge on an ideal rhythm of how to make their calls, and the attitude to have when interacting with clients.

If measured daily, this KPI can also bring insight into the clients’ behavior with the company. You might be able to recognize a daily variation in your clients’ calling habits, and this knowledge will allow you to optimize your resources to maximize performance through the week.

Why is Duration of Answered Calls important?

The importance of Duration of Answered Calls lies in the fact it provides further data points to help in assessing your customer support strategy. Longer calls might indicate more complex problems with your product or service; shorter calls likely indicate that your customer support team is highly efficient. A series of unusually long calls might point to issues independent of support and sales teams, such as a flaw or defect in your product or service.

How to calculate Duration of Answered Calls

The calculation for the Duration of Answered Calls simply consists of the input of three data points: answered calls, call duration, and the date answered.

Best practices for Duration of Answered Calls

Depending on your team’s size, you can choose to display this metric per salesperson or for the group at large. In both cases, this KPI gives you real-time data about your agents’ performance regarding time spent per client. If displayed individually, it’s easier to identify the ones that may require additional training to increase their efficiency.

Reducing time isn’t necessarily a concern for this KPI, so long as your agents aren’t exceeding their time limits in answering calls. After all, you want to ensure your clients are receiving the best help possible, and prompting them to reduce their call times unnecessarily will lead to a reduction in call quality.

You can also evaluate Duration of Answered Calls alongside other telephony KPIs to glean insights about customer behavior. These KPIs include:

• Duration of All Calls
• Number of Waiting Calls
• Average Received Rating Score

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