• 4,000 firms
  • Independent
  • Trusted
Save up to 70% on staff

Home » Glossary » Call Center Performance Evaluation

Call Center Performance Evaluation

Definition

What is Call Center Performance Evaluation?

The call center performance evaluation is a call center process that requires two items to be good; awareness and superior customer service skills. When these two entities get together, the customers receive what they have asked for on the call.

Proper call center performance evaluation includes a variety of call center roles. It’s more than about analyzing call times. A routine review of success metrics is needed to ensure that the call center stays competitive. Otherwise, a company could grow a reputation as inefficient.

Evaluating a call center also requires understanding every aspect of the agent’s expertise to customer loyalty. Both of these lead to the call center benchmarking and where the company wants to achieve its objectives.

What is Call Center Performance Evaluation

Metrics used to evaluate call center performance

Many key metrics need to check continuously to determine the success of your call center.

  • First-call resolution. This significant metric is strongly connected to customer loyalty. Top-rated customer loyalty ratings usually have a first-call resolution rate of more than 85 percent.
  • Response time. Response time is the service level for contacts that do not have to be addressed once they arrive. This essential metric can be calculated by minutes, days or hours to calculate the number of resources available for successful field calls.
  • Customer satisfaction. It is an indicator of how happy the clients are with the three most critical elements of a good call center experience: rapid resolution, real-time service, and a professional agent.
  • Contact quality. By tracking and recording agent communications, the level of communication can be measured regularly to highlight what is working and what is not.

Forecasting accuracy. Each call center has peak hours and call volume lapses. Evaluating the expected caller load and the current caller load is a measure that is crucial to successfully staff a call center to reduce waits, maintain customer loyalty, and control staff levels.

Outsourcing FAQ

What is Internal Metrics?

Internal metrics are methods introduced and applied to measure the success of inbound or outbound call centers. 

Usually, a call center works in a pressured atmosphere where administrators must handle tasks, including the timely response to every call while maintaining a high degree of customer support and customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Internal metrics are evaluation indicators used for the assessment, comparison, and monitoring of results or output. 

Companies use a group of metrics, often called key performance indicators (KPIs). Using these KPIs, firms create a dashboard that managers or consultants analyze daily to maintain performance reviews, perceptions, and business objectives.

Call center internal metrics 

Call centers use a variety of internal metrics to help paint an accurate picture of their services' efficiency and effectiveness. Using these metrics, call centers can measure:

How many people call in a given period of time Amount of time spent by agents on calls The effectiveness of their processes How much of their revenue each call eats up

Below are some of the most important metrics that call centers can use to determine the quality of their services.

Average Handle Time (AHT)

AHT is the approximate length of the entire customer service transaction, from the time the customer initiates the call until the completion of the conversation.

Blocking Rate

Blockage Metric lets the staff track the number of calls that could not be addressed due to business constraints or infrastructure problems. 

Cost per Contact

The Cost per Contact KPI calculates how much each contact costs your call center, which is a vital part of the cost-benefit study at the same time.

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

Consumer Satisfaction (CSAT) is a sign of customer pleasure. CSAT is based on a brief survey that consumers fill out after a discussion.

Forecasted Calls vs. Actual Calls

It is a primary factor in deciding the actual amount of capital needed, calculated as a proportion of the difference between the number of calls predicted and the number of calls received.

Number of Calls Offered

It is the total number of calls sent to the call center, including abandoned calls or calls where the caller gets a busy signal.

Peak-hour traffic

This metric refers to the time period in call center operations when they receive the highest volume of calls. 

Tracking the peak hour in call center operations help managers better manage workloads and manpower during critical work periods.

Internal communication metrics

The metrics discussed above are designed to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of call center processes toward customers.

Equally important are metrics that identify how well a call center’s internal communications work. These metrics are called internal communication metrics.

Because internal communication affects agent performance, call center managers must also keep an eye on how well their agents function as a team.

Some internal communication metrics call center managers can adopt include:

Email open rates Technology adoption rates Employee feedback Traffic variations Device usage Employee turnover rates

Using data from these internal communications metrics can help call center managers to create strategies that can improve agent engagement and productivity.

What is Benchmarking?

What is Benchmarking?

Benchmarking is the process that call centers use to compare their efficiency to other leading companies in the same industry. The factors that need to be considered in benchmarking are the products, services, or procedures. 

Benchmarking is developing into a collective mechanism that lets BPO suppliers and customers set project boundaries and priorities together. It also helps ensure that everyone involved receives the best benefit from an outsourcing partnership.

Two types of call center benchmarking

Call center benchmarking evaluates the operations and metrics of one call center to those of related organizations. The point of benchmarking is to recognize internal prospects for change. Here are the two main types of benchmarking the BPO industry:

Competitive benchmarking. The competitive benchmarking tests the efficiency of one call center against its immediate rivals. It can be a clear indicator of whether or not the call center is up to scratch. You may have surpassed metrics in some categories, but you need a little help in others. The easiest way to figure out is to see how you line up with other related companies. Process benchmarking. The process benchmarking, meanwhile, tests the efficiency of the corporate practices of one call center across industries. Process benchmarking tells the company how it rates operating efficiency relative to rivals and market experts. Also, it identifies fields that have the most scope for near-and long-term process change.

What is Quality Assurance?

What Is Quality Assurance?

Quality Assurance (QA) is any structured method to avoid mistakes and errors in services or manufactured products. Quality assurance involves logistical and procedural tasks performed in the quality chain to ensure that the specifications and expectations for a product, service, or operation are followed.

Businesses and organizations use quality assurance to guarantee that the product is designed and delivered with proper procedures. QA is vital for manufacturers and companies to avoid problems when supplying products or services to the customer. It also provides oversight of the quality of raw materials, assemblies, products and components, manufacturing and maintenance facilities, processing and testing procedures.

Importance of Quality Assurance

Quality is an essential factor to consider in any product and service. That is why manufacturers and service providers are continually looking to improve their products or service quality. The primary purpose of a QA strategy is to establish customer trust and the reputation of the organization or company; while at the same time enhancing work processes and performance and allows the company to compete favorably with others. 

QA needs a large commitment in people and systems. Doing quality assurance can be time-consuming that may influence the arrival of products. With a few exceptions, the downside of QA is more a prerequisite for a necessary step to be taken to ship a quality product. Without quality assurance, there will be none to guarantee the legitimacy of the qualifications

What is What is business process outsourcing??

What is business process outsourcing (BPO)?

Business process outsourcing (BPO) is the practice of contracting a third-party provider to run a defined business function such as customer support, payroll, accounting, or IT helpdesk. The provider takes ownership of the people, process, and technology, and bills you on a per-seat, per-transaction, or fixed-fee basis.

BPO sits at the intersection of labour arbitrage and operational focus. You hand off a non-core function to a specialist that can run it cheaper, faster, or better, and your in-house team gets to concentrate on what actually moves the business.

The category covers everything from a 4-seat phone team in Cebu answering after-hours calls for a US plumbing firm, to a 5,000-seat captive in Manila handling global claims processing for a Fortune 500 insurer. Same idea, very different scale.

If you've used Apple support, ordered from Amazon, or paid with Wells Fargo, you've talked to a BPO provider — you just didn't know it.

How it works

A BPO engagement runs in three layers: contract, transition, and steady state. You scope the function, sign a service level agreement that locks in response times, quality thresholds, and pricing, then transition the work through documented playbooks and parallel runs before the provider takes the keys.

Pricing usually falls into one of four shapes:

Model How you pay Best for Per FTE (seat) Fixed monthly rate per agent Steady-volume work like inbound support Per transaction Set fee per call, ticket, or invoice Variable-volume back-office tasks Outcome-based Tied to a KPI like CSAT or collections Mature processes with clean metrics Hybrid Base FTE rate plus variable bonus Long-term partnerships

Location choice drives most of the savings. Sending work to the Philippines or India (offshoring) typically cuts loaded labour cost by 50–70% versus a US in-house team. Sending it to Mexico or Colombia (nearshoring) trims 30–50% while keeping you in roughly the same timezone. Keeping it domestic (onshoring) protects timezone and language fit but barely moves the cost needle.

The provider absorbs the recruiting, training, real estate, tech stack, and compliance burden. You absorb the vendor-management overhead and the risk that comes with handing a function to an outsider.

Examples

The global BPO market hit roughly USD 347.95 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow at a 10.05% CAGR through 2035, according to Precedence Research. That growth is concentrated in a handful of hubs and a handful of named buyers.

Google has used Philippine and Indian BPO partners since 2016 for content moderation, ads review, and customer support — a quiet workforce that scales with each product launch. Meta contracts Accenture and TaskUs in Manila for content moderation; the work pulled enough scrutiny in the early 2020s that Meta eventually broadened its provider base across multiple regions. Wells Fargo has operated a Manila back-office hub since 2011, handling mortgage processing, AML checks, and treasury operations for the US parent. JPMorgan Chase runs large captive and outsourced operations in India and the Philippines for KYC, trade settlement, and analytics.

The Philippines remains the standout English-language hub. According to the IT and Business Process Association of the Philippines, the country's IT-BPM sector generates roughly USD 40 billion in revenue and employs about 1.9 million people, with growth targets pushing past 2.5 million by 2028.

Related terms Outsourcing: the umbrella term; BPO is the back-office and front-office slice that runs whole processes rather than one-off projects. Offshoring: moving work to a distant country (e.g. US to Philippines). A location choice, not a contracting choice. Nearshoring: moving work to a nearby country (e.g. US to Mexico) to keep timezone and culture closer. Knowledge process outsourcing: KPO handles judgment-heavy work like legal research or equity analysis, not transactional tasks. Call center: one delivery format inside BPO, focused on inbound or outbound voice. Back office: the non-customer-facing operations layer that BPO most commonly absorbs. Service level agreement: the contract clause that defines what "good" looks like in a BPO deal. FAQ What is business process outsourcing in simple terms?

BPO is paying another company to run a piece of your business for you, usually a repeatable function like answering support calls, processing invoices, or managing payroll. You keep the brand and the strategy; they run the operation.

What is the difference between BPO and outsourcing?

Outsourcing is the broad category — anything you contract out, including one-off projects. BPO is the subset where a provider runs an ongoing, defined business process end-to-end, typically with its own staff, systems, and SLAs.

Is BPO only about cost savings?

No. Cost is the entry argument, but mature buyers cite access to specialist talent, 24/7 coverage, faster scaling, and freeing in-house leaders to focus on growth as bigger long-term wins. See the directory of vetted providers on Clutch for how the market positions itself today.

What functions do companies outsource most often?

Customer support, IT helpdesk, finance and accounting, payroll, HR administration, content moderation, and data entry top the list. Higher-judgment work like legal research, equity analysis, and medical coding has shifted to KPO providers over the last decade.

Which countries dominate the BPO industry?

The Philippines leads voice and customer experience, India leads IT and analytics, and Latin America (Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica) leads nearshore work for North American buyers. Eastern Europe serves Western European clients on similar terms.

How do I choose a BPO provider?

Match scale to your volume, check for relevant compliance (ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOC 2), ask for two reference clients in your industry, and pilot a small scope before committing to a multi-year contract. Walk away from any provider that won't share agent attrition data.

Ready to scope a BPO partner? Outsource Accelerator lists 4,000+ vetted providers across the top global hubs — use the directory to shortlist, compare pricing, and book intro calls without paying a referral fee.

Companies you might be interested in

Get Inside Outsourcing

An insider's view on why remote and offshore staffing is radically changing the future of work.

Order now

Start your
journey today

  • Independent
  • Secure
  • Transparent

About OA

Outsource Accelerator is the trusted source of independent information, advisory and expert implementation of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO).

The #1 outsourcing authority

Outsource Accelerator offers the world’s leading aggregator marketplace for outsourcing. It specifically provides the conduit between world-leading outsourcing suppliers and the businesses – clients – across the globe.

The Outsource Accelerator website has over 5,000 articles, 450+ podcast episodes, and a comprehensive directory with 4,700+ BPO companies… all designed to make it easier for clients to learn about – and engage with – outsourcing.

About Derek Gallimore

Derek Gallimore has been in business for 20 years, outsourcing for over eight years, and has been living in Manila (the heart of global outsourcing) since 2014. Derek is the founder and CEO of Outsource Accelerator, and is regarded as a leading expert on all things outsourcing.

“Excellent service for outsourcing advice and expertise for my business.”

Learn more
Banner Image
Get 3 Free Quotes Verified Outsourcing Suppliers
4,000 firms.Just 2 minutes to complete.
SAVE UP TO
70% ON STAFF COSTS
Learn more

Connect with over 4,000 outsourcing services providers.

Banner Image

Transform your business with skilled offshore talent.

  • 4,000 firms
  • Simple
  • Transparent
Banner Image