One of the key challenges with measuring performance in the enterprise is also a major opportunity: data. Or, rather, the sheer amount of it that is available to teams across every business area.
Whereas most enterprises used common traditional performance metrics like revenue growth and efficiency, the digital era we are in now has opened up the possibility of many more data points.
From customer lifetime value to employee engagement scores, you can slice and dice performance data in any number of ways—if you know what you want to measure.
At RingCentral, we routinely work with enterprise customers to improve performance from an employee productivity, customer experience, and revenue perspective, just to name a few.
Let’s take a look at 14 real-world examples of how to measure performance in enterprises.
14 Key metrics for measuring enterprise performance
In enterprises, there are a few lenses we can look at performance through:
Customer-centric metrics
No matter what industry your business is in, you have to serve customers or clients. It’s essential to monitor a set of metrics that reflect factors like customer satisfaction and retention, which are relevant to business growth and forecasting future staffing demands. Here are a few examples of key CX (customer experience) metrics commonly used in contact centers:
- Abandonment rate: In contact centers, this is the percentage of customers or prospective customers who end a conversation before they are connected to a human (or AI) agent.
- Average speed of answer (ASA): The average length of time it takes to answer a phone call or message inquiry from a customer.
- Average handle time (AHT): The average duration of a conversation. Although it’s beneficial for agents to resolve issues more quickly, the goal isn’t to get AHT as low as possible because you risk agents rushing through conversations without solving problems to the customers’ satisfaction. For example, in RingCX, you can easily see AHT among other customer-related metrics in one convenient dashboard:
- After-call work time: The amount of time agents have to spend on wrap-up tasks after their conversation with a customer, e.g., typing up notes in the CRM and scheduling other follow-up tasks.
- CSAT (customer satisfaction) score: A number that measures how happy customers are—typically with a specific interaction, but can also be used for a product or service.
- NPS (Net Promoter Score): Measures how likely your customers are to recommend your brand or products to their networks. Based on the NPS they give you, customers are typically categorized as Detractors, Passives, and Promoters.
Employee productivity metrics
Now, let’s look at productivity through an employee lens. It’s important to note that even among enterprises, there is an extremely wide range of approaches. For example, some businesses such as Hitachi measure productivity using only one metric (worker happiness)—a shift that resulted in employees’ psychological capital rising by 33%, profits increasing 10%, sales per hour at Hitachi’s call centers increasing 34%, and retail sales increasing 15%.
For enterprises that don’t want to take such a singular approach, there are other productivity metrics to consider, such as:
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- Revenue per employee: A straightforward and direct measurement, but McKinsey acknowledges that it is “a blunt instrument, and it is influenced by factors beyond productivity, including brand name and go-to-market approach, market share, type of products and services offered, and operating model.”
- Time / workflow savings: Measures how much time employees save on specific tasks. For example, US Renal Care, the third largest dialysis provider in the United States with over 7,000 employees, tackled employee productivity with a multi-pronged approach—that was focused on their communications system.
“RingCentral Contact Center has improved so many aspects of our standard workflows,” says Marcus Burks, Senior Network Director. “We’re now able to record calls, let our supervisors monitor calls live, which is great for training and onboarding, and we can make the right scripts easily accessible to our agents in real-time.” - eNPS (employee Net Promoter Score): A good proxy for “worker happiness,” but instead of relying on data from wearables, it uses explicit feedback from employees. Also groups employees based on feedback into Detractors, Passives, and Promoters.
- Attrition rate: The percentage of employees who leave a company over a certain time period.
- Business-specific productivity metrics. For example, Ryder is a fleet management, supply chain, and logistics company with over 40,000 employees, and operates a high-volume contact center.
But besides typical agent productivity numbers, they also consider the ease with which the team can pivot when needed. “Those 180 agents are all working remotely, and they’re handling 30,000 calls in an average month,” says David Bartos, Senior Telecom Manager. “But because they can join call queues and take calls so easily from their laptops, that team hasn’t missed a beat.”
Operational efficiency metrics
Finally, enterprises should consider general operational efficiency metrics that typically relate to how efficiently the business earns revenue and spends:
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- Resource utilization: Measures how much of the available resources the business is using, and helps you ensure you’re getting the maximum ROI possible.
- Customer retention rate / churn rate: The rate at which customers stay with your business (or churn out) in a given period of time. According to McKinsey, a common factor in companies that fail to achieve sustainable growth is that they put too much focus on short-term acquisition and not enough investment on retention, also called the “acquisition trap.”
- Customer acquisition cost: How much it costs your business to acquire a new customer. Includes marketing campaigns costs, your sales teams’ salaries, and so on.
Hit your KPIs with RingCentral’s AI enterprise communications platform
To monitor and track your enterprise’s key metrics, you need tools that come with built-in dashboards that make it easy to pull data you need. RingCentral’s platform consolidates all your communications-related data—from voice calls to live chat to social media messaging and more—into a single pane of glass and empowers your teams to track these critical metrics efficiently.
Book a demo with our team to learn more about RingCentral and its enterprise-ready AI solutions today. [link TBD]
Originally published Jan 14, 2025
