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One of the most important aspects of making effective outbound contact is monitoring your ongoing performance, helping you identify what you need to change in order to improve results.

In this guide, we’ve explained seven of the most important metrics it’s worth measuring when making outbound contact, and how to use them to improve performance.

By monitoring these datapoints on an ongoing basis, you can more effectively troubleshoot any issues you are experiencing with your campaign, whether they be related to efficiency, outcomes, or compliance.

Before we begin though, if you’re looking for a software solution that helps you make better outbound contact at scale, while ensuring compliance, learn more about contactSPACE outbound plugins and APIs for Twilio, Amazon Connect, Zoom Contact Center, and other communications and contact center platforms.

Table of Contents

• 1. Contact rate
• 2. Conversion rate
• 3. Average handle time (AHT)
• 4. List penetration
• 5. Abandonment rate
• 6. Attempts per record
• 7. Speed to lead
• Final advice

1. Contact rate

Your contact rate is one of the best ways to assess the quality of the contact you are making.

This metric measures the proportion of calls made that result in a conversation with a real person.

The contact rate measures the effectiveness of your outbound contact strategy, such as whether you are calling people at the right time of day when they are likely to pick up the phone, and whether you are calling live phone numbers, rather than wasting dial attempts on answering machines and disconnected numbers.

The more contacts you can make per day, the more successful your outbound contact will be, so this metric is something that many outbound teams pay very close attention to.

• Industry average contact rate: 13-17%
• Good contact rate: 20%+

Here at contactSPACE, our outbound contact solutions have helped a number of businesses achieve a 20-40% or higher increase in contact rates, using strategies such as:

• Calling-line identification (CLID) rotation – displaying different phone numbers on different dial attempts and carefully monitoring CLID reputation, to increase the likelihood of the call being answered.
• Smart dial attempt logic – immediately discarding disconnected numbers, and limiting attempts to numbers that contactSPACE detects are unlikely to pick up.
• Call-time optimization – reaching people at the time of day they are most likely to answer the phone, such as when they finish work or are on their lunch break.

2. Conversion rate

Arguably the most important outbound contact center metric is your conversion rate.

This KPI measures the percentage of contacts made that result in an intended outcome for your business, such as a sale, donation, subscription, or booking.

Your conversion rate reflects a few different aspects of the effectiveness of your contact strategy. For example:

• In your dataset, are you reaching people who are most likely to convert at any given moment? Ideally, you should constantly be prioritizing your best leads to call throughout the day, and pushing them to the front of the dialing queue.
• Are your agents communicating effectively? Are they equipped to properly convey the value of your offer to each individual customer?
• Is your data quality good? Are you making right-party contact, meaning you are reaching the decision-maker for your offer?

Therefore, if your conversion rate is not as high as you would like it to be, you often need to look at other more specific metrics to determine the type of problem you are experiencing.

• Industry average conversion rate: 2-3% (can vary by industry, especially B2C vs B2B)
• Good conversion rate: 4-5%+ when cold calling, or 10-15% or higher with good-quality data

You can also measure your conversion rate against the total number of calls made to get a wider picture of your overall performance, as opposed to just your performance after successfully making contact.

3. Average handle time (AHT)

Average handle time (AHT) refers to the total amount of time it takes agents to complete a customer interaction.

This is quite a holistic metric which is mostly used to measure efficiency.

For example, if you notice that your conversion rate or number of conversions per day drops, and AHT increases, this could indicate that agent efficiency is the reason behind the performance decline.

To improve AHT, it’s often best to focus on reducing prep time and post-call work time, helping agents to become more efficient. For example, switching from preview to progressive dialing, or using autowrap functionality, which is available to contactSPACE customers.

However, it’s not generally a good idea to simply try and reduce AHT as much as possible, because it also comprises talk time with the customer.

Having a longer talk time is often a good thing, within reason, as it indicates customer interest in and engagement with your offer.

• Industry average AHT: 6 minutes
• Good AHT: 4-5 minutes (but this depends significantly on your campaign, specifically how much prep time agents need in order to do a good job, and how long they should spend talking to achieve your desired call outcome)

4. List penetration

List penetration measures your contact center’s overall outbound efficiency.

This metric refers to the proportion of your dataset that has been marked with a final outcome, such as a customer answering the phone, a sale, or a disconnected number.

The quicker your list penetration advances, the faster you are working through the data you have on-hand. And the quicker you go, the more positive results you can potentially achieve per day.

However, there are nuances to this metric it is important to keep in mind.

You don’t necessarily want to increase list penetration by making a record easier to assign an outcome to, for example by reducing the number of attempts before classifying a record as unreachable.

Instead, you generally want to improve list penetration by improving contact rates, dialing more intelligently, and moving through dead numbers and handling voicemail inboxes more quickly.

There is no industry average or target value to aim for when it comes to list penetration, because it depends on the size of your list and how recently you began using it.

Note that some teams define list penetration as the proportion of records that have been called at least once (also known as “list coverage”), but this is generally a less useful metric to assess.

5. Abandonment rate

When predictive dialing, your abandonment rate is one of the most important things you need to keep on top of.

This metric refers to the percentage of calls that are abandoned, meaning that the customer picks up the phone and has no agent available to speak to them.

Having high abandonment rates can lead to a poor customer experience. However, in many jurisdictions, it can also raise compliance concerns as well.

Under TCPA rules in the United States, no more than 3% of telemarketing calls in a single campaign may be abandoned in a 30-day period. Many other regulators such as Ofcom in the United Kingdom also have similar rules in place.

• Industry abandonment rate: 1-2%
• Good abandonment rate: 1% or less

6. Attempts per record

We pay particular attention to this metric at contactSPACE because it can have a significant impact on outbound dialing performance.

Attempts per record refers to the average number of dial attempts made for each record (phone number) in your dataset.

This metric is about striking a balance:

• If each record is being called too many times, this means your team is wasting time calling numbers that are not going to be picked up. This is quite a common mistake we see some outbound-focused contact centers making.
• If each record is being called too few times, for example if the dialer is giving up after just one or two attempts, this can indicate that potentially valuable leads are being left uncontacted, resulting in your team effectively leaving money on the table.

To make the most effective outbound contact possible, it’s best to be more intelligent about the dial attempts being made, to maximize the likelihood that each call will be picked up.

As we mentioned earlier in the article, if a number is disconnected or otherwise unreachable, contactSPACE will discard it immediately.

If the call reaches a voicemail inbox, contactSPACE will attempt it again but change strategy: for example, calling at a different time of day, or calling with a different CLID, to maximize the chances of the call being answered.

If contact still cannot be made, the number will be shelved to ensure no more time is being wasted on it.

• Industry average attempts per record: 6-7 attempts
• Good attempts per record: 4-5 attempts

The better your contact strategy, the better your contact rates will be, and your attempts per record will fall as well.

7. Speed to lead

Many contactSPACE customers make outbound contact to people who submit a form on their website.

Speed to lead measures the average amount of time it takes for a lead to be contacted after submitting their details.

Reaching out to a lead quickly is extremely important in many industries, especially in situations where the prospect may have submitted their details to multiple different websites one after another.

To improve this metric, there are a few things to look at:

• Your lead prioritization logic. Using contactSPACE, you can use first-in first-out (FIFO) prioritization, ensuring that new records get pushed to the front of the queue immediately, while still allowing your team to work through other data you have on-hand.
• Your broader contact strategy. There are a number of other potential issues related to campaign setup that can affect your speed to lead. For example, if predictive dialing and your abandonment rate is high, you may abandon many of the leads that are coming into your contact center.
• Staffing levels. If understaffed, certain leads may fall through the cracks.
• Average handle time. If records are not being completed efficiently, you may not have enough resources available to reach out to every lead on a timely basis.

For best results, speed to lead is best measured in terms of minutes, but many businesses still take hours or even days to return customer enquiries.

• Industry average speed to lead: 12-24 hours
• Good speed to lead: 5 minutes or less (during business hours)

Final advice

The secret to improving most of these metrics is to make smarter outbound contact.

Rather than by increasing call volumes, many of our customers here at contactSPACE have managed to improve their contact and conversion rates by using intelligent contact strategies such as CLID rotation, call time optimization, and record prioritization.

If you’d like to learn more about our outbound contact solutions for other communications platforms, and the strategies we use to help our customers achieve better outbound outcomes, read about contactSPACE Intelligent Outbound or contact us today.