Metrics for Telephone Calls

Here's a short overview of what I could find in terms of metrics used to measure telephone calls in organizations of the federal government. I based my findings on DPRs or Annual Reports. Only a surprisingly small number of organizations actually talk about the performance of their call centres.

Canada Revenue Agency:
Based on their 2005-06 Annual Report, caller accessibility measures the percentage of callers who succeed in reaching the telephone service, which basically means that the caller gets into the queue. Telephone service level is the percentage of calls answered within 2 minutes of entering the queue.

Service Canada:
Based on Service Canada Annual Report 2005-2006, Appendix 4 (Performance Scorecard) on page 37, it measures 3 things: the percentage of calls answered within 180 seconds (btw that’s 3 minutes guys… plain language writing…), percentage of Automated Telephone Information Service Usage (no reference to a page that explains how that works), % of calls blocked (EI High Volume Message) (which I take it means a busy signal).

Canada Business:
Based on their 2004-05 Annual Report, they seem to measure the volume of calls and do make a difference between automated and officer-assisted calls. They do have service standards, but they are very lax in terms of metrics, for example, their telephone service standard is: “Telephone service is available free of charge, generally from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Monday to Friday (except on holidays as they apply in each province). For exact service times, contact the centre in your province or territory. TTY is available for the hearing-impaired.”


Here are the links to the reports I used:

CRA Annual Report to Parliament 2005-06: http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/agency/annual/2005-2006/performance-e/ar_2005-06_htmlTOC-e.html

Service Canada Annual Report 2005-2006:
http://www.servicecanada.gc.ca/en/about/reports/ar_0506/pdf/ar_0506.pdf

Canada Business Annual Report 2004-05:
http://www.canadabusiness.ca/gol/cbec/site.nsf/vDownload/annual_reports/$file/canada_business_2004-2005_annual_report_en.pdf


Now for added fun, take a look at how dropped calls on automated lines are integrated in the measures. It would seem that most of the time, a call dropped on an automated line is considered as answered, the assumption being that the caller got the information he was looking for while going through the menus, or listening to the messages played while on hold.