METRICS
BY ROBERT BRADSHAW, WISEROWL
ILLUSTRATION PROVIDED BY ADOBE STOCK
YOUR METRICS ARE ACCURATE … AND MISLEADING AND HERE’ S HOW TO FIX THEM.
For decades, contact centers have been managed by the same familiar scorecard.
• Average handle time( AHT)
• Service levels
• CSAT
• Cost per contact
• NPS
There’ s a reason 85 % of contact centers are leveraging these legacy metrics. They are tidy. They benchmark well.
They fit neatly into dashboards.
They also leave most executives with the same lingering question once the meeting ends:“ So what did this actually do for the business?”
That gap used to be survivable. It no longer is.
Margins are thinner. Scrutiny is higher. And AI has moved from experiment to expectation. Leaders are being asked to invest real money in automation, analytics, and self-service without a clear way to explain what success looks like in financial terms.
The problem is not a lack of data. The problem is that the data speaks a language few outside the contact center understand.
METRICS EXPLAIN ACTIVITY, NOT BUSINESS IMPACT
Operational metrics describe what happened. They do not explain why it mattered. For example …
• AHT tells you how long an agent stayed on the line. But it does not tell you whether that call prevented a cancelation, saved a renewal, or avoided a repeat contact tomorrow.
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