Call Centre Benchmarking Australia
If your business operates a call centre in Australia, understanding your performance from an independent, third-party perspective is invaluable. The insights gained can help improve both the quality and efficiency of your operations.
And when it comes to call centre benchmarking, we’ve got you covered!
As Australia’s leading industry association for call centres, we literally wrote the guidelines for best practice operations and offer a range of training courses, networking events, resources, and support tools to assist Australian businesses in delivering global best practices in contact centre management.
Call Centre Benchmarking in Australia can mean different things to different people.
On this page, we’ll walk you through the various benchmarking services available for Australian call centres and how ACXPA can help you gain the insights you need.
Along with access to the resources, tools, and support that will help improve your contact centre’s performance.
Whether you want to gain access to industry-wide data, compare your centre’s performance against competitors, or receive quality assurance assessments for your own call centre, ACXPA has the solutions to support your business’s success.
Australian Call Centre Rankings
Each month, we publish the Australian Call Centre Rankings, offering Voice of Customer (VOC) insights into the performance of call centres across Australia.
What makes this unique is that our rankings are based on Mystery Shopping—real calls made to assess the customer experience.
This method provides authentic insights, capturing the experience customers have when trying to connect with a call centre, as opposed to relying on self-reported data.
Currently, we offer benchmarking data for seven key business sectors: Aged Care, Banks, Car Insurance, Councils, Energy Retailers, Internet Retailers, and Education Providers, along with overall industry data.
In this free industry data, we focus on five key metrics that directly impact customer experience:
1. Agent Mastery – Evaluates the quality of live agent interactions, focusing on critical soft skills like empathy, communication, and problem-solving.
2. Accessibility – Measures how easy it is for customers to connect with a live agent, including factors like wait times, menu navigation, and IVR systems.
3. Calls Answered Percentage – Tracks the percentage of calls answered within a defined time frame.
4. Average Wait Time – Captures how long customers wait to speak with an agent, highlighting the efficiency of the contact centre.
5. Overall CX – Provides a holistic view of the customer journey, measuring the overall experience from the first point of contact to resolution.
Currently, we report these key metrics for seven business sectors: Aged Care, Banks, Car Insurance, Councils, Education Providers, Energy Retailers and Internet Retailers.
While the free Australian Call Centre Rankings give you a snapshot of industry performance, ACXPA Members and Subscribers enjoy exclusive access to additional benchmarking insights, including:
• Monthly and quarterly data downloads
• Industry trend data
• Lifetime averages
• Results for three randomly selected call centres per sector each month and quarter
For those seeking deeper insights, our Contact Centre CX Benchmarking service (below) compares your contact centre’s performance against five competitors of your choice across over 80 metrics.
Members receive a discount on this service, making it the most comprehensive benchmarking tool available.
To explore more detailed information specific to your sector, visit the Australian Call Centre Industry Rankings page >
Contact Centre CX Benchmarking Service
To truly understand how your contact centre is performing, you need more than just industry-wide comparisons.
ACXPA’s Contact Centre CX Benchmarking Service offers detailed insights by comparing your contact centre’s performance against five competitors of your choice across over 80 key metrics.
This paid service evaluates three core dimensions of performance:
• Accessibility: Assess how easily customers can connect with your contact centre, including metrics like IVR navigation, wait times, and queue management. It helps you measure and optimise the ease of access for your customers.
• Agent Mastery: Gain insights into the quality of your agents’ customer interactions. This includes a detailed analysis across five core competencies—Engage, Discover, Educate, Close, and Energy—and 18 specific soft skills and behaviours that are critical to improving customer satisfaction and driving business outcomes.
• Overall CX: Understand the full customer journey, from the initial point of contact to resolution. This comprehensive analysis helps identify opportunities to improve your contact centre’s performance across every stage of the customer experience.
Whether you’re a visitor, subscriber, or ACXPA member, this benchmarking service provides the insights you need to optimise your contact centre.
ACXPA Members also enjoy a discount on this service, further enhancing the value of your membership.
To explore how this service can help you elevate your contact centre performance, visit our Contact Centre CX Benchmarking Service page.
Call Quality Assessments for your own call centre
While Mystery Shopping offers valuable insights, it does have limitations:
• Limited Call Coverage: Mystery shopping only captures calls in situations where we can remain anonymous, meaning it doesn’t cover calls from existing customers dealing with complaints, orders, or service inquiries.
• Agent Variability: The assessment is limited to whichever agent answers the call, meaning we don’t get a full view of agent performance across all team members.
Our Solution: Send Us Your Call Recordings
We can still assess the full range of your calls by having you send us your call recordings for evaluation. This allows us to:
• Assess performance across all agents
• Measure adherence to the Australian Call Centre Quality Standards
• Evaluate specific compliance metrics such as ID verification, greetings, and reference number provision
This service ensures that you receive an independent, unbiased assessment of your team’s performance, providing you with actionable data to improve customer service quality.
Benefits of Independent Call Quality Assessments
• Free Up Internal Resources: External assessments allow your team leaders and QA staff to focus on other tasks.
• Unbiased Perspective: Gain an independent view, free from internal influences or biases.
• Complement Internal Assessments: Use this service alongside your internal quality checks for a more thorough evaluation.
• Human-Driven Evaluation: Calls are assessed by specially trained humans, ensuring greater accuracy and removing potential issues with AI/Speech Recognition systems.
By sending us your call recordings, you can identify areas for improvement and implement targeted coaching and training programs, driving better outcomes across your contact centre.
Australian Call Centre Industry Benchmarks – Self Reported
With hundreds of call centre metrics and thousands of call centres all over Australia, knowing how you compare to others is a natural curiosity!
The Australia Call Centre Industry Benchmarking Report, published by the team at Smaart Recruitment, provides valuable insights each year.
Yes, it may sound a bit weird that an industry benchmarking report is managed by a recruitment agency, but the truth is that in 2019, when it first commenced, none of the industry associations at the time produced any benchmarking data, so it was left to the private sector to come up with a solution.
Smaart Recruitment, led by James Witcombe, made the most of the opportunity.
Their report has grown each year to be the peak industry report for call centre benchmarking in Australia and their annual roadshow, which releases the annual results, is a sell-out in every state and is attended by over 1,500 contact centre professionals across Australia.
ACXPA has been a proud partner of the report since 2019, with CEO Justin Tippett contributing each year. We actively promote and support the roadshow and online events each year.
The data collated is obtained from call centres all across Australia (over 300 call centres in 2024) making it by far the largest and most data-rich report in Australia, with a good cross-section of public and private sector call centres of all shapes and sizes contributing to the data.
The production of the report is funded through the support of sponsors which makes the 160+ page report completely free to obtain with a hard copy and soft copy of the data available by the Smaart Recruitment website.
Each year, the latest data is announced at events live around Australia and following the event, each attendee receives a copy of the report.
Smaart Recruitment are also now producing an update to each section of the report that will be released later in the year.
What type of benchmarking metrics are available?
With over 160 pages there is no shortage of data!
Whilst the chapters/sections can vary each year, recent chapters include Remote & Flexible Working, Digital Transformation, Artificial Intelligence, Self-Service, Absenteeism and Attendance, Employee Engagement, Innovation & Continous Improvement, Contact Centre Performance, Customer Experience, Workforce Planning & Optimisation, Knowledge Management, the Role of Team Leaders, Recruitment, Salaries and Bonuses, and lots more so you’re bound to find some valuable data to explore.
