Call Centre Benchmarking Australia
If your business has a call centre in Australia, knowing how you are performing from an independent, external third party can provide you with valuable insights to help you improve the quality and efficiency of your call centre operations.
And we’d know!
As Australia’s leading industry association for call centres, we literally wrote the guidelines on best practice call centre operations and offer a range of training courses, networking events, resources, and support tools to help Australian businesses deliver global best practice contact centre operations.
However, when it comes to Call Centre Benchmarking in Australia, it can mean different things to different people.
On this page, we’ll outline the different types of call centre benchmarking services available for call centres in Australia and how ACXPA can help you gain the insights you need, along with the resources, tools, and support to improve your call centre’s performance.
So whether you want to see generic call centre industry data, call centre benchmarking data on your competitors or quality assurance assessments for your own call centre, we’ve got you covered!
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 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 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.
Australian Call Centre Industry Benchmarks – Mystery Shopping
Each month, we publish the Australia Call Centre Rankings that provide Voice of Customer (VOC) Insights into the performance of call centres across Australia.
The important distinction here is that Mystery Shopping is based on real calls, not self reported data, and is designed to capture the experience that customers encounter when trying to connect to a call centre in Australia.
We currently publish call centre benchmarking data for six key business sectors: Banks, Car Insurance, Councils, Energy Retailers, Internet Retailers and TAFE/Education as well as overall industry data.
There is a wealth of information captured from over 80 metrics, including:
- Average wait times
- Calls answered percentage
- Menu Navigation Layers
- If call back options were offered
- Type of IVR used
- Message time
- The quality of the call centre agent assessed against the 18 competencies and behaviours of the Australian Call Centre Quality Standards.
- Lots more!
You can view the latest Australian Call Centre Rankings here, or you can see specific sector information on these links: Banks, Car Insurance, Councils, Energy Retailers, Internet Retailers and TAFE/Education.
There is free Australian Call Centre Benchmarking data/information available on the website, and ACXPA Members gain access to additional insights including monthly downloads, lifetime averages and summary data for three call centres per industry sector each month.
Benchmarking to compare with other call centres
Whilst looking at call centre industry benchmarking data can provide some valuable insights, knowing exactly how your competitors are performing steps things up another notch!
We now offer a Contact Centre CX Mystery Shopping service that compares the performance of your call centre to ANY FIVE competitors you nominate in the same industry sector.
This will provide you with Voice of Customer (VoC) insights garnered from over 80 metrics enabling you to gain exclusive insights into the performance of your call centre, and your competitors and, importantly, have data that enables you to take actions to improve your performance.
You’ll be able to compare performance on a range of metrics, plus you’ll receive the call recordings of your call centre interactions and our assessor’s notes.
Metrics include:
- How long it took to navigate menu options
- How long customers had to listen to recorded messages
- How long it took to connect a live agent
- Wait Time
- Talk Time
- The quality of the call centre agent across 5 core competencies and 18 individual behaviours.
Gaining insights into your performance and your competitors is obviously very powerful, but translating those insights into actions that improve performance is the ultimate benefit.
ACXPA offers Australia’s best training courses specifically designed for call centres aligned to the Australia Call Centre Standards. We have courses available for frontline employees and team leaders, as well as specialist courses such as call centre management and workforce optimisation.
ACXPA members also gain exclusive access to global contact centre best practices.
From the ACXPA Member Bites Video Library containing expert videos to help you improve performance, private support groups, networking tools and a host of resources you can download – all our resources are designed to help you and your team improve performance.
Call Quality Assessments for your own call centre
Whilst Mystery Shopping can provide some great insights, it does have its limitations:
- It does not capture the experience for all customer calls, as we are only able to test situations in which we can remain anonymous. This means that calls from existing customers regarding complaints, orders, service enquiries, etc., are not captured.
- It does not enable us to assess all agents – it’s just the luck of the draw (well the IVR really 😜) on which agent answers the call that we assess.
The good news is we are still able to assess your calls in the above situations with a slight modification.
You send us the call recordings to assess!
This enables us to assess your performance against the Australian Call Centre Quality Standards; plus, we can also assess compliance metrics specific to you, such as asking for ID verification, correct greetings, provision of name, reference numbers, etc.
We can either assess calls for every agent or a selection of calls that you send to us.
Having some or all of your calls assessed by an independent third party provides a range of benefits including:
- It can free up internal resources such as team leaders and QA staff.
- Providing you with an unbiased perspective, ensuring that the assessments are free from internal biases or influences.
- It can complement any internal quality assessment with an independent perspective (a common approach is to send us 2-3 calls per agent and the rest are conducted by your internal resources).
- As all calls sent to us are assessed by specially trained real humans, it can remove any technical/interpretation issues with automated quality assessments using AI/Speech Recognition.
Regardless of which approach suits you best, the insights gained will enable you to help improve the performance of your employees via targeted coaching and training.
