Talkdesk Releases Latest Version of its Global Contact Center KPI Benchmark

Whether AI will ever entirely replace human beings in a customer support setting is a question for the future. As of today, advanced artificial intelligence is being designed to assist alongside human agents, not replace them. Since the vast majority of customer support queries are routine, offloading them to a smart virtual assistant can lead to human agents gaining back time to resolve complex or sensitive issues that require the human touch.

AI-based contact center solutions provider Talkdesk recently announced its latest Talkdesk Global Contact Center Key Performance Indicator (KPI) Benchmarking report. Announced during Customer Contact Week Las Vegas 2024, the report measures five traditional contact center performance metrics and indicates that amid surging inbound call volumes in 2023, AI helps organizations improve speed to answer, maintain service levels and more.

Some of the highlights of the report include:

Total inbound calls increased 21% to 390 million in 2023 across Talkdesk customers. In a positive outlook for rising AI usage, speed-to-answer rates improved significantly – down 13% to an average of 8.7 seconds – and service levels improved slightly to 75.61%.

While recruitment and attrition were challenges in 2023, AI-powered self-service solutions helped handle a portion of the large volumes of calls despite labor shortages. These results indicate that AI is enabling organizations to engage with customers faster, according to Talkdesk.

While the average service level was maintained from 2022 to 2023 (75.45% in 2022 vs. 75.6% in 2023), some industries achieved higher service levels, including retail and consumer goods (RCG) at 78.5%.

Overall, the report suggests that organizations deploying solutions specifically tailored for their vertical industries can accelerate contact center transformation with AI.

“As contact center managers operate in a radically changing, increasingly competitive landscape, benchmarking KPI data is invaluable to understand how their center operations measure up,” said Crendal Kear, Senior Vice President of Customer Success at Talkdesk. “Our customers have different goals, but we believe that learning from the collective experience is important as it reveals opportunities to prioritize success that likely wouldn’t surface from internal reflection.”