Gauging Staff Success: 4 Crucial KPIs You Need To Measure For A Fruitful Front Desk Performance Review

The front desk has a significant impact on the customer experience. Thus, to create the ideal customer experience, you need to enhance your front desk.

Conducting front desk performance reviews is crucial to identifying the strengths and weaknesses of your front desk staff. One of the best ways to drive your reviews is by using key performance indicators (KPIs), which clearly show how your front desk is performing in certain areas.

There are 4 KPIs that you should measure to make your front desk performance reviews fruitful.

Here’s what you need to know:

4 Essential Front Desk Performance Review KPIs

Customer Satisfaction

The American Society For Quality (ASQ) defines customer satisfaction as a measurement of how satisfied customers are with a business’s products, services, and overall experience.

Your front desk plays a vital role in achieving customer satisfaction from the moment a customer engages with your business. Therefore, customer satisfaction is an essential metric determining how well your front desk delivers an excellent customer experience.

How to measure customer satisfaction

Distribute customer satisfaction surveys that ask your customers to rate their experience with your business’s customer service.

There are various types of customer satisfaction surveys, with the most popular being:

• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) – A general score that a customer gives to summarize their experience, usually with a range of 1-5 or 1-10 (e.g., “How satisfied are you with our service?”). Add all the CSATs and divide the sum by the number of respondents to gauge your company’s average CSAT.
• Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) – Individual weighted scores for specific areas of the customer experience (e.g., “How satisfied are you with the responsiveness of our customer service?”, “How satisfied are you with your wait time?”). Add all the individual scores for each question, divide the sum by the number of respondents, then add scores for all questions in a specific area and divide them by the number of questions in the same category.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) – A single score from 1-10 that a customer gives to measure how likely they are to promote your business to a friend or family member. To get a clear picture of your NPS, calculate the mean, median, and mode of the NPS values.

Resolution Rate

Resolution rate is a metric that gauges how well a front desk can resolve customer inquiries or complaints.
An effective front desk can resolve customer interactions within the first contact with the visitor without escalating to other staff.

How to measure the resolution rate

There are many types of metrics that measure the resolution rate. The two most important metrics that you should consider are:

• First contact resolution rate (FCRR) – The ratio of interactions that were resolved within first contact (net FCR) to interactions that required more than one contact to conclude (gross FCR). FCRR is calculated by dividing net FCR by gross FCR.
• First-level resolution rate (FLRR) – The ratio of interactions that were resolved by front desk staff (net FLR) to interactions that required involvement from other staff to settle at the front desk (gross FLR). FLRR is calculated by dividing net FLR by gross FLR.

Receptionist Utilization Rate

The receptionist utilization rate measures how productive a receptionist is relative to their total number of working hours per year.

Underutilized receptionists do less work than they should be performing based on their roles and responsibilities. This means you’re limiting their potential return on investment (ROI) and incurring unnecessary costs.

On the other hand, an overutilized receptionist is performing significantly more work than they should be doing. This causes stress and burnout in the long run, which affects their performance, well-being, and ROI.

How to measure receptionist utilization

Receptionist utilization is calculated by dividing the total number of billable hours by the total number of hours available in a year and multiplying the quotient by 100.

Depending on your staff training goals, you can measure receptionist utilization as a year-to-date (YTD) metric or quarterly metric, depending on your staff training goals.

The most optimal receptionist utilization is anywhere between 75% to 90%. Anywhere below 75% is considered underutilization, and higher than 90% indicates overutilization.

Job Satisfaction

A meta-analysis of various studies explored the relationship between job satisfaction and employee performance. It discovered that the average correlation between the two factors is 30. While this correlation is considered “moderate,” it indicates that job satisfaction notably impacts staff performance.

In other words, happy front desk staff perform better than those unsatisfied.

How to measure staff satisfaction

Using employee satisfaction surveys allows you to gauge how satisfied your staff is with specific areas of their work.

For example, you can ask them to use a scale of 1 to 10 to answer the following questions:

• How satisfied are you with your current work?
• How well are you working alongside your fellow staff?
• How engaged are you with your role regularly?

Consider looking at front desk staff turnover, as receptionists may be leaving due to dissatisfaction with their work.

Tips For Effective Front Desk Performance Review

Having these 4 KPIs in your front desk performance review will help you gather more critical insights to create effective data-driven decisions for improving front desk performance.

To make your performance review even more effective, here are some tips to help you.

• Constantly review your metrics. Depending on your staffing goals, you may incorporate new KPIs or place a lower premium on some current KPIs over time.
• Avoid making decisions solely on the numbers. Besides quantitative data, front desk performance consists of qualitative factors such as teamwork, camaraderie, and communication. Qualitative data is also crucial before deciding to improve front desk performance.
• Evaluate front desk performance with other managers. Having fresh pairs of eyes helps you analyze the data from an unbiased perspective.

Manage And Track Your Front Desk Success

Understanding your front desk performance is vital to identifying the best approach to training your receptionists for a better customer experience.

Learn how WelcomeWare’s virtual receptionist services can help you improve your front desk performance, enabling your staff to perform all their responsibilities remotely across all your locations, which you can track through an intuitive reporting dashboard on virtual receptionist software.