Transfer Rate
The share of contacts an agent hands to another agent, team, or department rather than resolving in place.
Transfer rate % = (transferred contacts / total contacts handled) x 100Transfer rate is the share of contacts that one agent passes to another agent, team, or department instead of resolving themselves. It reads as a routing-and-competence signal: transfers happen because the customer landed in the wrong queue, or because the agent who picked up couldn't finish the job. Unlike escalation, which moves a case up a tier for more authority or expertise, a transfer is usually lateral — sideways to whoever should have owned it in the first place.
You calculate it as transferred contacts divided by total contacts handled, times 100. It is trivial to instrument, which is part of why it gets watched.
What it hides: the rate counts hops, not harm. Every transfer makes the customer repeat themselves, and a cold transfer that drops all the context is far worse than a warm handoff — yet both increment the same counter. It also masks ping-ponging: a customer bounced across three queues shows up as several separate transfers, spreading the blame so no single team owns the mess. And a low transfer rate can mean clean routing or agents grinding through cases they should have passed on, quietly wrecking handle time and FCR.