What is the proper way to measure callback rate?

There are many different ways to measure callback rate....probably as many ways as there are companies that measure it.

From my experience as a consultant, no two companies have measured it the same way, either due to data cleansing (or lack of data cleansing) or the time period at which a callback "counts".

So which way is the right way? I think each company should tailor their metric for their business, but many are not doing this properly.

First and foremost, callback rate should be continuous in terms of time interval. Knowing what the callback rate is on day 1,2,3, or 35 can identify unique business intelligence that can be acted upon. What I have seen from my experience is that customers callback on days 1-3 for one reason 5-15 for another, and 30-35 for quite another. Picking one particular day as a snapshot, does no service for any of these groups.

Secondly, data cleansing is the only way that you can ensure that callbacks are for the same or a different issue. This proves to be a challenging task and often it is probably not worth the time investment to do continuously. Therefore, I would recommend that this exercise be done once or twice a year.