Service Level Definition?

[DaveA]

Need some help - there is a discussion around the correct definition of service level and how to measure. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Service Level is the percentage of calls answered with in a given threshold relative to:

(a) The number of calls answered
(b) The number of calls offered

For example - if I get 100 calls, abandon 10, and answer 70 of the remaining calls in 30seconds (30s is my measurement threshold) is my service level

SL = 70/100 = 70.0%
or
SL = 70/90 = 77.8%

[felix]

Personally, I would go with the first approach. It gives more information on what the real customer experience is.

The most popular approach according to Cleveland and Mayben is:

Calls answered and abandoned within Y seconds/Total calls offered

Regards

[Chr1s]

Service level is a value, which determines the the waiting-time for callers and its probability.

An example:

An 80/20-Servicelevel means, that 80 percent of all callers have to wait less than 20 seconds until they can speak to an agent.
Starting from that every caller has an unlimited patience and you have an unlimited number of lines, every caller will be served. In this case a randomly picked caller has an 80 percent-probability that his waiting time will be less than 20 seconds.

So I also would go with the first approach.


Chr1s

[kala]

How service level is calculated depends on how your Switch or Workforce Management system calculates Service Level. Ours calculates service level as:
# of calls answered within objective/total calls received

Total calls received includes abandon calls.

Different companies report this service level in different ways - I have seen no one solution. It seems it is all determined by the software that calculates the service level. Hope this helps.

[JoeB]

Dave,

The “correct” definition of measured SL should be driven by overall business objectives and, specifically, the business importance of abandoned calls. Call centers that contribute to sales, either directly or through upselling and cross-selling, should treat any abandoned call as a missed opportunity, and incorporate the number of abandoned calls in the SL calculation as per the first approach you proposed.

Conversely, if you provide unique a service and callers that abandon will eventually call back, you can use the second formula.

There are additional variations of these formulae that look more closely at the type of abandonment: short abandons, abandon during the VRU message and so forth, allowing you to better reflect both customer expectations and business objectives.

As Kala noted, different ACDs may use different approaches and it is important to ensure that the SL they report matches your strategy and the target SL you set for your operation! Some ACDS allow you to select from a list of several SL calculation algorithms.

You can read more about the business perspective of abandoned calls in http://www.diagnosticstrategies.com/abandonment.htm and about SL calculations in http://www.diagnosticstrategies.com/service_level.htm (an updated version will be posted early next week)

Hope this helps.

Joe

[n_meghanath]

The central idea of this discussion seems to be "whether to include abandoned within threshold in calculating Service level".
As JoeB has clearly indicated we have various types of abandon. For instance if someone abandoned during IVR (provided we don't have IVR options more than 4/5) or abandoned during the first 10 sec than we might say they are too impatient to be counted in our calculation. However if you have set the threshold as 30 sec I believe that is what you have come up as the most appropriate threshold (I believe your customer is patient enough to wait for 30 sec for the kind of service he wish to get).