In your Call Center

[wannabe21]

Could anyone tell me what the Service Level for your CC Support Desk (Help Desk) is? A Help Desk that provides answers to agents from the main Service Center (CC). I am doing research and would be interested in how low or high a SL is for this particular desk.

[ragsy]

The service level for a helpdesk is very much dependant on if you are looking at this from your own project view or an outsourced project. If you are looking from your own project view, a service level of 70%/40secs is acceptable. Just to be clear on what I mentioned, 70% of the calls are answered within 40 seconds of landing into the queue. Again, an important factor to be kept in mind is the staffing, call projection, type of calls expected, knowledge base of the agents involved.

Ragsy

[wannabe21]

It is for a project, but if I get the data the SL will be changed in our company to either 75/30 or 80/40. Yes, I understand staffing is important. We currently maintain a 90/20 SL, but changing this will benifit our dept. in a few areas.

[ragsy]

OK, so my understanding is the flexibility of lowering the service level is of importance to facilitate or benefit your department. I would say, to whom does your helpdesk answer the calls? Internal employees or external customers? Coz this will be a very important factor in the long run in getting a high score on customer satisfaction, a dip stick study on the current 90/20 service level should help you in establishing if your callers are ok in setting a service level of 70/40.

[ctaylor]

Mark,
I think you need to look at what you trying to attain as a result of this exercise. If you are looking to save staff hours/dollars, thenn a reduced SLA will help you do it. If however the objective is get the call center agents to adhere to existing policies and proceedures; i.e. only to escalate calls to the help desk once they have exhausted the resources (knowledgebase etc) availble to them, then adjusted the SLA may not be the best choice.

If the agents are not following the procedures then you should address this issue by aligning the process with the desired outcome. There are a number of ways to do this, one might be to track the agents who refer call to the HD that they should have been able to answer. This can be completed by a closing entry by the HD staff on each call as to whether the call needed to be escalated. Once this is done you can identify and report on the non-compliant agents and direct training and coaching to improve this performance. In conjunction or seperately you could employ a carrot or stick approach. Reward agents who do not refer unnessasary calls to the HD or penalize staff who do. In either case 'calls escalated without merit' should be established as a metric that is reviewed related to performance reviews, promotions or rate increases. This will quickly focus the agents best interest in doing what is desired...in short you will attain alignment.

I hope that I have added value to this discussion. Please feel free to contact me directly if I can be of further assistance at ctaylor@thetaylorreachgroup.com .

Colin

[wannabe21]

No, this is just one reason why I would want to change the SL. There are others, such as, we are clearly over delivering, so lowering SL will help on occupancy and save money.