SLA's in Callcenter

[ragsy]

I am looking at fixing a service level for a new cc set up. The agents would be answering queries on subscription, renewal, general tech related calls.

Any suggestions on this would be welcome.

[pgoldberg]

This is a difficult question without a lot of considerations. The first areas to look at are the point where you will lose customers (average abandon time) and the tolerance you have for losses along with the frequency of callback. In many tech support areas, 80% of the calls waiting less than 5 minutes is acceptable. If you are going to be focusing more on sales, 80% in 20 seconds is generally the way to go. Depending on your call setup, you may even want to assign different service levels depending on the incoming call type. In the end, the purpose of service level is to ensure you are providing efficient service to a majority of callers with some flexibility built in to avoid illogical staffing decisions.

When you say SLA's that usually involves a third-party having certain expectations. In that case, your goal is to find the lowest service level with the longest wait time they are willing to accept on paper, and then setting a higher internal standard. On an 80/20 service level, if abandon rates will be part of the discussion, get the third party to 4% and set internal to 2% and you should make both of them without a problem.

[ragsy]

Hi,

Thank you for your prompt reply. What you have mentioned makes sense to an extent. The team of agents would not be handling a high end tech support call but i would say it will be a mediocre level of remote support.

Now, the hold time or the wait time in question......we should be ok with the customers having to wait for about 30-40 seconds. Our call patterns so far have not shown much of abandonement except for 10-11 calls getting abandoned during the peak hours of the day.

So my question again would be to what extent my staffing would play a role in setting the SLA's?

[sidsuri]

Hi,

You would need to quote the call volume expected to be handled per week/month alongwith peak & off peak hours Estimated AHT(Average handled time) would arrive to calculation of SLA's and pricing.Some of the attributes would be:

Average Speed of Answer (ASA)
Abandon rate (%)
Avg. Talk Time (ATT)
First Time Resolution rate (FTR%)
Customer Satisfaction (Survey response)
TAT (turn around time)

Please feel free to contact if any questions.

[n_meghanath]

The most important factor for SL is staffing. 1 agent makes a whole lot of difference in SL. The more staff you have the SL will be more and the telephone occupancy and the staff utlization would become lesser. so you may want to set the telephone occupancy at about 70% (more than 80% may lead to agent burnt out) and find out how much call an agent can handle in a duration against the call load and pattern. Based on that you can calculate the SL by calculating the probable no. of calls answered between the service threshold.