Email Support - Service Level Metrics

[ltaylor]

I'm looking for some guidance re: departmental and individual service level targets and standards for an inbound email support contact centre.

I'm very familiar with the standard metrics for a telephony centre e.g. TSF (% calls answered within x seconds), ASA (average speed of answer), agent login and handle time and true calls per hour etc...but need some guidance on what the service level metrics are for an inbound email centre.

Thanks...

[vipdesktim]

We typically use only two metrics for emails:

1. Average time to reply (not including auto response) - indicating how long it takes for an initial repsonse to go out.

2. Average time to close - which means average amount of time before the email and subsequent request are officially closed.

Because of the nature of our business, we also like to wrap other email stats into our overall requests (which includes phone), and look at the percentage of requests opened, responded to and closed at different intervals, although these are not part of our service level standards for now. Sample:

Date
#Opened
#Closed
#Closed < 3 hours
#Closed 3-6 hours
#Closed 6-24 hours
#Closed 24-48 hours
#Closed 48+ hours

Hope that helps -

Tim

[Boschen]

How do you collect data on the turn around time of email correspondence?

What is your target or standard turn around time?

Do you regularly perform email-monitoring?

Does all email that comes into your company pass through your email unit and then get trafficked, by a person, to knowledge experts in other areas as needed? Or does your system automatically - through rules or some other automated system - forward the emails to the knowledge experts?

[MikeRCC]

There are numerous solutions in the market that can systematically report turn time of email correspondence. Most can provide standard reports like: Number of Inbound/Outbound messages, who responded to them, how long did it take for one of your agents to reply, average time resolve, busiest time, etc.

Email Response systems allow for monitoring of email. A supervisor can easily review agent correspondence from today or 12 months ago. Agents can review the history of any correspondence your company has ever had with a given contact with a single click of a button.

Generally these systems are rules based, sending messages to appropriate queues where designated agents are assigned. Messages can be escalated/reassigned as needed.

Solutions include:

Kana
VisNetic Mailflow
email topia
Talisma
MailManager