Service Level Expectations

[brianduress]

I have a question for anyone who would like to respond that will help me benchmark our standards. What measurements are you held accountable to at your center, specifically with Service Level, Abandons, & ASA? Can you list what type of call center you are in, what measurements are requested and looked at by SR Level Management (Directors & Above), & how do they use the numbers to measure your performance (or your team....)? We have a goal of an 80/20 SL, but I am working to establish with my management team how often (or lack there of) we should hit that target daily and at the 1/2 hour interval level also...

Thanks

[Karsten Fuhrmann]

Hello,

do you think that the service-level is an important figure to measure? I know that this is quite provocative - but I believe that if a customer is in queue for 3 minutes, he doesn't care much about the fact that you solve 90% of the other customers are handled in 20 seconds.

It's a question what you want to measure.

[thetuan]

of course it's important to measure service level at the higher level (80% at 20 sec). It's also important to do proper intraday management and real time workforce management so you don't have any customer queueing for 3 minutes.

As with anything, it's not one thing that makes or breaks your operation but it's how you handle all the pieces of the puzzle that will make your call center operation a successful one.

Thanks

[healani]

I agree with Karsten in that customers don't understand service level nor do they even know what it is most of the time. Our company has changed to analyzing ASA rather than service level. With abandons you run into issues because you're dealing with customer behavior and trying to analyze that as well.

[Frank A. Engle]

Hello Brian!

To answer your question, your key performance indicators (KPI's)should be unique to your product, service, operation, vertical market and budget. No offense, but in this forum I doubt that you will get enough of a cross section of KPI's to effectively meet your needs

As for service level...sure...every company would like to answer 100% of their calls in 0 seconds if it was financially viable to do so...but unfortunately most call centers are not in that position. Via trunking, skills based routing and other tools they have to make hard decisions on who they want to serve 1st and who they want to wait.

I'm sorry that I cannot offer you a "silver bullet" when it comes to KPI's. In my consulting experience, benchmarking only get's you in the ballpark for your particular vertical market and ultimately a compelling business case is always needed to justify internal standards.

Feel free to call me for more information for your particular vertical.

Good Luck!

Frank A. Engle
Pivotal Connection

[JoeB]

This question, as your other question in this forum concerning SL, highlights a common problem: SL, as well as other performance targets, are often inherited and passed on from one manger to the next and become “standards”, with too little regard to how they relate to your business goals.

As others have noted, performance metrics should not be ascertained based on self-selecting, self-reporting individuals (this includes “standard” benchmark studies you find on the Web). While these may offer an interesting perspective, your specific goals need to be set in the context of *your* business: financial and market goals, services you provide, customer expectations, and so forth. To ascertain these and to derive your SL and KPIs, you need to have a business-specific analysis conducted, involving multiple business stakeholders.

Another problem that often muddies the discussion is the over-reliance on (often incorrect) statistics. In my research I have visited numerous call center that “lie with statistics”: they use incorrect methods to measure, analyze and report their performance, exaggerating their performance (not always for the better…)

Take a look at some of the write-ups at www.DiagnosticStrategies.com/articles.htm and www.DiagnosticStrategies.com/cc_metrics.htm for more detailed discussion on the topic.

Feel free to contact me directly for with questions and for further clarifications.

Joe
jbarkai@DiagnosticStrategies.com