Service levels

What are the service level currently out there for call centre?? Are expectations changing?

The avergae service level seems to be 80% of calls answered in 20 seconds, but it does change quite a bit from centre to centre, with some operarting 90% of calls answered in 15 seconds.

But what's the standard to calculate the service levels, is the answered calls in x time in relation to the offered or to the total answered calls?

Of course customers expectations are changing. Service levels are not an accurate representation of how well we serve our customers.

Kevin is absolutely right and spot on about how customers don't mind so much waiting longer but rather want better service when they're answered! This can only be true if they know when they phone you, they will not:

1. be passed from pillar to post (nobody likes that)
2. their queries or demand get dealt with with just one phone call

Therefore in my opinion, service levels can actually do more damage and increase costs than anything else. Targets such as average talk time, abandon rates and call waiting times can detract staff as well as managers from the real purpose of the call centres i.e. from delivering what matters to the customers. Their behaviours will be driven by the targets not the customers.

If call centres are focused on providing callers with the answers they needed (I understand that it's not always possible but majority of the time the nature of calls can be predictable) so that the callers do not have to phone back, this would not only mean that your staff will only be dealing with 'value' calls and not have to deal with the 'failure' calls (e.g.repeat phone calls because something was not done right the first time or because you haven't delivered what you promised).

An alternative to learning and understanding from reports such as abandon rate reports would be to actually listen in to the phone calls and learn and understand the type of phone calls you're getting. Split them into value (I'd like to buy, I'd like to order...) and failure (why isnt' my order here yet, where is the engineer?, I'm still waiting for someone to turn up) and get to the root cause of the failure and eliminate them as much as you can.

So what you will end up with is staff that are motivated because they know that they don't have to deal with 'complaints' phone calls.

Reduction in costs of running the operations because your centre is dealing with mostly value demand and also you are not unnecessarily employing more staff to cope with the increase in demand resulting from not delivering what matters on the first phone call.

And most importantly happy customers because they know their phone calls will get dealt with and a solution is at hand.

Thank you and good luck :)

To answer Francesco:

Inbound Service Level: It is the percentages of calls offered that are handled within a predefined wait time goal.

Total incoming calls handled within Customer Wait Time Goal /Total calls offered
* 100

Most modern solutions would report this for you, they only ask you to set the Customer Wait Time Goal.