Voice mail Service Level

Hi Rob,

I can give you some things to think about before you set your service level, but I think alot of it will be based on how agressive you set your service standards across your other mediums (i.e. queued calls, emails, etc).

Typically, I find that if you are able to manage the caller's expectations around when they can expect a callback, then it can be anywhere from between 1 and 24 hours from when they left the message in the first place. I wouldnt recommend anything after 24 hours, and if you can manage it, aiming to return voicemails within the same working day, if possible. You may want to observe when you plan to make the callbacks in your day (in your inbound call troughs, for example), when they occur as a frequency, and use those as a baseline to inform customers as to when they can expect a call.

However, the fact that you're sending calls to a voicemail service leads me to thing you may be getting more calls than you realistically can handle.

Is this a new initiative within your centre to try to contain the inbound call volumes, or is this something that has been in place for a while?

Hope to hear from you soon.
Gene

Hi Rob

You might be interested in our recent national survey on the use of Voicemail. Over 500 unique survey respondents from a wide demographic of UK telephone business and consumer telephone users completed the online 10 question survey between April and June 2010. With regards to your question you might find the following result useful:

Question -
If you leave a business related message on voicemail how soon do you expect to be called back?

Answers -

Within 1 hour – 16%

1 to 4 hours – 26%

same day – 44%

1 to 2 days – 13%

more than 2 days – 1%

The majority of survey respondents have an expectation that their call should be returned on the same day they leave a message. This information could be deemed useful for any organisation that uses voicemail in that failure to return a call within these parameters could lead to failing to meet the expectation of the caller and a negative customer experience. You can view the full results on our blog - http://www.office-response.co.uk/blog

Steve West