For many years, many contact centers in the industry have been striving to enforce the “80/20” rule when it comes to answering calls. In fact, there were a number of contact centers that took more than 48 hours to respond to emails, which could well lead to a number of repeated contacts and hurt first contact resolution rates (FCR). To see how your call center is performing, you can calculate a specific service level metric for a specific period of time. With this service level calculation: For example, there could be an SLA between the call center and the IT department that describes repair times for broken computers or headsets, system failures, etc. Contract preparation is one of the most important aspects of the entire outsourcing process. A client company wants to ensure that the SLA (Service Level Agreement) is organized according to the requirements and clearly states all payment and productivity standards. Currently, many companies that offer contact center outsourcing services need new ideas to achieve unique advantages and achieve maximum results in their work. Metrics such as service levels are useful for efficiently collecting data for further analysis of business processes passed on to enterprise customers for outsourcing. This information says a lot about the quality of customer service and helps to prepare for the following goals. Quick and fast responses increase customer satisfaction and improve your level of service.
The International Finance Corporation (IFC) currently places the global average of cancelled calls at between 5% and 8%. There are many things to consider, and if you only have 20 seconds to answer a call before it crosses the threshold, you need to be able to take the right steps immediately. The negotiation of the rules of engagement must be done in advance. First of all, you need to define the criteria for action. A simple one-page document is enough here. If SL is 0-5% below the target, this should eventually be seen as a warning to WFM and operations that performance is deteriorating. Between 5% and 10%, you may want to cancel discretionary offline activities and start retraining. If it`s worse than 10% below the target, you may want to take an “all hands on deck” approach so everyone is on the phone. If you simplify this, all team leaders can drag it to their desks. Everyone will know what their share is when SL reaches a certain threshold. Even if you had to strictly measure your turnaround time or the number of calls you answer within a given time frame, it would be difficult to truly assess the quality of your service level agreements (SLAs) without having a rough idea of industry standards. To date, one of the most popular field standards of contract centers is an 80/20 ratio.
This means that 80% of incoming calls are answered by a specialist within 20 seconds. However, this is not a basic principle and the final results depend mainly on the specifics of a particular call as well as other elements. The ratio can therefore vary – 90/20, 70/40 or 60/60. Phone: 80% of calls answered within 20 seconds Email: 100% of emails answered within 24 hours Live chat: 80% of chats answered within 20 seconds Social media: N/A First of all, an SLA ensures that everyone works on the same goals. This ensures that everyone is equipped to succeed. There is less friction in the system and you spend less time negotiating and debating and more time solving problems. Second, it makes planning easier. You have clear goals on which to build a plan. Your target service level, average response speed, or abandonment rate are defined and everyone knows the goals. Finally, it helps establish a better working relationship between workforce management and operations. The process of developing a service level agreement fosters conversation and alignment between the two groups to achieve common goals. ASA (Average Response Speed) = The average time a caller is in the queue before being answered by a agent.SL (service level) = The percentage of callers responded within a specified threshold.
A service level of 80/20 means, for . B, that 80% of all calls are answered in 20 seconds. Note: The SL can be based only on the calls processed or on all the calls offered. Cancellation rate = The percentage of callers who cancel before receiving a response. There are also variants of these metrics. You can use a “refined” ASA, sl or abandonment rate. What does that mean? Well, that means filtering out specific calls that you don`t want to include. The metric is not pure and tells a slightly different story. For example, you take your SL metric and delete any call that didn`t wait for the full threshold. If you`re using an 80/20 SL, your refined SL would be 80/20 without any calls canceled in less than 20 seconds. The logic here is that you customize to answer the call in 20 seconds.
If the customer doesn`t give you the full 20 seconds to try to answer it, do you want it to count against you? Keep in mind that the stricter the service level goal, the more expensive it is for employees. You want to make sure that every amount of money you spend at work is for a deliberate purpose. Most call centers don`t use a refined level of service, but it can help manage costs. The same refinement can be used for the dropout rate. If a call hangs up in less than 5 or 10 seconds, did it really give you the opportunity to answer the call? This statistic, combined with the fact that some contact centers wait more than three days to respond to 100% of customers` emails, highlights the large variance in the contact center industry. The right level of service may be due to the style and operation of your center, but the customer experience should be just as important to you as your cost, so aim for fast response times. While some centers have decided to relax their SLA time, others may choose to increase their level of service instead. Simply put, increasing your service level means increasing the number of calls from your agents and answering as quickly as possible. While there`s also a cluster that forms nearly 100% of emails answered in three hours, it`s surprising that more contact centers wait 48 hours to complete the same percentage of emails. You`ve probably heard the oft-cited industry standard of answering at least 80% of calls in less than 20 seconds. I`ll explain why that`s not the best number to look at right away. Any company that orders certain services from contractors wants the work to be done qualitatively.
Constant monitoring of the affiliate`s shares requires a lot of time and effort, but does not even guarantee that the goals will be achieved. If an outsourcing company lags behind in terms of productivity in performing customer functions, it should not function adequately. We can conclude that the SLA is a practical and very versatile tool for evaluating an enterprise service. Contact centers use service level agreements for the same reason that contracts are used for many other business operations. to make sure everyone is working towards the same results and – in the true sense of the word – is on the same page as to what success looks like. It allows the smooth running of any other interaction between the two companies. Looking for ways to improve the overall performance of your contact or contact center with real-time dashboards, ACD, IVR, competency-based routing, call center analytics, and more? 📱 The level of service is an invaluable metric for your customer satisfaction efforts. .