What is Service Level in a Contact Center?

A quick overview of what service level is and how it impacts a typical call center.

Show Notes

What is Call Center Service Level?

A service level agreement (SLA) gives a measure of overall call handling performance that helps management make decisions based on an agreed upon standard. Service level measures the percentage of how many calls are answered within a certain number of seconds. This figure is not limited to calls; it can also include any type of inbound interaction, such as chats. 

Since every call center is different, there is no industry standard for service level. However, a common service level goal would be 80% of calls answered within 30 seconds or less. When this target is met it leads to a greater customer experience and appropriate staffing levels. 

So how do you find the service level of your contact center? 

If your service level target is a certain percentage in less than 30 seconds, start by looking at the total number of calls that were taken in less than 30 seconds. Then, divide that number by the total number of handled calls during your designated time period. This could be over the past few days, weeks, months, or years or in a specific 15-minute interval. Finally, compare your percentage with your target goals to see if you are meeting your ideal service level. 

Reaching your call center’s service level can help improve customer satisfaction by meeting their needs quickly. It can also help managers like yourself evaluate the customer journey, look for any issues and measure the success of your contact center. 

Listen to Dave Hoekstra on the Calabrio Shorts podcast to learn more about what service level is and how it can help your employees and customers! 

 

What is Calabrio Shorts?

Calabrio Shorts is a fun-sized podcast that covers all sorts of topics around the contact center industry. No topic is off-limits as we cover frequently asked questions, industry trends and definitions, and yes, we will have fun doing it.

What is Service Level in a Contact Center

[00:00:00] Hello everyone! And welcome to the latest edition of Calabrio Shorts. My name is Dave Hoekstra product evangelist at Calabrio and we have a pretty common topic to talk about today. One of the questions we get from people that are just getting started in contact centers or learning more about contact centers for their various roles in different areas is the question of what is service level.

[00:00:23] And it's a pretty easy concept. Once we get started talking about. We wanted to kind of dive into a little bit of what it means and what we should be paying attention to at its very definition, service level is a measurement of how many calls or what percentage of calls are answered within a certain number of seconds.

[00:00:44] And it doesn't have to be calls. It can be chats. It can be any. Inbound type of interaction. So a good example would be at service level, fairly common in the contact center industry is 80% of your calls answered in 30 seconds or less. So every single call that comes into the phone line, we are able to measure.

[00:01:08] How quickly that call was answered. And so every call that is answered in less than 30 seconds gets a yes in the check box. And every call that's answered after 30 seconds gets a no in the check box. And then we take the number of yeses and divide that by the total number of calls that came in on that particular timeframe.

[00:01:31] And we get a percentage. And what service level is designed to do is to give the management of the contact center, an idea of how well they are performing. But not have it be an absolute number. Right. So average speed of answer is an absolute number. Every call we take, we average that total number, whereas service level is a measurement of how many met that goal and how many didn't.

[00:01:56] So if we look at an 80% and 30 seconds or less, you know, that's our goal for the day. And at the end of the day or the week or the month or the year, we can look at. The total number of calls that were taken in fewer than 30 seconds divided by the total number of calls. And we can get a percentage of how many calls met that goal.

[00:02:19] And it gives us a great way of kind of measuring total day performance or total week performance. And what I mean by that is that we can have a bad morning, for example, where lots of calls are answered after 30 seconds. And so, in each particular, 15 or 30 minute interval of the day, we don't have a very high percentage.

[00:02:41] We might be in the thirties or the forties, and that's not great, but by the end of the day, we kind of make up for it. And that's not traditionally the best practice, but we can recover. The important thing to remember about service level is that it's really a measure of customer experience or your caller experience, not necessarily your performance, right?

[00:03:01] So it can indicate performance, but more importantly, we have to ask ourselves questions, like what can our callers tolerate? Right. So for I, one of the questions that we get asked a lot is what is the industry standard for service level? And it's important to note that there is no such thing. There's no rule for any organization that has to meet that, except for maybe a, an outsource or a BPO where they have contractual agreements with their customers, that they're going to maintain a particular service level.

[00:03:36] But for most internal contact center organizations, we don't see a common thread between that because it's very so differently between the different types of callers. So for example a high end bourgeois contact center that has really particular customers might set their service level at 90% in 20 seconds or less.

[00:03:59] That's a really aggressive target. But it also requires more people to answer those particular phone calls, but there're being a boujee contact center. They can afford it, right. They can afford the extra staff. It takes to meet that level because that's what their customers expect. But let's flip the other side and go to the United States, the IRS the internal revenue service, where.

[00:04:23] You don't have any other option. If you have tax problems or tax issues, you don't have any other is options to, but to contact the IRS. So they don't particularly worry too much about that. Their service level might be 50% of the calls in 120 seconds or less, or they might even not care at all, but those are two really extreme examples.

[00:04:46] But most of the time, the question that we like to ask when customers are saying, what should our service level be? What can your callers tolerate, right? What's a true measure of your customer experience when we're dealing with this. So it's a very it's a, can be a complicated process to go through to determine what the right service level is.

[00:05:04] You can look at your speed of answers and your abandoned rates and where those come from. And what point they're happening. And then you might make a decision if you're seeing that most people abandoned within the first 45 seconds or so maybe a 30 second target is really good for you, but ultimately it's about measuring the performance.

[00:05:23] And that's the other key thing is there's no rule book that says your organization has to set the service level at a particular level. You can have different service level targets on days of the week. You can have different service level targets, but even during time of day, based on what you see and what kind of level of service you need to provide.

[00:05:40] So I've seen organizations that have a less aggressive service level on the weekends than they do during the day. So it's a really important discussion to have. And the key takeaway that I will make sure that you leave this episode with today, is to make sure that you understand why your service level target is set at what it's set.

[00:06:01] For example, if I were to ask you, what is your service level target? And you say, oh, it's you know, 85 30. And my next question is, why is it 85 30? I need you to have a good answer for that. And if you don't, then we need to find out why it's set that way. We need to be able to explain because that's, if that's the target that your contact center is using, that's the one.

[00:06:21] That we need to be able to explain where that information came from. And if you don't have that information, we need to find out if it's right, because you may be costing yourself efficiency, the higher or more aggressive, the service level target, the more people you need and vice versa. And if your service level target is too high.

[00:06:40] And you are looking at your staffing requirements. You're you may be overestimating the amount of people you need, which can cost you payroll dollars long term. Consequently, if your service level target is set too low, then you may be abandoning more calls than you need to be, and you might be costing your customers or your callers, that kind of service.

[00:07:00] So just a quick reminder, this is not just for calls. This is for any inbound interaction type. We typically center around calls when we talk about it, but that is the key takeaway. So when the question comes up, what is service level? It is the measurement of a percentage of calls answered within a certain number of seconds.

[00:07:18] So 80, 30, 80% and 30 seconds or less, or 95, 40, 95% of my calls answered in 40 seconds or less.. So you have two factors that go into that. So hopefully you've found this to be a little bit informative as always if you have questions, we're here to help. So please don't hesitate to reach out to us, go to www.calabrio.com send us a quick note. You can also email info calabrio.com and we will get back to you with some information, but we're always happy to kind of have a discussion about where these should be. So thanks to everybody who joined us today and we will talk to you on the next episode of Calabrio Shorts.

[00:07:54] Thanks everybody.