Call Center Service Level Matters!

Can your customers reach the services they need, when and as they want?

Source : Brad Cleveland President, ICMI

Accessibility—providing access to the services customers need and want through the channels they choose—goes to the heart of what call centers do. Yes, the quality of services delivered are what ultimately matter… but you can’t even get started until contacts get to the right places at the right times.

The following are well-established principles of managing call center service levels. Reviewing them often and building them into both strategic and day-to-day operational decisions will ensure that your call center is both efficient and accessible—prerequisites to building high-value services.

Categorize contacts correctly. Service level has a specific definition: “X percent of calls answered in Y seconds”—e.g., 90 percent answer within 20 seconds. It is a concrete and stable objective for contacts that must be handled when they arrive, such as telephone calls, text chat, walk-in customers, etc. Response time is the related objective for contacts that don't have to be handled at a specific time, e.g., handling customer email messages within 24 hours. Differentiating between service level and response time is essential because base staff calculations vary for these two major categories of contacts.

Apply appropriate staff calculations. Because of random call arrival, base staff requirements for those contacts that must be handled when they arrive must be predicted by using either a queuing formula that takes random call arrival into account (e.g., the widely-used Erlang C formula) or computer simulation. To calculate the staff required for contacts that do not have to be handled when they arrive, you can generally use a more traditional approach to planning—e.g., if you have 60 customer email messages to process today, which require an average five minutes time, you have 300 minutes of workload to fit into staffing requirements.

Ensure service levels are in parity across contact channels. Being in parity in this context doesn't necessarily mean being equal—e.g., it doesn't mean you necessarily need to respond to email as fast as you answer calls. But it does mean operating within general customer expectations across contact channels. For example, a customer who expects a reply to an email within a few hours but doesn't get it may pick up the phone and call. Similarly, if the customer ends up in an endless telephone queue, they may send an email. Assessing and meeting expectations across contact channels will keep your center in balance.

Manage service levels by increment (interval). Consistent performance by interval (e.g., half hour), is one of the telltale signs of a well-run call center. (Daily, weekly and monthly summary reports often conceal problem areas.) Teach your team to think, plan, report and manage in terms of what’s happening throughout the day—that’s a key to consistent performance.

Don't force occupancy to unrealistic levels. It’s a well-worn principle that when service level gets better, occupancy (the time agents spend handling calls versus waiting for calls) goes down. Therefore, average calls handled per individual also will go down. But remember, this "unproductive" time is sliced into 12 seconds there, two seconds there, and so on, the result of random call arrival. Don't try to force occupancy within an increment to be higher than what base staffing calculations predict it will be, or you will jeopardize service level.

Ensure that budgets reflect workload dynamics. Today's customers demand user-friendly self-service systems and the means to reach well-informed and capable customer service and support representatives when and as they need them. Yes, it's important to do everything possible to provide and encourage customers to use automated support alternatives where that makes sense… but it's also necessary to be realistic about demand for agent-assisted services in operational budgets.

Support service levels with effective workload planning. Effective workload planning involves the totality of forecasting, staff and system calculations, scheduling and real-time management. The most successful call centers have an established, systematic planning process. And good planning provides benefits far beyond accurate schedules… it is a catalyst for the kind of collaboration across the organization that effective customer services require.

In the end, service level must be viewed in the context of a much larger objective: customer satisfaction and loyalty. Service level does not guarantee a great customer experience. But it cannot be minimized, either. It is an enabler—an enabler to everything else that follows!

As president of ICMI, Brad Cleveland has delivered keynotes, executive briefings and consulting services in over 50 countries. ICMI is part of the UBM family of companies, a global leader in business information services with offices around the world. Brad can be reached at bradc@icmi.com.