At the heart of effective incoming call center management is the principle of service level. A service level objective can be used to determine the resources required and the effectiveness of the center in its impact on the corporate business goals. Here are some of the questions that can be answered by establishing and monitoring a specified level of service:
§ How much staff is required?
§ How does the center compare to the competition?
§ Can the center handle the response to marketing campaigns?
§ How busy will the CSRs be?
§ What will the costs be?
Defining a service level
Service level is often referred to by various terms. In some call centers, it is the telephone service factor, or TSF. Others refer to it as grade of service (GOS), although this may be confused with the term for the degree of blocking on a group of trunks. Service level is also referred to as accessibility or service standard. Typically, the term service level is used to refer specifically to transactions that must be handled on arrival at the call center. Response time, often called speed of reply, may even be called service level as well. To avoid confusion, response time will be used in a specific sense in this book, to describe the level of service assigned to transactions that can be handled at a later time and do not need to be handled "on arrival. "
The most widely-accepted definition of service level is based on the percentage of calls answered in a given time frame, for example, 90 percent of calls answered in 20 seconds. Some managers define service level as a percentage only or as an abandonment rate. Others refer to the percentage of the time the service level objective is met, whatever that objective may be. And there are those who define service level as "average speed of answer" or longest delayed call.
The various interpretations and other definitions of service level often lead to misunderstandings and mismanagement. By its nature, service level should be defined as a specific percentage of all calls answered in a specific time frame, as previously noted. Planning should be based on achieving this target. Choosing an appropriate service level objective is one of the first steps a call center manager should take to ensure effective planning and management of the operation and to establish budgets.
Establishing a service level helps to link resources to results and measures the degree to which customers are being transferred and handled by a CSR. Service level is a tested and proven criterion in call centers worldwide for transactions that must be handled when they arrive—most commonly inbound phone calls. However, as customer contact methods change, new multimedia services—video calls and calls integrated with the World Wide Web—may also become part of the service level criterion. Because of its universal acceptance as a primary call center criterion, service level will remain an important objective to the next generation of call centers.
Other response categories
In addition to the "immediate response" category, most incoming call centers are required to handle transactions that belong in a second category, those that don't have to be handled at the time they arrive. Some examples of these transactions are
§ Postal correspondence (snail mail)
§ E-mail
§ Faxes
§ Voice mail
§ Video mail
These transactions allow a larger window of time for the call center to respond. It is as important, however, to establish specific response time objectives for these interactions as it is for the first category of transactions. All categories of transactions can contribute to meeting the service objectives of the call center if appropriate priorities are established.
Other response criteria
Average speed of answer (ASA), another often-used response criterion, is related to service level because it is derived from the same set of data. However, ASA is often misinterpreted. In any set of data, it is generally assumed that the average lies somewhere in the middle or that "average" represents typical experience. This is not true for call center purposes. Although mathematically correct, the average does not represent the experience of individual callers. In a call center, most callers get connected to a CSR much quicker than the average, but some wait far beyond the average. For example, with an average speed of answer of 15 seconds, about 70 percent of callers get answered immediately, but a small percentage of callers will wait three or four minutes in the calling queue. Although ASA is useful in calculating some call center requirements—for example, in calculating trunk load—service level is a more reliable and more telling measure of a caller's experience.
Abandoned calls
Considering call abandonment rates alone as a measure of whether staffing levels are appropriate can be quite misleading. A high abandonment rate is probably a symptom of staff problems. But a low abandonment rate doesn't necessarily mean the center is optimally staffed. If abandonment rates are unacceptable, call center managers need to evaluate the situation to determine what is wrong. It is most likely that the evaluation will reveal a too low service level. When service level is being achieved, abandonment rates tend to take care of themselves.
Unanswered calls
One important consideration about service level is what happens to calls that don't get answered in the specified service-level time frame? Most Erlang C and computer simulation software programs can calculate the answers to this question and others. For example, for a service level of 80 percent answered in 20 seconds, experience indicates that about 30 percent of callers end up in the queue, that the longest wait will be around three minutes, and that the average speed of answer will range from 10 to 15 seconds. This example points up the obvious fact that different callers have different experiences with call centers, even if they are part of the same set of data measured by service level, ASA, and other measurements. The reason for this is "random call arrival," a reality of call center operation and a factor that needs to be considered when deciding how to measure quality of service. Service level is the single best measure of quality, largely because it enables the center to determine what happens to different callers.
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