This is the main metric used to see how the call centre is performing and is often the only metric the higher management are interested in so it is worth getting right. There are many ways to calculate the service level and many different thresholds and agreements used to decide if the result is a pass or fail. The most common service level I have seen is 80% of contacts answered in less than 20 seconds.
Now this seems simple enough and here is the calculation to work this out.
(Contacts Offered – Failed Contacts) / Contacts Offered = Service Level
Key:
Contacts Offered = all incoming contacts
Failed Contacts = All the contacts not answered in 20 seconds.
Now this calculation is the simplest calculation I know for working this out. This method does however throw up some questions, what about abandoned calls, as these were not answered at all so therefore should they be added into the calculation at all. The way I look at this is if the customer decided to abandon the contact within 20 seconds then we did not have the opportunity to answer the contact and therefore should not go against us, but if the contact abandoned after 20 seconds it should be classed as a failed contact as we failed to answer within service level agreement.
Some people think this should not be added in at all and use the following calculation for service level (Handled – Failed) / Handled, although this does give a service level it is not a very good measure of how you are performing.
Example, let’s say you are offered 1000 contacts to keep it simple and of those you handle only 500 and of the 500, 100 of these were answered after 20 seconds, this gives a service level of 80%, but of the 500 not answered 400 abandoned after 20 seconds, now if this is included your service level is only 50%. Now the numbers alone indicate the centre has a serious problem but by excluding the abandoned this is hidden as we are achieving 80%.
So that is the basic calculation for service level I have seen other calculations used and there are many agreements depending on the contact type and the customers’ requirements, here are some examples I have come across in the time I have been doing this job.
Service Level Examples
80/20 is the most popular but 80/30 is also seen a lot in smaller centres due to costs, I have also seen 90/10 used for premium customers where people pay for a better service. With other contact methods example e-mail I have seen this set at 100% in 8 hours or 90% in 24 hours.
Service level needs to be looked at across many time frames to understand if the contact centre is performing from 15/30 minute periods throughout the day to daily, weekly and monthly levels. If our service level is 80/20 we don’t want to be at 100% all day long every day as then we are probably over staffed but at the same time it’s not good for our customer experience if we are at 20% for a few hours every day and 100% the rest of the day giving us an 80% overall level. Service level is one metric we can use to quickly see where the centre is performing and not performing and make changes or improvements to help us achieve our goals efficiently.
To summarise service level is the first and most used metric to measure a contact centres performance.
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