What is Service Level in a Call Center
Service Level also known as "SL" is one of the key parameters in most industries. Service level is a measure (in Percentage ) to gauge how well the industry standards are met within the given period.
In customer service as well this parameter plays an important role. An inbound call center operates on different KPIs i.e AHT (Average Handling Time), AL (Answering Level), Shrinkage, Attrition, etc.
Service Level or commonly known as SL is one of them. Often in the call center, we calculate SL on the pattern of "X /Y" where "X "indicates the % of calls received in a given duration and "Y" indicates the specific time duration (secs ) within these (%) calls should be answered.
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| What is SL or Service Level in a call center |
We will understand in deep more about "What is SL or Service Level in a call center" and what are the possible causes of failure of SL achievement
What is SL or Service Level??
As mentioned above it works on the formula of X/Y. In most of the inbound call centers, we operate the Service Level on the "80/20" ratio, It means a call center needs to answer 80% of calls in 20 secs.
Though it depends on the type of business and process handled by the Call center and obviously with the volume trend.
Let's understand the case by an Example: If a call center receives 2000 calls in a day. So If I have to aim for the SL with an 80/20 ratio I will have to answer 1600 ( 2000*80% ) calls to maintain my Service Level
Also, this should be noted that to achieve my Service Level I should have enough manpower in place required for the projected volume.
Reason for Not achieving SLA :
If you are working in an Inbound call center you know this can not be constant throughout the day but happens only at some specific time intervals
Let's understand by this below graphical representation :
Here I have taken a 6 hrs time period with 1 hr each for every interval. You can see the Orange line is for SL achieved and Blue is the target line for SL (i.e 80% )
For every interval, we have achieved our SL target of "80% except between 2 PM to 4 PM
To get the reason I will have to look at every aspect of call center KPIs.
There could be 4 main reasons why this SL was not achieved in those durations :
1 AHT. : It can be a possibility that my call center agent would have received maximum calls of some specific issue on that specific interval which took time to explain to the customer more than the allowed AHT or might be due to not rigorous real-time monitoring the AHT was high due to which I have achieved only 76% or 74% of SL during that period
2. Sort of Staffing: Second reason could be in that particular interval I did not have rostered customer service agents as per the forecast volume trend or a big chunk of agents could be on break at the same time interval when the volume was there which led to dropping in Service Level.
3. Current Volume > Forecast Volume: Often it happens that we receive more or less call volume compared to the predetermined or Forecasted call volume given by the client due to which drop-in service level is expected.
In such cases, we should proactively inform the client about the current volume trend and probability of servile level drop
4, Specific Call Drivers: Sometimes it happens that due to a sudden technical glitch or any process change update from the client's end we receive a big percentage of calls of some specific call drivers which can also lead to the failure of SL target.
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There could be many more reasons apart from the four mentioned above. To achieve the Service Level in every interval our real-time monitoring should be robust also along with the rostered count of agents, adequate support staff should be in place to assist agents
.Support staff should be aware of the volume trend and any specific call driver in any time interval to raise any alarm if the volume spikes up.
I hope you like this article. Would love to hear comments and suggestions on this.
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