Remote Call Centers: Tools, Tips & Best Practices for Remote Contact Center Managers & Agents
Read these tips and best practices for remote contact center managers and agents as businesses move to work-from-home workforces.
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The Team at CallMiner
March 23, 2020
Providing key metrics and clear numbers is primordial in any industry, and it becomes particularly challenging in the field of call centers. This is why managers have developed a number of techniques to quantify results and improve efficiency over the years. One of these methods is Call Center Service Levels.
The most basic definition of a service level is: a measurable number of services provided to a customer within a given time period.
In the context of call center performance metrics, this is often employed to measure the percentage of incoming calls that agents answer live during a set amount of time. However, with a number of different formulas and definitions, there remains a great deal of confusion on the topic.
In this resource, you find:
Unfortunately, calculating call center service levels is a highly contentious issue. This is because the rate can easily be manipulated depending on the formula employed to calculate it. In the following examples, we will look at 5 different ways to calculate service levels and see how they offer different results.
All the formulas are based on the same data. For this example, we will limit the time threshold to 30 seconds.
During these 30 seconds:
Formula #1
The simplest formula for calculating call center service levels is the following:
number of calls answered within threshold / total calls answered * 100%
In our example, this is ((860)/1000))*100% = 86%
The service level rate of 86%. While this looks good, we should be aware that it does not represent the abandoned calls.
Formula #2
This formula is designed to take all calls into consideration. However, it also uses abandoned calls during the time threshold as a positive,
Total calls answered within threshold +calls abandoned within threshold/ total calls answered + total calls abandoned * 100%
Here, the result is (860+20)/(1000+60)*100% = 83%
Formula #3
This version tends to impact the results negatively, as it treats all abandoned called as a negative.
Total calls answered within threshold / Total calls answered + Total calls abandoned*100%
With our numbers, this gives a result of (860)/(1000+60)) *100%= 81%
Formula #4
The fourth formula ignores calls abandoned before the threshold, while abandoned calls after the threshold impact the result negatively.
Total calls answered within threshold / Total calls answered + Total calls abandoned after threshold*100%
Our data gives us the result of (860)/(1000+40)*100% = 83%
Formula #5
Finally, the last method uses a threshold that accounts for short calls, counting abandoned called before the threshold as a positive.
Total calls answered within threshold +calls abandoned within a shorter amount of time than the threshold / total calls answered + total calls abandoned * 100%
(860+10)/(1000+60)*100%= 82%
Since different Center Service Levels offer varying results depending on the data selected, you need to ensure all your parameters are well defined. This can easily be done by following this 10-point checklist:
1. Service level calculations show you if you have enough. “Service level shows you whether your business has enough resources to fulfill customer needs. It indicates if customers are being quickly connected to team members and getting their problems resolved in a timely manner. If your service level is lacking, then it may be time to adopt new customer service tools or hire more employees.” – Clint Fontanella, 7 Call Center Metrics to Measure Your Customer Service, HubSpot; Twitter: @HubSpot
2. Figure out the best metrics for your business. “There are multiple approaches to determining service levels, each involving how call centers define abandoned calls.
They may be treated, for instance, as:
3. Manage spikes in call volume.
“Some companies often experience spikes in their call center activities, following periods of calm. To cope with this change in pace, some companies use temporary workers, others subcontract all or part of their services while others opt for overstaffing. All these alternatives are unfortunately not conducive to the stabilization of service levels.
“Many factors can lead to rush periods in a contact center: festivities, promotion, new launch etc. In addition, the nature of the activity has an enormous impact on the number of calls. It can increase tremendously in a short period of time and it is quite difficult to manage it, especially when there is a lack of information on the external factors in question.” – How to Stabilize Service Levels?, PCS Call Center; Twitter: @PCSCallCenter
Download our guide on how speech analytics can improve your call center’s performance!
As we’ve seen, Call Center Service Levels can be confusing, which is why it is important to ensure they are measured through the right method. As is often the case with call center data, this is an area where advancements in software technology, such as speech analytics and customer engagement analytics, can drastically help managers get a clearer picture of agent performance, as well as the overall performance of the call center.
A final point to note is that if you are working with clients who require Call Center Service Levels, your formulas should be made transparent with everyone in order to be understood. This point is usually defined during a contract between the call center and the client, and as a reasonable solution, most of them will include a clause to accept 10% variance between the results.
As a leader among speech analytics vendors, CallMiner offers industry-leading omnichannel contact center solutions that drive call center optimization and improve business performance metrics. CallMiner’s conversation analytics technology captures and analyzes 100% of customer conversations across all channels, providing insight that can drive call center performance metrics and enhance omnichannel support. CallMiner simplifies customer touchpoint mapping with an automated journey map tool that delivers clearer understanding of the customer’s mindset and emotions. And automated performance scoring and detailed, real-time analytics of every conversation make it easy to monitor performance, implement call center best practices, and support the work from home call center agent.