Service Level

I always receive prospects requesting 100% service level and calls to be answered immediately and so forth, honestly I used to get confused at the beginning of my career within the BPO industry back in 2004, by the time I understood that everything is doable however with a cost and consequences especially if prospects actual transactions not calculated properly, and even if you don't have such transactions you need to build it based assumptions and fine-tune at a later stage to avoid unwanted consequences.

When a prospect requests 100% service level, it is great news from a sales perspective since the number of agents/advisors will increase, and you will achieve your target faster however, the consequences are not the best and this is where your client feel that you deceived him/her since at certain points those agents will not be utilized and they will have avail time (waiting for call time) during the day longer than expected.

This is where it comes to "why I'm paying for this number of advisor/agents while I am not using them at all times"

Dear Sales experts within the industry please educate your prospect and do not oversell, always ensure he/she understands the difference between Service level target & PCA (percentage of calls answered).

Service level target – A pair of numbers — like 80/20, 60/20, 50/50. The first part denotes the percentage of calls, while the second part denotes the number of seconds. Together, they indicate the overall performance of a customer experience center.

PCA (percentage of answered calls) shall not be less than 95% at all times however the percentage of answered calls might be within threshold i.e. Target 80% 20 seconds or exceeding threshold 80% 60 seconds but still fulfilling the PCA target, certainly when you are operating a 911 call center or any emergency number it is important to reach your desired Service Level every quarter of the hour. This however is very costly and for most organizations not necessary. One could choose to measure Service Level Weekly or Daily.

It is also possible to choose a combination. For example, Service Level should be met on a weekly basis and only one day a week is allowed to be lower than the desired Service Level. (The other days making up for the day that you underperformed.)

Defining Service Level

Defining your desired Service Level goes further than just stating: an X percentage of calls should be answered within Y seconds.

It is important to consistently reach this desired Service Level. This means that measuring this just monthly is not enough. Depending on your organization's needs one should set a more limited time period as the time interval to measure service level.

Don't Sell A Comb to A Bald Person.