Chas2002

Posted this earlier to creative in a PM. Decided to share with everyone.

Hi,

Yes the SLA they are speaking of isn't a contract Service Level Agreement for response times that we are used to seeing in the Tech world.

They are speaking of Call Center SLA. This type of SLA is a target set by a call center management team with respect to an application or process. For example: Customer Care application may have an SLA of 80 / 45. That’s a management target of answering 80% of incoming calls within 45 seconds. This metric comes in to play as a determining factor for how many agents you need or can let go and sets a benchmark for noticeable shortfalls or extreme overages.

To continue with this example: So Customer Care with an SLA target of 80 / 45 averages an SLA percentage of 95% - you could probably cut back on staff and the “incoming callers” would “feel” no significant increase in queue time, this of course drops your cost per call and promotes efficiency. As a quick health check up; if the CC SLA is 100%, then you have too many agents and you should see a significant number of idle agents.

If the CC SLA is in the neighborhood of 70% then you may have too few agents.

As a general rule: There’s nothing worse than have agents “wait for calls”, queues are designed for callers to “wait for an idle agent”. Quite the opposite, of course, may be true for “sales” call centers.

In addition to SLA, we have two other metrics that play key roles in Call Center staffing. AHT (Average Handle Time) and (Calls Offered) . Calls offered is the obvious staffing consideration and AHT is a weighted value that determines a call centers efficiency.

If your want to impress them then bone up on those three metrics and also show why Calls Abandoned isn’t the best metric to use for a quick health check of a call center.

(In some cases, CC Managers see a high abandonment rate and freak out and hire more agents and more often than not – they can do better with the number of agents they have, maybe even less.)

For a quick and informative read – read Mr. Flemmings pdf: http://www.flemmingconsulting.com/im...Statistics.pdf

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