When it comes to meeting and exceeding your customers' expectations, measuring and improving First Contact Resolution in tandem with Service Levels and Response Times definitely hits the ball out of the park. If you can pick up that call or chat quickly and resolve the issue the first time, your customer will think they have died and gone to heaven. (Doesn't say much about the typical customer's expectation of the support center does it?)

In earlier posts I talked about First Call Resolution (FCR) as a very important metric to measure for customer satisfaction and service quality. Another metric that also makes an impact on customer satisfaction is the Service Level of the support center.

There is no hard and fast benchmark that describe what your service level or response time should be. The target is determined by each support center based on a number of factors such as budget, business goals, channel, and customer expectation.

An example might be  "80% of calls answered within 30 seconds". And while that makes sense for incoming calls, the service level for email, chat, and other channels must be firmly based on what the customer expects of that channel. Expectations for email response may run to a few hours.

This is called keeping service levels in parity across channels. The numerical target will not be the same for all channels, but all channels must have a target and must be measured to get a true idea of the service level of the support center.

If multiple call centers are active and a combined service level is needed, a weighted average is the simplest method of tracking.

Call Center #1 handled 400 calls with a service level of 92%.
Call Center #2 handled 600 calls with a service level of 88%.

Call Center#1: 400 X .92 = 368
Call Center#2: 600 X .88 = 528

 Totals: 1000 = 896

896/1000 = .896 (89.6%)

Many resources treat Service Level and Response Time as the same metric. At least one source,   Brad Cleveland in Call Center Magazine, differentiates Response Time from Service Level. Cleveland offers this definition of Response Time:

"Response Time is a related objective for contacts that don't have to be handled at a specific time: customer email messages, or scheduled out-bound calls."

It is measured as:

Cleveland feels it is important to distinguish between the two for accurate base staff calculations for each category of contact.

Service Levels are typically reported from the ACD routing system or a workforce management system. Response Times may come from other routing systems such as email response management, web servers, or other source.

That wraps up another typical call center metric. Are there any specific requests for what to tackle next?