Official "Advice from a Call Center Geek!" SLA Benchmarking Episode

00:00Hi, guys. Tom Laird here. You've heard me breakdown contact center technology on the podcast time and time again. Now it's time for me to help you with your challenges. As your contact center technology advisor through our new Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you RFP! advice from a call center geek, a weekly podcast with a focus on all things call center. We'll cover it all from call center operations Hiring, culture, technology, and education. We're here to give you actionable items to improve the quality of yours and your customers experience. This is an evolving industry with creative minds and ambitious people like this guy. Not only is his passion call center operations, but he's our host. He's the CEO of Expivia Interaction Marketing Group and the call center geek geek himself, Tom Laird. What is up everybody? Welcome to another episode of advice from a call center geek, the call center and contact center podcast.

01:11We try to give you some action items to take back in your contact center, improve the overall quality, improve the agent experience, hopefully improve the customer experience as well. My name is Tom Laird. I am the CEO here at Expivia Interaction Marketing. are located here in Northwestern Pennsylvania. All right, let's benchmark some SLAs. How about that? Let's start some arguments within the community. Every time I do something like this on LinkedIn, it's a little bit of an argument, as there's so much, I guess, I don't know, there's many opinions on what a world-class call center SLA is, what an average SLA is, because there's so many different variables at play here. I normally hate this question, but it's come up a couple times. I think that there are some questions on this a little bit of say, or a little bit of experience in this as we are BPO, right? And I see a ton of different clients, with different channels from healthcare to tech support, right? To financial services and everybody has a different kind of way of looking at this.

02:29So taking all that information, this is kind of what I've come-up with and we've come-up with the organization for what we think is a benchmarked SLA for all these different channels. I'm going to get into it. Love to hear your opinion. When I post this on LinkedIn, make sure that you say, Tom, I think you're crazy or Tom, I think you're on target here. But I believe that the average quote unquote good voice SLA, right? So this is where your standard is that is good, right? The first thing that you should be looking at. This isn't bad, this is, you know, I don't want to do white glove, but what is the area that I think is a good service level is an 80 30 80% of the calls answer within 30 seconds or less. Where does a 80 30 come from, I believe it came from way back in the day, AT&T actually was the ones that started that, right?

03:20But for us and for I would say 80% of our clients, they dictate an 80-30, that's kind of the industry average, right? Is an 80-30. If you want white glove service, it goes higher, right? Meaning it will be a 90-10, or we have clients that are at a 95. 90% of the calls answer within five seconds or less. How do you do that? Well, you have to be really, really good with your staffing. You have to the really, really good with how you're routing calls as well and using all the tools that you have to make sure that you're hitting these calls. There's also, I think, again, 80-30 is where you're at. If you're doing that, you're in a really good spot. 90-10, 90-5, if you want something that's pretty crazy and more white glove. But we also have clients that say, hey, we can't afford that.

04:09We can't staff to an 80-30. And I think the new benchmarking that's starting to happen people starting to look at sentiment scores based on time and queue. So we can look at the average time and queue, and when does the service level start to go south? So when that happens, we'll say, hey, listen, we can probably do an 81.0.20 because your customers are willing to stay on that in queue up to a minute 20 before, before they get ticked That's something to kind of look at and I think we're evolving service level SLAs with that. All right, now email. I think email, this really varies widely on how clients would like it answered. I believe that the average is one day 24 hours right so that's kind of average good service right or a kind of a higher or SLA, or SLA is within three hours of them sending that email, and kind of that white glove is either instant or within 30 minutes.

05:13And that's kind of what we put in our contracts, based on what clients want. Normally it's one day. If you want something a little bit higher, we can do it within three hours. If you want the thing even higher, it's instant or up to 30 minutes. Chat, we, we treat it like voice, right? So it's the same type of, of SLAs that we're looking for, right? So an 80-30, you know, is your kind of regular, your normal, and then, you and 90-10 or 95 for something that's a little bit, you know, more again, white glove or, or higher end, you know, you can take multiple chats. We normally do not, depending on the client, take more than four chats at a time. But that's kind of how we staff based on chat volume[_ to an 80-30 or to a 90-10. All right, I get this question a lot too is how do you benchmark QA in scoring with QA?

06:12This becomes a little bit of a headache because everybody does this differently, right? Some Some of you out there are using a 100 point system. Some of you could be at a 135 point system. Some of you are doing ABC or 123 or one through five or one through 10. - So it's kind of difficult to say let's benchmark this but so this is how I'm going to do it. [QA coverage remark omitted] So there's points right within that scoring system and normally what I will say in my Tom Laird, Expivia Digital, OttoQA, BPO, CCaaS, NICE CXone, RFP, QA, WFM, QA, WFM, CCaaS, NICE CXone, RFP, CCaaS, NICE CXone, RFP, CCaaS, NICE CX or I guess 84% or lower is below the standard that we want. that's something that we would make sure that got to the floor that would be corrected.

06:5990% is really above the standard. If we have somebody that is dealing with a hiring client, we're looking at 90%. If we're looking at white glove and they're paying for white glove, and they're paying for servicing, and we have the best agents that we can possibly have, we hold our agents to a 95% or plus for those types of programs. The other thing that we will mark or monitor as well as auto fails. And depending on your QA or depending on what what the client really wants. And some of these have, there's a culture of, I don't know, forgiveness, right? Of understanding that there's a learning curve, and there's some clients that say, hey, listen, it's my way or the highway, do this, or these reps are off, right? So we have to look as well as how many auto fails do they get until they're kind of off the program, right?

07:51And again, that doesn't happen. We're talking once everything is learned, and maybe they're six months to eight months into the program. You know, if you have three auto fails in a week or not, you know, doing something that is vitally important. stuff that you're not thinking about, right? And again, we can talk about CSAT, we can talk about NPS as well, right, and kind of look at that. a a It's looking at the customer A, BPO, CCaaS, WFM, You Agent sentiment as the

[Gap 10:40–11:08: no reliable transcription]

11:08that's my that's my benchmarking, right? When it comes to, to voice, email, chat, QA and sentiment. Again, if you guys disagree, let me know. But I think if those of you who are new or have never really looked at what service levels we should have, hopefully this gives you a bit of value and you can start that process. Thanks, guys. And again, I will talk to you next week.