Mitan Ltd
Call-centre and Caller views
A target such as 80% answered within 15 seconds is often interpreted as:
"Answering most calls in a reasonable time"
The statistics shown here are a realistic example of a medium-sized call centre.
Call-centre view
Looking at the first display of statistics related to answer time, the call centre might think that a good service is being provided. Since agents are waiting for calls more that 15% of their time, perhaps fewer agents would be enough.
Caller's view
The second set of statistics gives the caller's view, and show that a significant proprtion of calls have to wait much longer than the target time. Is it good service that 10% of calls wait much longer than the "reasonable" wait time?
Limitations of service-levels
- Service levels are a heuristic target used as a proxy for the very difficult question of what is a satisfactory compromise between cost and speedy service.
- Service-level targets have little objective basis, and are a poor predictor of caller satisfaction, but are established call-centre practice with no obvious alternatives. .
- Service-level prediction formulas, such as Erlang-C, usefully represent the way waiting times deteriorate more rapidly as workload incresases towards maximum capacity.
Call-centre vs caller views