Revisit your service level.

Can your customers reach the services they need, when they need them?

In the time of pandemic many organizations are facing labor shortages. Contact centers as well are facing a lot of difficulty in managing quality and service levels. Contact centers are bound to maintain their service levels as this is what they do. They need to ensure that customers get the right quality of service at the right time. Yes, the quality of service delivered is what ultimately matters most; but, you can't even get started until contacts get to the right places at the right times.

The following are important principles of managing contact center service levels. Revisiting and building them into both strategic and day-to-day operational decisions can help you navigate this challenging season. They're keys to ensuring your center is both efficient and accessible:

Categorize contacts correctly

In simple words service level is defined as: "X percent of calls answered in Y seconds". It is a concrete and stable objective for contacts that must be handled when they arrive. Response time is the related objective for contacts that don't have to be handled at a specific time (e.g., email, social posts that do not have to be handled immediately, and others).

Differentiating between service level and response time is essential for two reasons. First, you need to divide the staff effectively to handle both the categories. Second, deferring work that doesn't have to be handled as it arrives can provide much-needed breathing room. Yes, you have to manage it well and within customer expectations, but categorizing work and being smart about when you handle it can lead to much better results.

Apply appropriate staff calculations

Contact centers must be able to predict the traffic on calls and staff requirements should be done according to that. To calculate the staff required for customer queries that do not have to be handled when they arrive, you can generally use a more traditional approach to planning. For example, if you have 60 customer e-mail messages to process, and they require an average five minutes handling time, you have 300 minutes of workload to fit into staffing requirements.

Ensure service levels are in parity across contact channels

Being in parity in this context doesn't necessarily mean being...