Service Level
Measure your call center's ability to respond to customers within the timeframes defined in your Service Level Agreement (SLA).
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What is Service Level?
Service Level is the percentage of incoming calls answered within a defined time threshold, expressed as "X% of calls answered within Y seconds."
For example, a Service Level of "80% of calls answered within 20 seconds" means 80% of incoming calls must be picked up by an agent within that window. It's one of the most closely watched metrics in call center operations because it directly reflects how responsive your team is to customers.
Key terms
Service Level: The percentage of calls answered within a predefined time threshold, used to assess responsiveness and staffing effectiveness.
Service Level Agreement (SLA): A formal contract in which a service provider commits to delivering a defined standard of service to clients or customers.
Success indicators
- Consistently meeting or exceeding the response targets defined in your SLA.
What is a Service Level Agreement (SLA)?
An SLA is your call center's formal commitment to maintaining a defined standard of service. Typically, an SLA specifies that your team will answer a set percentage of calls within a certain number of seconds, such as answering 75% of calls within 20 seconds.
Monitoring Service Level in real time is essential. If performance fluctuates, you need to know immediately. Common causes include unexpectedly high call volume, unplanned outages, or high agent absenteeism.
Best practices for creating a call center SLA
An effective SLA sets clear expectations for both your team and your clients. The following practices help you build one that drives consistent performance.
Define clear objectives:
- Establish goals that align with your organization's broader customer support strategy
- Make objectives measurable, achievable, and relevant to your call center's capacity
Set performance metrics and targets:
- Choose metrics such as Average Speed of Answer, First Call Resolution, and Call Abandonment Rate to track performance
- Set realistic targets based on industry benchmarks and your team's capabilities
Establish response and resolution timeframes:
- Define expected response times for different inquiry types, factoring in complexity and urgency
- Set clear resolution timeframes with a focus on minimizing customer effort
Communicate SLA expectations to your team:
- Ensure agents understand the SLA's objectives, metrics, and their role in achieving targets
- Provide regular training and support to help your team stay on track
Monitor and review performance:
- Track performance against SLA metrics on a regular cadence
- Analyze data to identify trends, gaps, and opportunities to improve
Foster a collaborative relationship with clients:
- Maintain open communication so SLA expectations are clear and mutually agreed upon
- Review and update the SLA periodically as client needs and business objectives evolve
Monitoring call center KPIs on a dashboard
Once you've established benchmarks and targets for Service Level, you need a reliable way to track them. Call center dashboards make it possible to monitor this and other call center KPIs in real time, so your team can act on performance data as it happens rather than after the fact.
Klips lets you connect your call center data sources and build dashboards that display live Service Level metrics alongside related KPIs. You can set refresh rates, apply custom thresholds, and distribute dashboards to agents and managers, keeping everyone aligned on performance goals.
