Service Level

What it means

Service level states the percentage of contacts answered inside a defined threshold, written as a pair: 80/20 means 80 percent of contacts answered within 20 seconds. Unlike an average, it makes an explicit promise about the shape of the wait, which is why it is the standard commitment in client contracts.

How it is calculated

Service level = contacts answered within the threshold / total contacts offered

Why it matters

Service level is usually the number a penalty clause is attached to, so it drives both staffing and margin. The threshold pair matters as much as the percentage: 80/20 and 80/60 are very different operations even though both are 80 percent.

Common mistakes

• Not agreeing how abandoned contacts are counted. Whether short abandons are excluded can swing the reported number by several points.
• Reporting a daily or monthly roll-up when the contract is measured by interval. A month can pass while most individual intervals fail.
• Setting the same target for every line of business regardless of what the contact is worth.

See also

• SLA: Service Level AgreementA contractual performance target, e.g. answering X% of calls within Y seconds.
• ASA: Average Speed of AnswerThe average wait before a queued contact reaches an agent.
• Abandonment rateThe share of queued contacts that hang up before reaching an agent.
• Erlang CThe staffing formula that estimates how many agents a queue needs to hit a service level at a given volume.