4 min
Level: Intermediate
An SLA (Service Level) is a contact centre metric that measures the performance and quantity of service provided. Most contact centres try to answer at least 80% of incoming calls within the first 20-30 seconds. But what if you want to deliver a higher level of service? Here is the foolproof formula for answering more than 90% of calls in less than 10 seconds, even when faced with agent shortages and call peaks.
1. IMPLEMENTING ADVANCED TECHNOLOGIES
The first step to meeting service quality standards is to have an advanced contact centre solution. This means that customer service software cannot be a simple call management system, but must focus on optimising call centre performance.
How can you tell advanced software from the rest? Look at its features, such as multi-channel management, integration with external applications, self-service options or rapid scalability.
2. EFFECTIVELY QUALIFYING CUSTOMER INTENT
An effective strategy for meeting SLAs is to use artificial intelligence to qualify customer intent. After customers have specified the reason for their call, AI determines whether they should be routed to the best available agent or to a self-service IVR menu.
In order to choose between one option or the other, this technology has the necessary capabilities to recognise customer intentions and intent. Thanks to its natural language processing (NLP), natural language understanding (NLU) and natural language generation (NLG) capabilities, it can act as a filter without the need for human supervision.
3. AUTOMATING SERVICE PROCESSES
Another key strategy to ensure service quality standards are met is to use artificial intelligence to serve customers. At first glance, AI may seem to be taking the work out of agents’ hands, but in reality it is freeing them from routine, non-value-added tasks.
Once the people responsible for training the AI have defined conversation flows, bots are ready to handle FAQs or facilitate self-service, such as sending a copy of a contract when a customer needs it.
In addition to the extremely fast training time, the long-term impact of this technology is revolutionary, as AI is able to achieve what previously seemed impossible: maintaining millions of simultaneous conversations across voice, chat, WhatsApp and email channels.
4. OPTIMISING CALL ROUTING
In addition to artificial intelligence, another key element in meeting SLAs is configuring the service software to route calls in an advanced manner, taking into account important factors such as agent skills.
By simply telling the system what each agent knows and defining the correct parameters within each queue, calls can be automatically routed based on language, soft skills required for a query or customer type, among other things.
This way, when a customer contacts the system with a complaint, for example, the system will route the communication to the agent best equipped to handle it.
5. REAL-TIME SERVICE MONITORING
Within the customer service team, supervisors are responsible for monitoring the operational performance of the call centre. To be more agile in their decision-making, it is essential that they have real-time updates on key metrics related to SLAs.
With a wallboard or dashboard that shows key metrics broken down by queue and agent, they can abandon the trial-and-error method and use real-time data to deduce real-time changes.
6. ANALYSE HISTORICAL SERVICE DATA
Another level at which you can find information about past SLA performance is historical statistics. Having a solution that provides standard and customisable statistical reports that include all metrics and KPIs is essential for in-depth analysis.
Once you have analysed the past behaviour of your data-driven service, you can make decisions for the future, whether it is changing the size of your agent pool, automating processes or incorporating new technologies.
7. CONTINUOUS MONITORING
If your tool allows you to monitor your contact centre’s performance in real time, as well as access historical data, call history and categorisations, you will find it much easier to review this data on a daily basis and use it to continually improve your service.
8. SEEKING FEEDBACK FROM END CUSTOMERS
The final source of information you can consult to get a complete picture of service quality levels is to talk to end customers. The most common feedback format in the industry is a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey.
In addition to understanding customers’ willingness to recommend a product or service, NPS surveys provide an overall assessment of the customer experience.
For example, if response time or problem resolution scores are low, the team can adjust their internal processes to improve these specific areas and thus better align with SLAs.
FINAL CONCLUSIONS
As you have seen, SLA compliance requires the best available technology, the habit of constantly reviewing the service from quantitative, qualitative, objective and even subjective perspectives, and using this information to optimise processes on a daily basis.
The integration of these eight points is the key to success and will ensure that you meet your service quality standards.
At Enreach, we are committed to helping our clients achieve their goals by providing the right solution for each case, type of service or service channel.
We also suggest how to align all the elements that make up a service: the platform or solution, the service channels, and the service and/or agent metrics or KPIs, so that our clients can deliver the best experience to their end customers.
If you would like to know how to configure and parameterise each section of our customer service software, request a free demonstration by calling +34 900 670 750 or writing to us in the chat below.
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