The idea being that executives should push for service consistency across intervals was one of the catchwords in our industry a couple years ago.
We began hearing of goals like “We want 90% of all intervals to have service levels greater than 80% within 20 seconds.” I may sound foolish here, but I don’t get this thinking.
In my humble opinion (Ric humble!?! HaHa), I would think that if you correctly measure service level as being across all of your customers, 80% of all customers being answered in 20 seconds or less should be good enough.
My guess as to why this concept got some traction is that maybe the way daily service was reported may have been wrong. Instead of volume-weighting service level across the day (service level as a percent of customers), service level may be interval-weighted in some reports (service level average across the hours, say). If you add up the service level of all of your intervals and divide by the number of intervals, then you are weighting your busiest period the same as you least busiest period, and that is likely a mistake.
In other words, service level reporting had a mistake in it, and so we had to create a new service discipline around our reports. That’s the only thing I can come up with to make sense of this other metric. But I can’t really get my arms around it. Please explain?
One thing we talk about during sales calls and during webinars is a different concept of service consistency. But we mean this in a very different way: we mean that we will make sure you have the exact right number of people available each week so that week over week- through all the seasonality- we maintain our service with little stress to the operation.
The idea being that the seasonality of all sorts of metrics: handle times, volumes, sick time, attrition, etc… make the development of week over week plans difficult. If you do that well, like CenterBridge does, then you will have service consistency.