Part of the Call centers glossary:

Service level describes, usually in measurable terms, the services a network service provider furnishes a customer within a given time period. When used as a call center metric, service level measures the percentage of incoming calls that an agent answers live in an established amount of time.

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For example, a service level of 90% can be achieved if 9 out of every 10 phone calls are answered before the established time limit.

There are multiple approaches to determining service levels, each involving how call centers define abandoned calls. They may be treated, for instance, as:

  • Missed opportunities (counted against the service level)
  • Ignored (unavoidable and a part of doing business)
  • Completed (where the caller would have been serviced properly without a premature abandonment of the call when the wait time is reasonably short).

Learn more about service level agreements:

Negotiating service-level agreements and billing with cloud providers.

Measuring agent retention translates to the bottom line

SaaS evaluation: Considerations for a SaaS service-level agreement

This was last updated in November 2010
Posted by: Margaret Rouse

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