WFM Unfiltered

SLA vs ASA (Is SLA a Dead Metric?)

July 30, 2024 • Greg McConney • Season 1 • Episode 4

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In this episode of WFM Unfiltered, Irina chats with Greg McConney, the Vice President of Workforce Planning, Analytics, and Business Intelligence at XtendOps. Greg brings his extensive experience from his previous role at Verizon to delve into the intricate world of workforce management metrics. The focus of their discussion is on the relevance of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) versus Average Speed of Answer (ASA), questioning whether SLAs have become outdated in today's fast-paced contact center environment.

Greg begins by defining the fundamental differences between SLAs and ASA, highlighting how each metric impacts overall customer satisfaction. He argues that while SLAs have been the industry standard for years, they often fail to provide a complete picture of customer experience. Irina and Greg explore the practical implications of these metrics, discussing how they affect not only customer satisfaction but also agent performance and company costs.

Throughout the episode, Greg emphasizes the importance of a balanced approach to workforce management, where both metrics are used in conjunction with other data points to create a more accurate and comprehensive understanding of contact center performance. He shares insights from his current role at XtendOps, demonstrating how they successfully manage various client needs while maintaining high service standards.

This episode is a must-watch for anyone involved in workforce management, offering valuable perspectives on optimizing contact center operations. Don't miss Greg's expert advice on improving both customer and agent experiences through better metric management.

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Irina:

Hello, everyone, and happy Tuesday. I am your host, Irina Mateva, and welcome to WFM Unfiltered, a podcast by RightWFM. Today, we're traveling to Jersey, and we're going to be talking again about terminology with someone who is a fantastic professional, but before I introduce you to him, Let me introduce you to the sponsors of this episode, Community WFM. The key is in their name. Their tool makes it much more easier for everyone across the board to maintain operations from the agents to the planners, to the team leads. So if you're looking for a partner that's truly invested in making stuff easier for you, reach out to them. More info in the show notes. And with that, on to the show. Hi, Greg, how are you doing?

Greg:

Good. How are you?

Irina:

I am doing amazing. I'm so happy that you accepted that invitation for this chat.

Greg:

I was very excited to receive it. I think it's, we don't find too many people who are experts in the workforce management space who are just. Getting the word out there. So I was, super happy to, get in the discussions with you.

Irina:

Oh, thank you for that. And likewise, I absolutely love having you because you came up with such a great topic. And I know that, we were discussing many different topics and you would for sure be joining me for a second parter. And that's gonna be something completely different that we're going to be doing. And I'm so excited about that. But before we kick off, Can you please introduce yourself?

Greg:

Sounds good. my name is Greg McConney. I'm currently working at a awesome company called XtendOps, which is a, contact center BPO, really we're doing customer success across various channels for a lot of awesome companies and. At XtendOps, I serve as the VP over workforce planning and also analytics and business intelligence. I love the role. I really love all things data. So this is a really perfect blend for me of not only using data to help our clients understand their metrics better. We're going to talk a little bit about how we're going to be able to use this to help us understand ours, but also using it to optimize our workforce, in the perfect way. And before XtendOps, I was at Verizon for eight years, where I led their workforce planning organization. so major change going from one giant company where you have tons of different call queues and business units that you're managing day to day. To a BPO where you are looking at various different companies, and really have to keep your eye on a lot of different things and really prioritize your time in, in, in the smartest possible way.

Irina:

You have such a great background and you're right, it's such a shift, but you're going from a massive company that's so big on the market to, I must say, a BPO that I was quite excited to hear about because I know that you're truly invested into making the life of agents easier, which is something that It's disregarded, especially in BPO. So join us for the second conversation. This is going to be our topic. But for this one, the topic you have chosen is discussing service level and average speed of answer. So before starting to share our opinion about them, do you want to kick off with some, Terminology definition, what is a service level and what's average speed of answer.

Greg:

Yeah, absolutely. So service level is that metric that almost every company will have, and it typically serves as an executive metric, is how I like to look at it. But what it helps you understand is how many of your contacts are you responding to and answering, A certain amount of time. So one you might hear, a company might say, Hey, I really want to answer 70% of my calls in 60 seconds. You might have another company who, they invest a little bit heavier in their customer service. They might wanna answer 90% of their calls in 10 seconds. So companies really, depending on how much they wanna invest in this space and how fast they wanna answer their customer contacts. We'll define a different service level metric, but that's really what it tries to get at. Average speed of answer is really just how long is it taking you to answer every single contact before a customer would abandon. And that's really the key, right? You're trying to understand, okay, I had maybe 100 calls come in today. On average, I answered them in 30 seconds, but I can really understand that distribution of How many were answered in 10 seconds, 200 seconds, 50 seconds? Because you could have a very disparate, distribution there. And that's very important to understand because each customer is getting impacted in a potentially different way.

Irina:

This is such a great way to kick off our conversation and to elaborate a little bit on the terminology. Before we continue with going deeper, I'm sorry, I'll have to pause. Get it out of my system and start with the rant. Do you know what's one thing that really annoys me, gets me out of my skin is when we're talking about targets and KPIs and service level and abandonment and what have you, when I hear the term industry standard, So in my experience, almost every single customer that I have worked with, when I ask them, what's your service level? Oh, 80, 60. Why? it's an industry standard. And I'm always asking like, what kind of standard is that? What kind of industry? First of all, and my opinion on those targets is that. Someone once has made some sort of a research, like 20 years ago, has produced some numbers and now everybody is using those numbers without understanding their own operations, which is where the issue with both service level and every speed bouncer starts with. What do you think about that?

Greg:

Yeah, I, totally agree. it can be very frustrating when you're, Doing this every single day. And you're told like, Hey, this is the industry standard. I think what it comes down to is customers want their contacts answered really fast, right? And that really fast can mean a lot of different things. to me, it's an industry standard could also be a little bit of an excuse to invest less in customer success. If you really want to deliver that exceptional customer experience, It starts with answering the phone, and unless you're really staffing bell to bell, and across all your queues, and you're really making sure you're meeting all the requirements needed, and even overstaffing a little bit to be safe, so that those reps aren't back to back on calls, they have a little bit of a break in the day, I think you're going to find it challenging to deliver even the industry standard. I think industry standard is something that It can help, but I also see it as an excuse to not invest more, in really getting those customers through to your agents.

Irina:

Daniel, the way that I'm looking at it, industry standard is a great way if you have no clue and no expectations about your own business and your own operations and you just have to have a starting point. This is why we usually use industry standard. But, while you were talking and explaining about customer success, the thing that started playing in my head was that If we have to be honest, who cares about the service level and every speed of answer? Because if I'm a customer, I neither have access to your metrics, neither, to be honest, I care about them. I don't care if 90 percent of your customers are answered within 60 seconds, if I'm three hours waiting on the phone to get connected to someone. So how the heck do we reach what we have internally to the customers?

Greg:

Yeah, I think it's, how well you have a handle on your data and are you actually taking action on it. So I think, in order to really, a starting point to understand where your company sits is you need to understand not only ASA by time of day, But you really also need to understand, in every interval, what's your distribution of answering times. let's say for example, at 12 o'clock in the afternoon, you are answering 50 percent in 10 seconds, but the other 50 percent are in 30 seconds. A minute and a half, 90 seconds, then at eight o'clock in the evening, you're maybe answering 30 percent in 10 seconds and 70 percent are in three minutes, right? You're clearly showing that you're imbalanced to what the requirements are based on however, the demand is coming into the. You need to have your hands on that data so you can take action, move schedules, you might need to hire to a different schedule distribution, but ultimately it's on the company to make sure they're staffing appropriately so that all customers come in some sort of balanced way. You're never going to be perfect here, let's be real. Every forecast every day in workforce planning is going to miss somewhere. You're going to miss your handle time forecast. Your call forecast, how many people show up for work that day, so your shrink. Something's going to miss, it's going to throw off your data. You then have the opportunity to make sure you have a full picture of what's going on, so you can really move the pieces around and ensure the customer gets answered fast. but I agree, customers aren't going to care about ASA, it's really on the company's responsibility to care, take action, and move things around. Because the last thing you want to do, and this is the way I've always thought about it, If you're delivering a worse speed of answer in the evening versus the daytime, you're just taking it out on customers who happen to have a schedule where they need to call you at night. And that's not fair. Also, on top of that, we think about in customer service, the metric of occupancy, which is how busy our reps are, how often are they in that taking call state. If you're busy at a certain time of day, Those reps are going to be back to back on phone calls and the burnout is going to start happening versus the daytime shifts, they might be less busy, so they're getting those five minute breathers. They're getting more coaching and development. they're able to spend more time off the phone, maybe take more, Days off in the day if things are less busy, you want that for everyone. You want everyone in your business, all the agents have the same opportunity for, having a good work life balance.

Irina:

So if I have to take you back is because a big time, a big part, why your agents are busy or not is due to how many people we have available, but how many people we need to have available comes from a big part from those targets that we want to follow internally My experience that usually we are accommodating those targets to manage our business, our point of service versus the cost. To manage that service and this is where usually we start playing. Okay. What is the optimum balance between how many people we want to service for a certain amount of a second, certain amount of time versus how much we're willing to pay for that. And this is where it can all goes wrong. It can all goes okay. Because for me, at some point, if, especially if you're using service level, at some point you can know you cannot go, get above that. So you are investing into hiring more people and more people and the service level remains 97%, 97 and a bit percent, and it makes no sense for your business. On this note, I know that you are potentially not a big fan of service level. So can you tell me why is that?

Greg:

I'll say just to answer your last point, I think it's a great call out that a lot of people, sometimes we don't. We don't think about it, right? Which is there is a cost to all of this and every company has a budget. So sometimes you run into a problem where, you're trying to deliver a better service level or a lower speed of answer that comes with a cost. And I'll tell you in any time I've done this analysis, I've always provided at the beginning of a year, the end of one year for the next, when we're doing the budgeting process, every single speed of answer and what the cost of it will be to the business. I'm very fortunate that the places I've worked have prioritized the customer experience and they've really went with a more expensive model and a lower speed of answer because it's so important to get the customer through to an agent. But it's, just a great call out that the financials do play an absolute important role here. especially in the PPO space. A lot of people come to us because labor is too expensive. And they're looking for ways to, optimize costs and still get the quality of a good, customer success professional. On the, a topic though of, service level and why I personally don't like it, I just think, for example, if you want to answer 70 percent of your calls in 30 seconds, and let's say you're delivering that, there's then another 30% That's sitting out there of people. You don't even know what's happening with them. And I've seen this happen in reality, multiple times, you might be delivering that amazing service level in a part of the day, but what about if those, let's say 20 percent of that remaining 30 percent are being answered in 60 seconds, but what if that final 10 percent is waiting 10 minutes and you don't know that is really important because that customer base is now going to be frustrated when they get on with their agent. That's going to frustrate your agent because now they're dealing with a difficult customer, which is, it just started the engagement off on the wrong foot. Not to mention, customers are often not calling because they're happy with a product or a service, right? They're calling because they have some sort of issue and they're looking for resolution. You just started off on the wrong foot. Not to mention, a lot of those customers and customers in today's society, they're never going to wait 10 minutes to talk to an agent. It's just not, it's just not something they're going to do. Everyone's busy, they have things to do, they want to get through fast. So what you've now created is, you've had a percentage of your customers who have abandoned. They've said, I'm not going to wait, I'm going to call back another time. Now they're even more frustrated. So now what you've done is, you've taken a percentage of your calls on one day, and you've moved them to the next day. Or maybe the day after. So you've messed with your distributions a little bit. It makes it a little bit harder to understand. You definitely need some technology like scheduled callbacks, immediate callbacks, that can help here. But you're ultimately creating this cycle where you're kicking a can down the road. You're not answering a certain number of customers in a day and they have to keep calling you back. And unless you have a technology that knows this and handles it properly, you, what if you have a customer who keeps calling and keeps, they can't get through. Now you're talking about a potential churn risk. You're talking about something that's maybe a little bit of a more difficult problem for your agents to solve. So by investing upfront, You are solving several other problems at the same time, but really comes down to my issue with service level is you're not getting the full story, and you need the full story if you want to understand of your customers who's being delivered that white glove service you're looking to maybe deliver versus a really poor experience because your schedules aren't in the right spots or you haven't, And get invested in hiring the right number of people.

Irina:

I really like that explanation, but I'm gonna throw a curveball at you because you mentioned something about the complete picture and My comment would be when we're talking about the average speed of answer, then you are only looking at your answered calls, but you are disregarding that maybe after your average speed of answer is 30 seconds and you drop out all of the other customers. So that's potentially, A huge risk, not of churn, but of everything else. Like people will get frustrated, they'll call again and so on. So what's the difference then for you? Because you don't get the complete picture with both of the metrics.

Greg:

Yeah, it's a great, it's a great point. speed of answer is, really nothing without abandons. So understanding your abandoned percentage and your speed of answer together will really tell that more complete story. So it's a really fair point. We look at both on a daily basis and on every, every 15 minutes of every day, and it is critical. Speed of answer, you will miss that part of the story, but looking at both, you'll know, Hey, On average, we answered the calls in maybe 25 seconds on average. That spread was maybe between 0 seconds and a minute and a half. So now you know your min, max, your median, your average. And then, okay, with that number, in the interval where I made customers wait 90 seconds, I abandoned maybe 5 percent of those calls. So really understanding that is important, especially in our business. You have so many different companies who have so many different lines of business. You need to understand your abandons by line of business, right? Cause it's not just one story. Some companies like to keep calls contained to certain groups for that ultimate customer experience. Only issue with that is, If you're not staffed appropriately in one group, there's nowhere for those calls to overflow. So your abandons can go up, your speed of answer can go up, and yeah, you have to have your finger on that pulse because that's, truly the only way to tell the story of, I'm answering my 95 percent of my calls maybe in X number of seconds, but of those 5 percent of abandons, they had to wait five minutes on average before their call abandoned. So it's really very important part of the story for sure.

Irina:

Yeah. I always say that those metrics are great, but if you're only looking at them in isolation, you're not doing much with your operations. And other thing that I have noticed in a lot of companies that I have worked with is that they look at the target as an absolute value, but they are not looking at what's behind that number. So when we're talking about 80 percent of customers, we have answered them in 60 seconds. that's great. But indeed, what happened with the other 20%? Did we drop them? Because, Imagine that you're in a sales environment where every sale counts and you're missing 20 percent of the people that potentially can buy your product. that's a huge loss and this is where things can get very, muddy about the organizations. So how about that? first of all, we need to understand our business, but second of all, every single line of business, you can have a general, cues. You can have sales cues. You can have reimbursement, what have you that needs to have different priority. And I just can't imagine that you have a VIP clients that are trying to contact you, that are spending hundreds or thousands of euros, dollars on your service or product. And there's no one because you have achieved your service level. So you don't really care about them. It's

Greg:

yep. Every one of those poor interactions will start with I've been a customer for X number of years. It's the classic opening line and it's a fair one. why am I being treated this way? Often what is sales queues get priority. So they're overstaffed cause that's what companies care about the most is bringing in that revenue. You get those customers in the door, but we would do these formulas as well. Even for sales queues, we always understood at any company. How many of those calls are abandoning? What's that actual cost for annualized revenue and margin based on those abandoned calls? So the good thing is, with all the data we have today, it's very easy to tell that story. but yeah, it's a really, valid point there on the sales piece. You really have to understand that fully. And I think for the, the executive point you were hitting on, super important one. I think it's executives need to be more involved in the details of their KPIs. They often like to get up there, and you'll see this at many companies, right? They will put out a major data point. It's one number, right? And you hope that it's showing the right story, but it could be, hey, we're delivering the right thing. We're answering 80 percent of our calls in 20 seconds. Great. But like you said, to the customer, that means nothing. Maybe to shareholders it means something, but it's important that executives understand they have to get engaged, they have to understand a little bit more underneath that, because ultimately they'll be the ones who approve funding to improve it if they want to. But also, they're the ones who are going to get the escalations. think about when customers are frustrated and they couldn't get through and they're waiting an hour for the, longest delay in the queue. Those CEOs are going to get emails. that's typically how it works, right? Customers are going to look up, hey, maybe a LinkedIn message, a Twitter, post. But they're going to, they're going to call out that bad experience. And then the CEO is going to be put in a position or a high level executive of, Hey, why are you not delivering? Why didn't you answer my phone call? And they're going to have to get deep at some point. I'm not saying they need to know the nitty gritty by interval, but they should really understand what's behind a service level number, how it's fluctuated. Are they really hitting their target? How many customers may have been impacted and what could be perceived as a negative experience? there's a lot of ways to feed them some highlight data points where they could see it in one page, but have a much better pulse on their customer experience than, just one number.

Irina:

it's so important. And one thing that we're not spending a lot of time analyzing or understanding is how does the customer service or experience impacted the missed opportunity for concluding a sale, acquire a new customer, or basically leading to churn, because that's one thing that. We're not making the parallel and I'm exactly that type of a customer. I'm very loyal. If I like your product or service, I'm going to be with you for years until you annoy me. And it requires you to annoy me one time in a bad way. And I'm going to be out the door for the next 15 years somewhere else. And every time where I'm calling a customer service for my issues for the bank, for example, If you make me wait, and then the moment that you say something, wrong or with the wrong intonation on the call. For me, it's that's the second strike. I'm out like, thank you very much.

Greg:

Yeah. Oh, absolutely. You hit on a super great point there. there's, think about it this way. You have service level and speed of answer to get to the agent. Then you have, a service level type metric, if you will, on how well that interaction went, right? CSAT, NPS, whatever a company wants to measure. If you've already made the customer wait 10 minutes, they finally get through. There's a couple of things that I often see go wrong in this space, in customer service. The customer might be calling about a account issue. Maybe they need to reset their password. Maybe the agent hits them first with, are you interested in us reviewing your account to upsell you some products? Right now you're like, I just called to get my password reset and you're trying to sell me some services like servicing problem, take care of in the best possible way, resolve it on the call. If you really can't get the right person, you can submit a ticket and make sure there's follow through. And then from there proceed with any extra services that you might've earned from delivering a good customer experience. But yeah, if you get You know, those two strikes in one contact. And also you might already be frustrated with that service for a various number of reasons. But yeah, now you're waiting forever to get through. You have a problem. You really need solved fast because you might need to do something with your account. It takes a while. Maybe you had to abandon the first time because it took 20 minutes to get through. Then the next time you finally get through, you had to wait and then you're delivered a bad customer experience from a, Maybe it wasn't the right agent to handle the contact. Maybe it was a transfer to the wrong representative. You're now in a position where you are very frustrated. And if there is a competitor in that space. You are talking absolutely about potential churn. it's not guaranteed. It's a hard correlation to tie together. But I can tell you companies are really trying to draw that conclusion. But if you want to nail the customer experience, it starts from the very beginning of the process, which is invest in customer success, invest in workforce management, so you are staffed appropriately for your call demand, so no customer is suffering. Past the point of, where they'll be frustrated. And then from there, hire the most quality agents, pay them well, treat them well, and then let them treat your customers well.

Irina:

This is a great way to go to our wrapup. And I wanna mention one thing before, we, stop with our conversation for today is that so far we've been also mostly looking at the customer point of view and of the cost point of view for our company. But imagine that you're the agents and you're not properly staffed and something is going wrong and you're looking at those targets in isolation and then you're getting an angry customer, then a frustrated customer, then somebody's shouting at you while talking about attrition in contact centers. It's really not the easiest job out there. You're underpaid, you're stressed on all levels and then The schedulers are giving you bad shifts, team leads are screaming at you, intradays are screaming at you, then the customers are screaming at you. what is it there for you in the end? So this is also what I have seen a major, blow for the agents. And I'm going to give it a hint somewhere here for our second recording is that we're going to be specifically talking about Attrition and contact centers, and especially in BPO, which is your current, kind of journey. So let's leave it there because I'm very excited about the second conversation. But is there any other takeaways that we need to conclude with in terms of service level and average speed of answer?

Greg:

No, I think you nailed it. I love the conversation. it's always great talking to you because you're just so engaged in the industry and. We need more people talking about workforce planning. It's such an important science and it sometimes just doesn't get enough love. but you hit the point great, right? It's not a bad, all of your employees need to be treated well, right? The employee experience is more important now than ever with work life balance and, And just overall compensating well, but it's not just about operational employees. Your agents are the one on the front lines every day dealing with customers and representing your brand. If anyone deserves to be treated the best, it's really them. and that goes to everything we talked about. The right shifts for them and their family and their situations, the right pay so that they can take care of their family, and build a career and, have a, a very good home life, right? And not being burnt out because they're dealing with frustrated customers and they're too busy in the day. It's, really all those things, and making sure you're delivering on all of them. So you really have that happy, and productive employee base. I just appreciate the time and always getting to chat with you.

Irina:

We wrap up. Thank you so much for this conversation, Greg.

Greg:

Thank you. Always a pleasure.

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