What is service level and how to utilise it?

No matter the industry or company, there’s one thing most of us have in common: we love to throw around acronyms like KPI & SLA.

Whether we do it because we can or because we want to, I’m not entirely sure, but my guess is that it’s because we want to appear a bit knowledgeable.

We at lynes are no exception and often toss around terms like service level (SL) and target service level (TSL) both internally and externally, talking about it as one of the simplest ways to maintain a good service level.

But before we start talking about SL, let’s clarify the meaning of KPI and SLA.

What is KPI?

The abbreviation KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator which are metrics used by organizations to assess how well they are performing in relation to their strategic and operational goals. KPIs can vary depending on the type of organization and industry, and they help provide a clear picture of a company’s successes and challenges.

KPIs are carefully selected by the company and serve as one or more metrics to see if the company in question is ‘steering’ in the right direction. Depending on the type of operation you run, they can look different, here are some common examples:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• Average Wait Time (AWT)
• SLA

And so you don’t get confused; a KPI is not a key figure itself but a collective term for various metrics.

What is SLA?

Service Level Agreement, abbreviated as SLA, is part of a contract between a service provider and its customers or users.

It specifies the level of service to be delivered and often includes details about quality, availability, and answering times. SLAs are common among internet, telecommunications, and IT providers and are also found in other service-oriented industries to define exactly what customers can expect from the provider.

An SLA might define things like:

• Availability and uptime: The percentage of time a service is expected to be available and operational
• Handling time: How quickly the provider should respond to inquiries or incidents
• Resolution or restoration time: The time it takes for the provider to resolve an issue or restore the service to full functionality after an interruption.

What is service level?

Service level (SL), or its Swedish equivalent servicenivå, is a way to measure a KPI, assuming it’s used, and to ensure that you adhere to your SLAs.

It’s thus a metric for both SLA and KPI and is defined as follows:

Service level measures how a system or availability performs based on set goals. This can be:

• The percentage of calls answered
• The number of calls answered within X seconds

Service level in lynes

With lynes, measuring your Service level is a breeze. It’s a function that is activated by default when you create a new answer group in the app, and you can easily adjust the values to fit your needs.

Here’s how it works

This helps you keep track of an answer group’s answering times by measuring whether agents answer calls within a set threshold value (in seconds) and displays it as your service level in percent.

Example: you set the value to 90 seconds and 7 out of 10 calls are answered within this time. Then your service level would be 70%. It’s also possible to add a minimum threshold to exclude early hang-ups. For instance, calls hung up within 10 seconds or less.

Adding target service level

As an extra layer of data presented in analytics, you can activate a target for your service level. That is, the percentage of all your calls you should answer within the set time.

A simple way to realize the metric for your SLA on an answer group.

Accessing the data

To more easily reach your goals, it’s important that you and the agents can easily access the data, which is why we’ve made it possible to present it in different places:

On a wallboard

With our wallboard, you can easily visualize metrics from an answer group on an external screen. By doing this, it becomes clear for the agents how they are performing in real time.

Directly in the AG (answer group)

In the AG’s dashboard, we present several different metrics, including service level, which means that all agents in an AG have direct access to the data in real-time.

Via analytics

If you have access to analytics in lynes, you’ll find both your service level and target service level depicted in two graphs, where you can directly see how you’re performing and if you’re deviating from set levels. You can easily export data from here!

Increase customer satisfaction with better service!

Acting on data instead of guesses makes decisions easier, decisions that hopefully lead to better, faster, and more efficient service!

With lynes, our customers create the right digital environment to increase their customer satisfaction and easily maintain a high level of service!