We’re missing response-time SLAs. What can we do?

Your response time is slow. Maybe not horribly slow, but you are not meeting response target times–and this is a persistent problem. Take heart: fixing response time issues is much easier than fixing resolution time issues!

Here’s a ten-point checklist you can use to diagnose and fix the problem. We start at the strategic level before delving into the details of how you manage case intake and case resolution.

• Make sure you have enough agents. If you are short-staffed, you will for sure have response time challenges (along with resolution time and customer satisfaction challenges, yikes!). A reliable indication that staffing is the issue is that your backlog is growing steadily, across the board, even as you use systematic backlog management techniques.
• Offer self-service options. Customers love getting an immediate answer and inflecting the case volume down, even a a little bit, makes it much easier to respond promptly. This is not a quick fix but it will yield benefits for years to come.
• Build response time into KPIs. Yes, customer satisfaction and productivity may be more important than response time achievement, but having a visible, shared goal for response time keeps it top of mind.

Now. let’s look at how you manage case intake and routing.

• Move away from phone intake. Phone calls require a quick response, so give yourself some wiggle room, at least for non-emergency cases. Move intake to online case logging, or even chat which is more flexible when it comes to response time.
• Make sure you schedule enough agents on intake. This is a basic and often overlooked issue. If most agents are “off queue” working on their backlog, the few agents who are dealing with intake won’t be able to cope, especially during busy times. Schedule more queue time.
• Keep the quick cases moving. If you have a mix of simple (short) and complex (long) cases, it’s easy for agents to get stuck on a long case while customers with short cases are forced to wait.  See if you can anticipate case complexity and route simple cases to a separate queue.
• Create SLA alerts. This is very helpful especially if you miss targets by just a little bit. Provide visual alerts to agents and managers when cases get close to the targets so they can take action before you miss them.
• Train agents to keep initial interactions short so they can attend to incoming requests. This works best when coupled with alerts, as described above: there’s no reason to cut a conversation short if no one is waiting!

Finally, look at how you handle cases.

• Streamline the agents’ work. Improve clunky tools and get rid of burdensome logging requirements. Offload follow-up tasks to other teams whenever possible.  Anything you can do to make agents more efficient will help them get to the next case faster (and will speed up resolution time, as a bonus).
• Make sure agents can get help when they need it. An agent who’s waiting for help is an agent who is not available to work on a new case. Improve knowledge management and collaboration management.

How are you doing on response time? What techniques have worked for you? Please share.