hello and welcome to managing metrics a series of videos highlighting contact center metrics
that matter to managers in this series we look at key performance indicators
this video is on average speed of answer also known by its acronym asa
we will define the metric discuss its importance to managing your center
provide an approximate best practice range for the metric and explain the impact of the metric
on your operations and performance this video is brought to you by benchmark portal the source for
contact center training certification benchmarking and consulting if you like this video please
subscribe and hit the like button this helps us to continue providing free video training for
contact center professionals like you asa is the average time it takes for a call to be answered
by an agent from the point when the caller first selected the option to speak to an agent
the graphic below gives you a visual rendering of this definition note that asa includes both calls
that are answered immediately and thus never go into a queue and calls that go into queue
thus asa includes a blend of calls with no queue time and those that land in queue note
that some systems require all calls to go into technical queue even if only briefly
asa stats do not include calls abandoned while in queue asa is important as a customer facing
quality metric quick response time is something all customers like and contributes to positive
satisfaction and loyalty waiting a long time to reach an agent will
cause dissatisfaction and may result in the customer going elsewhere speaking badly of
their customer experience to others or lodging a complaint asa across all industries tends to be
in the 20 to 60 second range which is a very broad range when you think about it however here's where
things get interesting from a managerial viewpoint different industries tend to have different asas
the benchmark portal database shows that the first level tech support industry has an average asa
that nears 80 seconds while some other industry sectors have averages that are less than half that
figure the fact is that people have different expectations of different industries different
expectations for example when they call 9-1-1 emergency lines compared to when they call a
cable or telecom company since lowering asas often requires adding personnel and therefore increasing
costs it is important for you as a manager to know if that improvement in asa will actually
increase customer satisfaction and by inference customer loyalty and repurchase benchmarking
provides you with the information you need to set a realistic competitive asa target for your center
average speed of answer will have an impact on other key metrics as well
long asa times are associated with high abandon rates since the longer someone has to wait to be
helped the more likely they are to get frustrated and hang up and perhaps go to your competitor long
asa can also be linked to longer talk times if people spend the first part of their call
venting their displeasure with a long time they spend on hold all of these elements can obviously
result in lower customer satisfaction and have an impact on agent satisfaction since agents
who are continually under the gun to answer the next caller and that next caller is likely to be
annoyed from a long wait time they will tend to have lower satisfaction and be prone to burnout
so take asa into account when you are doing all aspects of workforce management from projecting
new hires to scheduling etc so that you keep customer wait time under control for all days and
for all time intervals at all times of the week the month and the year we have many more videos to
help you hone your ability to manage with metrics you can find links to these resources below and
don't forget to like and subscribe to our channel feel free to leave comments or suggestions below
i'm bruce belfury and thanks for joining us in this episode of managing metrics