80/20 – why is this the ubiquitous metric?

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Posted Tue 13 May 2008 @ 8:47 a.m. by Sarah Putt

If there is one metric that appears to be universal it’s the target 80/20 – that is 80 per cent of all calls answered within 20 seconds. I was reminded of this while reading a summary report on the Telecommunication Dispute Scheme, which mentioned the Scheme’s administrators had exceeded this telephony target.

But why is 80/20 such a ubiquitous metric? Where did it come from?

This was a question that came up at the Contact Centre Conference workshop on metrics and then, just last week, a very experienced contact centre manager asked me that same question. She thought the 80/20 metric had been inherited from the original Telecom contact centres - which are generally credited as being the first widespread contact centres in New Zealand - and that they had adopted the metric from America.

If that’s the case, is 80/20 relevant in 2008?

Categories: Benchmarking | International

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2 comments

  • Grant Casci - TeleConsultants says:

    The 80%/20s (aka Service Level) is an arbitrary metric that came out of the USA in the early days of call centres. It’s one side of the balance between the level of service you can provide your customers and the cost of resourcing agents to meet that service level… the dreaded Erlang calculations strike again.

    Now it is considered by most in the industry as the minimum service level to provide a reasonable level of service, but many CC’s aim to exceed this and set service levels of 90%/20s, or even 90%/10s. This can be a significant challenge as increasing your service level by 10% doesn’t mean increasing your agents by 10%, it could require a 20% or more increase in agents.

    The final decision is based on Business metrics, not CC metrics. Each business is different and must decide what service level is appropriate for their customers versus the cost to resource to meet that service level… the 80%/20s measure is simply a useful, historical strawman to kick-start the decision making process. It’s also useful to remember that this is only a measure of the Efficiency of the CC, not it’s Effectiveness. We have seen many CC's that achieve this service level, but still don't achieve customer satisfaction for a variety of reasons... this is known as "The operation was a success but the patient died."

    Added: 16 May 2008, 10:22 a.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

  • George says:

    How astonishing!! The discussed metric does not measure the queue time for the customer who is seeking an answer. It ignores the level of information that customers may need. I expect it drives the wrong behaviors, such as encouraging hasty answers, quick closure and a complete lack of any sort of follow up. I presume it is now outdated as we move back to measures that relate to true customer service. I hope that none of my suppliers use it!

    Added: 19 May 2008, 5:22 p.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive
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