Our next 2007 goal is for Average Speed of Answer (ASA), or how quickly your Help Desk can answer calls that come into your automatic call distribution (ACD) queue. If you don't have an ACD queue, you can still measure this, though it may be much harder.
Callers know this metric as "How long do I have to wait on hold before I get to a live person?" and no other metric makes clients happier. Our goal, with 7 agents, 2300 internal clients, and tens of thousands of online clients, is to answer every call in an average of 20 seconds.
20 seconds is our 2007 goal for ASA. 20 seconds is about 3 rings, give or take a ring. Any more than 3 rings, and people feel they are waiting too long. Any less than that, and people feel like the people on your Help Desk aren't working hard enough.
As you have less agents, and call volume stays steady or increases, you may need to adjust your expectations for ASA to 30 or 40 seconds. Any longer than a minute and people will start to talk. At my firm, 20 seconds is our threshold, though our readerboards don't beep until people have been waiting more than a minute, and the board blinks after 30 seconds in queue.
Do you have a goal for ASA? If so, please share it, along with how many clients you serve, in the comments. Perhaps we can develop our own set of best practices here?
Next, I'll be sharing our client satisfaction goals for 2007. Stay tuned for more 2007 goals.
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