Availability versus call times

Hi Lisa,

If you are talking about the amount of time an agent is spending in an Available state, i.e not taking calls but ready, then it will be pretty tough for your agents to be able to manage that as a KPI. Availability, or Occupancy if talking about the inverse, is an output not a driver. It is the result of the workload you are seeing vs the number of agents you have staffed, which has likely been determined based on a service level target. Availability would be used more from a point of view of budgeting - usually to have to explain to people in charge of the purse strings why you need more people than there is pure workload.

An agent can have some control how many hours they are "Available" to work and when, which is usually tracked against schedules to provide Adherence.

Lisa,

Thank you for the calrification. Very different scenario then.

You are seeking to reduce abandon rate, and presumably you have some routing that determines a call gets offered to voicemail after some pre determined length of time?

If so, then reducing Handle Time of calls would almost certainly improve your performance on this measure, but you need to be careful about how and why you do this.

Reduce AHT but get more repeats will trigger another of the factors causing poor performance - call volumes. You will need to be sure that a reduced AHT will not tip this factor too far - in an ideal world, you would assume low repeats has some correlation to good service anyway!

Can the agents do anything about the AHT - is is system related rather than how they speak to people or their knowledge and use of the systems. Processes tend to be the main factor behind your AHT, so be careful how far you think you can cut without making fundamental changes to your processes and systems.

Basically, Handle Time and number of agents staffed vs the call volume are the factors which will be influencing your ability to answer calls.

Other areas to consider are patience levels. Have you called your helpdesk and experienced what your "customers" experience? do you have pain points where announcements are causing customers to hang-up?

Finally, be careful to analyse the impact of your Handle Time changes. You may not need to reduce anywhere near to 12 mins to get the desired improvement in volume of calls handled. Small changes can have big impacts, especially if you are not a million miles a way from being optimally staffed. Have a look at the free erlang calculators on this site for further info - they'll show you how to model this, if you do not already use them.

Hope that helps.