Ashley Durante highlights the importance of analysing historical data and past contact volumes when staffing your contact centre.
One of the hardest parts about running a contact centre is getting the right number of people in seats, at the right times, to handle the incoming workload at a reasonable speed of service to customers without going over budget.
For example, when and how many calls arrive are both factors out of your control – you’re simply at the mercy of when that customer decides to contact your company.
Another reason why this is so tough is because of the random way in which the workload such as calls arrive. Let’s compare call centre staffing to the number that might be needed to process incoming mail in one hour. In both cases, assume there are 400 pieces of work to do between 9am and 10am, and that each one takes 3 minutes to handle. That’s 1200 minutes (or 20 hours) of work to do in that one-hour period.
The number of staff needed to process the mail is easy to figure out – it’s simply 20 people. There’s a 1:1 ratio of staff hours to the hours of work to do. Each person can process one full hour’s worth of work since the tasks are stacked up and can be handled sequentially, one right behind the other.
There might be 20 calls arriving and all staff would be busy on a call
On the other hand, we can’t assume the same 20 people could satisfactorily handle 20 hours of inbound telephone calls. At any given point within the hour, there might be 20 calls arriving, and all staff would be busy on a call. Five minutes later, 25 calls could arrive, so all 20 staff are busy, with 5 calls in queue.
Ten minutes later, there may only be 15 calls, meaning that 15 people are busy, but another 5 are just sitting idle. Those 5 people won’t be able to do a full hour’s worth of work since there’s no work arriving at certain points within the hour. Therefore, the number of staff needed to handle incoming telephone calls will always be greater than the actual hours of work to do.
The precise number of staff will depend upon the desired speed of answer
The precise number of staff needed will depend upon the desired speed of answer. The more “bodies in chairs”, the faster the service will be. Contact centres consider a variety of factors in setting a speed of answer goal. Once this goal is set, the number of bodies in chairs can be calculated.
Ashley Durante
The steps of workforce planning and management begin with analysing historical data and past contact volumes to arrive at a future forecast for every half-hour of every single day. These call volume and workload forecasts are used to determine how many staff will be needed each hour.
Variations in this number of staff can have serious implications on the speed of answer to the customer, as well as on productivity and cost. It is important to understand the impact just one person can have on service, productivity, and costs within your centre.
With thanks to Ashley Durante at injixo
Author: Megan Jones
Published On: 4th Feb 2015 - Last modified: 22nd Mar 2017
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