So here's the way we look at it, we look at what impact one person has on service
to callers, occupancy for the other staff and bottom line cost. So let's take a
look at some numbers and these numbers I think illustrate that concept best. So
this is an example where we have 26 hours of work to do, our earlier example
we had 20 hours in the mailroom we bump that up just a little bit her,e so 26
hours of work to do. We said earlier that okay that means that we have to have
more than 26 staff well how many more well how many more depends upon the
level of service or the delay that we want to provide. So many contact centers
today use ASA or average speed of answer as that service goal definition
but the majority around the world use service level. So in this example we are
looking to the point where we're meeting a 70% in thirty-second, speed of answer
goal. So that occurs here with 29 staff you see that we would need 29 staff in
place in order to deliver either an under 30 second ASA average speed of
answer or better than a 70 percent service level. So there's our number, but
then let's look up and down on the table and let's look at the implications of
the power of one. We make a move just one step in either direction and look what
happens. First if we add staff we go from a 28 second delay on average. We add a
person that improves to 16 seconds so we've made a 12 second improvement there.
If we add one more person we improve once again we get from 16 seconds to
nine seconds well we didn't make a 12 second improvement this time, we only
made a seven second improvements and you know
what if we add one more person. We're probably going to get about a four
second improvement so you see the pattern that's happening here. Every time
we add another person we get an improvement in service but we get less
and less and less of it each time. So one of the rules of call center staffing is
that there's a law of diminishing returns here. We get an improvement but
less and less so each time but now look at the other direction when we remove a
person. We take just one person away and we go from 29 staff to 28, there's a
difference of 27 seconds we go from a 28 second delay on average to 55 seconds.
And if we remove just one more person it's not a 27 second jump this time, no
it's a huge jump in service this time. So it's almost tripling. So as we are
removing staff service worsens each time but it's really important for everyone
to understand that it worsens exponentially. And where it really gets
us in trouble is where the number of staff is getting closer and closer and
closer to your actual hours of workload to do. So that's where that really
jumping off point is, as we go from 28 staff to 27 we're getting very very very
near to the 26 hours of workload to do and that's where we're really in
staffing trouble. Now so with these numbers this may be clear
to the workforce team that okay we need to really try and get that 29 people in
place. But what is the implication if we're just a few off we've looked at the
service implication I'm going to show you the other two in just a minute but I
think one of the keys here is helping your staff understand that this is a
dilemma. Because do you have people sometimes in your call center say well I
need to come in late on Thursday morning and you say well that's really a problem
with you know it's gonna be a problem with service that morning
and they're looking at you thinking I'm one out of you know 25 people, 30 people
what difference could it possibly make you hardly even notice that you look out
over the call center that someone's missing right. So I think one thing we
need to do is we need to help them understand the power of one and the
impact that's going to have. So what you see here is the impact that it has on
the customer and speed of answer but we also want to look at and communicate the
impact that it has on our other groups as well.