BPO Articles - The Call Center Staffing

Defining the Service Goals

In call centers, there is no such thing as an "industry standard" but instead what is needed is the setting up a speed of answer goal that depends upon many different factors such as enterprise goals and marketing strategies, competitor standards, and most importantly the expectations of customers.

Customer expectations have certainly risen when it comes to speed of answer expectations. More and more callers are basing their expectations and judging your service on their last, best service experience. Taking a look at your call center’s ACD reports and looking at when callers begin to abandon calls will give you some idea about a “worst case” delay scenario. But setting the “best case” goal should involve getting feedback from senior management, customers, competitors, and other centers – and then evaluating cost and service trade-offs to determine the impact on cost and on service of raising or lowering the goal.

Relationship behind Staffing and Service

The question is: what is the impact on service when staff numbers change. Obviously, delay times increase as agents are subtracted, and service improves as staff is added. But service is not affected to the same degree each way, and this is a terribly important phenomenon to understand about call center staffing.

Let’s say we have decided to have 24 staff in place to handle the 20 hours of telephone workload in order to meet an 80% in 20 seconds as our service level goal. If we adjust the staff numbers up or down, there are two very different impacts. First, if we add a person or two, the average speed of answer (ASA) improves from 13 seconds to 8 seconds with 25 staff, and then to 4 seconds with 26 staff. The first person added yielded a 5-second improvement, with the next person gaining us only a 4-second improvement, and a third person would result in an ASA of 2 seconds, a 2-second improvement. Adding staff results in diminishing returns, with less and less impact as the staff numbers get higher.

Now let’s look at the effect of subtracting staff from our 24 person requirement. When we subtract one, two, and three persons our ASA increases to 25 seconds, 51 seconds, and 137 seconds respectively. The first person out resulted in an increase of 12 seconds, the second in another 26-second decline, and the third in a jump another 86 seconds! By taking staff away, service worsens and it does so dramatically at some point. There are especially big jumps as our staff number gets closer and closer to the hours of workload.

So you can clearly observe that if you are delivering poor service in your call center, you can improve it dramatically by adding just one more person. On the other hand, when service levels are mediocre to bad, one more person dropping out can create a situation in which it is nearly impossible to recover.

Calculating Shrinkage and Schedule Requirements

The numbers so far, were obtained by assuming that all agents are always available to handle call workload. But we all know that agents aren’t available much of the time. And hence we need to factor in this unavailability into our schedule requirements so we end up with enough staff to man the phones.

Thus, a final adjustment needs to be made for calculating staff requirements to factor in all the activities and situations that make staff "unproductive". This unproductive time is referred to as staff shrinkage and is defined as the time for which staff are being paid but not available to handle calls which includes activities such as breaks, meetings, training sessions, off-phone work, and general unproductive time.

In most centers, staff shrinkage ranges from 20 – 35%. We account for this shrinkage factor in our staff requirement by dividing the staff requirement by the productive staff percentage (or 1 minus the shrinkage percentage). In our example, if 24 staff are needed and our shrinkage factor is 30%, then 24/.7 yields a requirement of 34 schedules.