Managing Daily Staffing and Service

For the successful running of a call center, you should have just the right staff in place every half-hour to match the workforce to the workload. The foremost thing that needs to be taken care of in this case is the call forecasting. In order to arrive at a call forecast, you need to gather and analyze mounds of historical information regarding the call patterns. Then you need to calculate the number of staff needed by half-hour to meet your center’s speed of answer goals. The next step is to work out an efficient and acceptable staffing schedule. Finally, you need to manage the daily schedules to ensure that the service levels are being met half- hour by half-hour. For this what is required is a well planned workforce management process. This includes tracking the half-hourly components of call volume, handle time, and staffing levels that will provide you the information you need to communicate status and make necessary changes to ensure that your service goals are consistently being met. Generally, the workforce management process includes the following steps:

• Forecast workload
• Calculate staff requirements
• Create staff schedules
• Track call center performance

The key is to have a systematic process in place to track the information so there is sufficient time to react to make a difference for the day.

The Real-Time Tracking Process

There are three steps in the daily performance tracking process:

Step 1: Tracking
Step 2: Communications
Step 3: Reaction

Tracking and Analysis

Tracking performance within the day means tracking the three elements that affect service: call volume, average handle time (AHT), and staffing levels.

Let’s take a look at how a variation in any one of these components might affect net staffing and service. For example, imagine a scenario where the staff is adhered to the schedule. The call volume forecast is also right on the target, but the calls took 30 seconds longer to handle than planned. The reason may be the slow operating speed of computer system or a different format for the billing statement might have caused an extra question per call. Due to this you will observe that staff requirements are significantly affected. In such case, staffing at 8:00 would need to be adjusted from 82 to 90 staff in order to meet an 80% in 20 seconds service goal. And if the staffing is not adjusted, the service level will drop to only 6% of calls answered in 20 seconds.

Opposite to this, consider the situation when workload is less than the forecast, when the marketing campaign doesn’t go as well as expected and call volume is 10% lower than planned. This time at 8:00, only 75 staff will be needed instead of the 82 to be scheduled to work. With everyone on the phones, service level will be as high as 98% in 20 seconds. That’s great from a service perspective, but notice the amount of unnecessary expense this kind of overstaffing will cause.