The Power of One in Call Center Staffing

In order to run a call center you need to first plan and develop a workforce schedule. Whether you have developed your workforce schedule manually or through workforce management systems, this thing is trivial to consider unless your staff sticks to it. Infact, getting the agents to adhere to the daily work schedules is one of the hardest things to manage in many call centers as most of them have a kind of thinking as to absence of one person can’t possibly make much of the difference in the operation. Generally, the workforce management process includes the following steps:

In such case, schedule adherence can be improved to a large extent with a little education. You can help your agents in understanding the importance of schedule adherence by simply educating them about the effect one or two bodies can have on the service and can ask them to increase their cooperation with the scheduling process. Helping your staff in this way to understand what impact one individual agent has on service can go a long way in getting them to stick to their planned schedule.

Actually, the impact of a person or two on the service largely depends on two factors: the size of the call center and the level of service delivery.

Size of the call center

Obviously, the smaller the call center, the greater the percentage share of workload handled by each person, and therefore the bigger the impact of his/her participation. Where as in case of larger call centers, because of their economies of scale, there is greater efficiency in the call handling process, and therefore the impact of one person on the service is not much significant.

Level of service delivery

The current level of service being provided by the call center is another factor that determines the impact on service of a single person. The better the existing level of service, the lesser is the impact of one person on the service. Obviously, as staff numbers increase, service improves. As staff numbers decrease, service worsens.

So, you can conclude that the impact of one person on service is that if your center is in a service slump, adding just one more person on the phones can make a tremendous improvement. On the other hand, losing one person in case of a mediocre or poor service situation can really ruin the service to such an extent that it might become very difficult to recover.

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.