Both are right in their own sense. You can correlate AHT to the learning curve / experience of an individual. At the same time, stressing overtly on AHT would take an agent's mind off the customer experience which is any company's primary objective. Any target given to an agent would define the behaviour he/she adopts. Hence it is crucial to ensure right targets are taken. From a vendor perspective, abandoned calls and ASA would need to be measured. However, whether individual AHT's lead to the above (as there are many factors affecting the same) can be debated. Find out what is more important to the organisation that has offshored work. Keep a tab on individual agent AHT; however, feedback on call control, quality and customer experience would go a longer way in setting right practices than AHT.

I am not sure that I agree with the statement "Generally speaking AHT is *not* in agents' control". We actually would track each graduating class of agents' AHT as one measure of the effectiveness of the training. Also, when a new class was added to the floor we would have some data to forecast what the AHT would be. And by checking agents' AHT on various types of calls we would be able to identify stars that could pass on their tips to the rest of the agents. One caution on selecting your stars: make sure they are providing the required service and not just rushing the call. It can be a time consuming process, but you should be able to track the progress in AHT reduction through the various periods. One of the interesting constants is that the AHT would reduce to a certain point and then climb back up a notch where it would level off. Hope this helps! -- Don Wood, Ricoh Canada

Hi Jayashree: Generally speaking AHT is *not* in agents' control. First up, AHT is an average. So the agent will then need to: a) keep a running total of her talk time and After Call Work time since she logged in, and b) decide what should be the length of the current call so that the cumulative AHT is within limits to control the AHT. More importantly, it is the customer who decides when the call should end. I presume that just like every call center in the world that I know of, you do not expect the agent to hang up on any customer. As a matter of fact, the only two parameters that the agent *can* control are - Quality of calls & Schedule Adherence. Having said that, I do agree that your client will have expectations from you since you are an outsourcer. In such a case, since you have past nine months data, you can try and find a correlation between AHT and agent tenure, provided you have been maintaining enough details at agent level, etc. You will most likely find out that more experienced agents *might* have lower (or at least more consistent) AHTs. Another suggestion is to find out from the mobile company whether they have any AHT targets based on agent's tenure? Is it the client who wants you to have agent tenure-based AHT targets, or is it a mechanism that *you* are trying to figure out to meet an overall AHT target the client seems to have imposed on you? I guess what the client really wants you to meet is the target Service Level, and not really the AHT spent in meeting or exceeding the Service Level. And this really means that you require to know one-and-only-one *Average* Handling Time to calculate the number of agents in the interval required to meet the Service Level for the forecasted call volumes for that interval. This unique AHT is really the average of different AHTs of the agents with varying tenures. To ensure that the above unique AHT (as opposed to a number of different AHT figures that you are seeking) is more useful to calculate the required number of agents, you should minimize the variance between AHTs for agents with varying tenures. This can come through better training, and better tools for the agents like CTI, Call scripting, etc. And finally, (if it is indeed about managing the Service Level) you need to do better real-time operations management, better schedule adherence, and better resource utilization (including supervisors getting on phones to handle spikes, etc.) to more effectively meet Service Levels. This way you can create a more consistent experience for your client's customers when they call in, and consequently have a satisfied client. Hope that helps. -- Rajas Daithankar, Avaya GlobalConnect Limited