Original Publication: Customer Management Insight - June 2008
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Now, stick with me on this one (large call centers have their challenges too, but they are often of a different type). Consider some of the issues facing smaller centers:
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The smaller the agent group handling calls, the greater the impact each person has on service level. Poorly timed breaks, unplanned non-phone activities and absenteeism can quickly demolish service level.
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At lower volumes, the calling patterns (i.e., seasonality, day-of-week and half-hour-of-day patterns) for average talk time, average after call work time (wrap-up) and volume are generally less predictable, which makes accurate forecasting more difficult.
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Random call arrival (the moment-to-moment arrival of calls) is more volatile at lower call volumes. Picture a graph showing the minute by minute arrival of 2,500 calls in a half hour. It would look smoother than a graph of 25 calls. Put another way, calls really ‘bunch up" in smaller call centers.
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Small call centers have a tougher time absorbing wide swings in the work load, resulting from marketing campaigns, changes in the marketplace, the introduction of new products and services, and other events.
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Agents in small call centers often have to be "jacks of all trades," handling a wide variety of calls and other tasks.
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Small call centers often do not have the advanced tools, technologies and support that larger centers do (although that is changing as sophisticated technologies become increasingly cost effective for smaller applications).
Flip the coin over, and small call centers clearly have some advantages. For example, there’s often a cohesiveness and sense of responsibility among the agents that is more difficult to replicate in larger environments. Further, keeping everyone up to date on changes in policies and services is usually less difficult and less time consuming. And the big question many call center managers often have around 10:30 a.m., "Where is everybody?" is easier to answer.
The point in all of this is, hey, you may only have nine people handling calls but you have a call center, and it makes a lot of sense to treat it as such. Some of the unique challenges notwithstanding, many of the same planning and management approaches that work so well for larger call centers (targeting a service level objective, forecasting, scheduling, etc.) will also help you. The following advice, garnered from many others who have been down this path, will help you identify key issues you face and suggestions on how to tackle them.
Get the Laws of Call Center Nature Working for You
Notice in the scenarios presented in Figure 1 on the previous page, that a group of nine people are required to handle 50 calls in a half hour. Their occupancy (the percent of time that the agents who are seated and available to take calls are actually handling calls, versus waiting for calls to arrive) is 65 percent. But for a group handling 10 times the number of calls, you wouldn’t need 10 times the number of agents (90), but only 65, with occupancy at 90 percent. Put another way, a group of nine people is much more efficient than nine individuals working independently. And one group of 90 people is a lot more efficient than 10 separate groups of nine people each.
The pooling principle is a mathematical fact, based on the laws of probability. It states: any movement in the direction of consolidation of resources will result in improved traffic-carrying (i.e., call handling) efficiency. Conversely, any movement away from consolidation of resources will result in reduced traffic-carrying efficiency. This principle is at the heart of what makes call centers so efficient, and you’ll want it on your side as much as possible. More specifically:
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If you have a small group to begin with, resist the temptation to further subdivide unless absolutely necessary. You may have to specialize around complex call types or multiple languages, but the impetus ought to be on cross-training and pooling as much as possible.
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Look for ways to further pool the resources you have. Can you further cross-train your staff? Would developments in your information systems reduce the time necessary for training and enable newer hires to handle a broader variety of calls? Are you a bottleneck for approvals, escalated calls and staff planning, and can you begin developing others so they can share these responsibilities?
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In hiring, find people who can handle the broadest variety of calls. For example, if you handle multiple languages, multilingual agents are worth their weight in gold.
Develop a Systematic Planning Process
Some respond to the subject of resource planning with the rationale that forecasting, staffing and scheduling won’t do a lot of good because there is only a limited number of staff anyway. Truth is, the fact that you are in a more volatile environment and that you have limited resources to work with is all the more reason to do some concerted planning. (See Notes, December 1996, for a summary of the planning process. You may want to also review the many past SLN articles that focus on the details of forecasting, staffing and scheduling.)
Small call centers generally have fewer scheduling alternatives and are therefore prime candidates for the "envelope strategy," illustrated in Figure 2. To use this approach, first determine the base staff required to handle the inbound call load, down to the half hour level. Next, add in necessary breaks, absenteeism, etc., so you know the rostered staff required. Then, find the difference between rostered staff required and the staff you actually have; that is the envelope available for more flexible activities, such as non-phone work, training and special projects.
This approach simply recognizes that flexible activities should happen in the valleys of the inbound call load pattern. For example, training should happen Wednesday afternoon versus Monday morning (assuming Monday has a heavier call load). And correspondence or e-mail should happen during the late afternoon, not during the busier mid-morning period.
You are probably making these adjustments anyway, even if you don’t have a well-developed planning process in place. But for the envelope strategy to be most effective, you’ll need to forecast and manage non-phone activities in addition to the inbound calls. As with inbound calls, these activities often occur in predictable patterns, and usually have a strong correlation to other forecasts, such as the inbound call load, units of sales or number of customers. Investigate the tracking capabilities in your ACD, forecasting/staffing software and computer database. As a last resort, track these activities manually, as they occur.
Next month, we’ll pick up this topic again, and I’ll provide additional recommendations for small call centers.
