Acceptable Calls Per Day

Answers

• Siraj Hassan Posted at 8:20AM on Mar 26, 2012

  calls/hour is function of AHT. For a AHT of 5 minutes the number of calls that can be answered/hour @ 70% utilization = 8 calls/hour. Assuming that every agent provides 8 productive hours, the number of calls that can be answered and can be used as the bench marking is 8*8 = 64 calls/day. Hope this helps Regards, Siraj

• Jeremy Ellis Posted at 2:00PM on Apr 5, 2012

  I believe an important thing to consider is the unintended consequences of any KPI you establish. What is the objective of the company - is it customer experience? Is it lowest operating cost ("operational excellence")? From what you describe it sounds like it's customer experience with may not be achieved with a calls per hour metric. The behavior that will drive is an agent moving as quickly as possible through a transaction in order to achieve a certain throughput, typically at the expense of customer experience/quality. If calls per hour is the KPI you're directed to use, it might be helpful to look at where the average is currently and use that as a benchmark. From there, engage your associates with a simple question like "what prevents you from completing more calls in a day?" You'll likely discover there's a cumbersome process or efforts are duplicated (i.e. entering notes in multiple systems) which reduces overall efficiency.

• Jeff Palzkill Posted at 8:13AM on May 14, 2012

  This is a perfect place to apply a little statistical analysis. Take a 30 day sample of the agents, calculate the average calls per day per agent, and determine where the overall average lands. Then take a quick standard deviation of the sample (STDEV function in Excel, or use Minitab if it is available), find out which agents are around the average (1 sigma either side of mean) - these are your "normal" performers. Then find the outliers which would be the fastest and slowest agents - find the fastest agents and ask the question "Why are they faster?" Is it as the expense of customer experience? OR have they found some shortcuts/effiencies/best practices that could be rolled out to the rest of your agents. Now take a look at your slower agents - are they perfect in quality (perfect responses, etc.) The whole idea is to establish a grid where you have high quality and high throughput as your ultimate goal.

• sam ghaffari Posted at 7:03AM on May 29, 2012

  First you need to specify how many hours your staff should be at their station ready to take the call. An eight hour shift with 1 hr break time would leave seven hours or 420 minutes agent availability. The next step is to establish average agent handle time which is (Talk time + Hold time + Post call). This could be achieved through nature of the call or through call history. Lets assume that leads to 5 minutes. The last part is to establish the desired agent occupancy and for the sake of our argument you end up with 75%. Now you have the basic info to establish estimated handle calls per agent. (No. of Handled Calls)= (420*75%)/5. This assumptions leads to 63 calls per agent per 8 hrs shift.

• jameel alhitar Posted at 9:48AM on Jun 8, 2012

  Calls can be forecasted according to the system if you have WFM but if not you can count the call duration that has to be an average of the services that you offer then count the ready time each agent has to work then divide that by the AHT you will get the numbner of calls that each agent has to answer in a day.