Call Center Metrics and Performance

Take the 15 Day Trial Today. Learn more about this Call Center VIP membership site now.

It has been a week since I last posted, Call Center Operations and Schedule Adherence, and as I mentioned in my previous post, I am on a new assignment, looking at Schedule adherence and overall call center metrics. 

Initially, I decided to focus on schedule adherence because I believed this would be the biggest opportunity, low-hanging fruit, if you will.  My goal for last week was to set-up a real-time schedule adherence process.

I quickly discovered that the reporting function of the WFA software was not working correctly, resulting in lack of reporting. 

Not having this data makes it tough to know your starting point as well as providing front-line employees with results to effectively coach. 

How can you set-up a real-time schedule adherence exception process if you lack data?

I shifted my focus while the schedule adherence reporting was being fixed.

My focus then turned to productivity against several important data points.

Productivity for my model included all phone activities such as ACD, ACW, Available, Ring and Other.  I used this data and compared it against staffed hours to get a baseline. 

What I was looking for was a number as close as possible to 100%.  What I found wasn’t too far off.  Although, there are some areas of opportunity the number wasn’t that bad considering the call center has not paid special attention to this in the past. 

I also looked at productivity (phone) against payroll hours to see how close the call center came to 100%.  What I found there was also a pleasant surprise.  Remember the best number to hit is 100%.  Again, I found a number that was somewhat close.

Today I ran all the aux codes from our switch to see what % they were against the over all staffed hours produced.  There I found some numbers that need to be addressed.  It appears that some of the representatives are hiding their time within the aux codes. 

As mentioned before the overall production time against staffed hours did not look too bad, however by improving the unproductive aux time we can increase the overall production hours.

More importantly, we need to provide our supervisors the data so they can coach their employees for improvement.

I am now moving into another area….

I have begun to pull the data to look at scheduled staffed hours by agent, by sup, to identify the delta between what we scheduled and what was actually produced.

In utilizing this data we may find that it is easier to hit call center service level with fewer people if we can increase their seat utilization.

Until next post…

Call Center Operations and Schedule Adherence

First off let me apologize for not paying enough attention to this site!

But I have good news for you.  I just took on a new assignment for a major company and they want me to focus on improving their call center operations.  This assignment is somewhat indefinite based on delivery of marked improvement.  I love these assignments.

So over the next several months you have a front seat to a true case study.

I'll share the troubles and the solutions, however I won't name names but instead focus on the areas of opportunities and how we go about fixing them.  I think this will be very interesting to be a part of.

I started on Monday and have spent the last three days observing the dynamics and functions.  I'm asking a lot of questions and probably annoying many of the call center employees.  LOL

The leadership team at the call center has asked me to focus on schedule adherence, specifically putting together an exception process.  If you have examples of systems that work, make sure you leave a comment explaining your system, of course you can leave a link to your website if you like!)

The workforce group and the customer service group report to two separate groups, each focused on their perticular goals.  These goals don't appear to be aligned but I'm hoping that after further discussion and investigation they are closer to each other than everybody really thinks.

I've spent the majority of my time for the past three days in the command center to get an idea of the functions and challenge the team has there.  Based on the feedback from the analyst, they believe the floor leadership team does not cae about Service level and schedule adherence.  That is only their perspective.

Tomorrow and Friday I am going to spend time with both the supervisors and managers in charge of running the call floor to get their perspective. 

As with any corporate environment, there are politics to deal with so I am paying close attention to this and make sure that I follow the proper protocols to ensure that I do not ruffle any feathers or agitate anybody unnecessarily.

Make sure you subscribe to this feed , so you can get the automatic updates when I post the next update (which btw will be tomorrow.

Talk soon

Mr.  Call Center