Understanding The Aspects Of Call Center Staffing

Communication Articles | January 24, 2009

Call centers are all about being able to manage the peak demand requirements depending upon the season, day, and product and so on. The most important parameter that talks about the effectiveness of a call center

fact that how many employees are responding to the calls from the customers on an hourly basis. More than 66% of the operating costs of a call center are related with employee payments.

Determining The Call Center Staffing Requirements

The determination process begins with forecasting calls by analyzing historical patterns, data and trends for arriving at monthly staffing estimates. These estimates are then ultimately broken down into hourly estimates depending upon the time-of-day and day-of-week patterns. Staff workload can be calculated by assuming handling times on an average basis for the forecasted calls. The handling time includes the conversation time plus the wrap-up time that usually follows a call for purposes such as form filling, updating the database, etc. The practice of employing the handling time number on an average basis is inaccurate as this might lead to overstaffing or understaffing on account of the fact that not everyone works similarly. Also, the scheduling and shrinkage requirements must be properly accounted for at the time of calculating staffing numbers.

Educating The Staff About Schedule Adherence

There is a common tendency amongst the staff members of contact center outsourcing services that they fail to understand the difference that even one event of non-conformance to schedule makes to the total AHT and staffing calculations. Schedule adherence impacts the call center activities based on two parameters:

The size and scale of the operations carried out at the call center

The service delivery levels in the recent past

Therefore, employees of smaller call centers have to share a greater percentage of workload as compared to bigger call centers and hence

, the impact on the total operational efficiency is high.

Criticality Of Staffing Numbers

Data analysis shows that it is imperative to have a greater number of staff as compared to the amount of work that is required to be done in hours. Further insight into the analysis concludes that adding staff after a particular level causes the returns to diminish whereas subtracting staff after a certain level results in a complete downfall of the call center operations.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

For an organization which has decided to outsource call center activities to offshore locations, it becomes increasingly difficult to exercise control over the staff functioning. Call center staffing procedures and calculations are adopted by the organization to lay down a metric which will maximize the utilization of the workforce and generate maximum returns out of their activities, in terms of cost as well as service.