Posted by Kerry Engle on Tue, Jun 16, 2009 @ 05:32 PM
In conversations with clients, I have better grown to understand the nuances of how call centers are staffed and managed. For those of us new to this, call centers have to staff for both on-phone and off-phone activities. On-phone activities is just what you would expect - how many people do I need available to answer the phone within some agreed to service level. The off-phone activities can be broken down into 2 parts: out of office activities (sick days, vacations, holidays, etc.) and in-office activities (training, team meetings/huddles, special projects, coaching, reading communications, breaks, lunches etc.). In many call centers these off-phone activities are called shrinkage.
The need to have "extra" agents available to handle calls while you perform off-phone activities results in having to over staff your call center.
In the research that I have seen, shrinkage in most call centers is somewhere between 20%-30% (depending on the number of activities). I believe that between 7% - 10% of that number can be attributed to off-phone activities (training, coaching, team meetings, & reading communications) that if you automated would produce significant savings in personnel costs - (wages).
So what does this mean in financial terms to the call center industry? Approximately, $197 billion is spent on wages in the call center industry today. This means that about $12.5 billion in wage spend can be avoidable through the automation of several manual management processes.
Let me close with a math lesson/word problem:
Given: The call center has 500 call center agents. The average salary is $31,000. Shrinkage is 25%
I was able to automate the above identified off-phone activities by 7%-10%. The approximate amount of money I would save in wages per year is between ________ - _________.
Answer:
$271,250 - $387,500