Re-defining “off-phone” activities help you reduce your staffing levels
Posted by Kerry Engle on Thu, Aug 06, 2009 @ 05:37 PM
Today's call center staffing theories force you to bucket on-phone and off-phone activities. It is important to understand that if we don't redfine these activities, we will always overstaff our call centers.
This idea was reinforced recently during a research project when we asked call center operations people if they overstaffed for off-phone or "off-line" work in their call center. The overwhelming answer was no! In fact, most people said, "We staff just enough to get both on-phone and off-phone work completed." This response made me think about why these people don't see staffing for off-phone activities as overstaffing? To operations, work is work and they need to staff for it.
What I think we fail to understand is that due to technology some "work" that is now done "off-phone" or "off-line" can be scheduled and delivered to the agent's desktop just like a call. For example, several years ago call centers actually processed "snail" mail. Mail would come into the center and then during call volume downtime, agents would open the mail and process the requests. Today, "snail" mail has been replace with e-mail and now email (off-phone work) is scheduled to be completed while the agent in on the phone.
Today's technology allows us to treat training, communications and coaching the same way. It can be delivered to the agent at their desktop "between" calls. If you follow this type of model you can reduce your staffing needs between 7% and 10% since you won't be staffing people to "cover" calls while others are in training or being coached.
And with people being the largest cost category in a call center, what an impact a savings of 10% could mean to your bottom line!