Best Laid Plans - better resource planning - Q&A from CCF magazine

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Planning resources in the call centre well ahead of schedule is imperative for organisations, particularly in the run up to holidays such as Christmas, or in school holiday times for a call centre with a lot of parents in their staff

Best Laid Plans - better resource planning - Q&A from CCF magazine
Planning resources in the call centre well ahead of schedule is imperative for organisations, particularly in the run up to holidays such as Christmas, or in school holiday times for a call centre with a lot of parents in their staff. But how does an organisation go about implementing good planning? QPC's response to questions posed by James West, for the article which appeared in Call Centre Focus (Aug 08).

1. What techniques can be employed to ensure that the right skills are in place during peaks (Christmas, holidays etc)
The first step in a resource planning process is normally forecasting. Forecasting tools allow contact centres to anticipate future demand based on how many contacts have been received previously. For the small contact centre this can be done using a spreadsheet and a calculation called ‘time series analysis’. Larger centres can also do the same but the forecasting functionality will typically be part of their workforce management software application. To get the right skills in place may also mean doing a forecast for each contact type. So, if you have people with sales skills and people with service skills you will want to do a forecast for both your sales line and your service line.

For forecasting algorithms to be accurate it’s important to realise that you should have contact volume information for every period that you need for a year. For instance if you want to know day by day what your contact volume will be you will have to have recorded this previously. Also, if you have a seasonal trend that alters the volume of contact significantly, for example at Christmas a mail order company may become much busier, you will need to know what happened during Christmas last year.

The next step in the planning process is scheduling. The first step in this process is to work out how many people you need to handle the incoming contacts you have anticipated with your forecast within a speed of response goal. This will mean figuring out how long each call, or letter, takes to complete. Then, using an an Erlang calculation for calls or a workload sum for non abandoning contacts like letters, you can anticipate how many people you will need for every period within your forecast. Finally, you will need to look at who is available during these periods, taking into account their contracted hours, holidays and working time regulations etc to meet the speed of response goal you have set. Unfortunately, even with a small number of agents scheduling is hard work to do manually. However, workforce management systems can do the massive amount of computation needed to create every individual’s work schedule, down to the minute, for every day of the year quickly and accurately. They can even help you manage holidays and offer flexible shifts to make your centre a better place to work and take into account multiskill agents who can handle more than one contact type.

2. How do you limit the problems of being over staffed during quiet periods?
Keeping agents busy or ‘occupancy’ is one of the key functions of the resourcing planning team and helps businesses optimise their cost to serve. If you have a quiet time within the day that can be anticipated, for example you may notice that you take less calls between 10 and 12, the easiest way to keep agents busy is to schedule other work, like emails or letters, to be handled during this time. If the dip is unexpected and there is a change of shifts due, then allowing agents to slide their shifts along in the day may be an option.

Staff work contracts that align with the hours or seasons when your customers want to get in touch with you are a cornerstone of good resource management. One option is to offer part time or flexible contracts that match closely your customers’ contact requirements. One of our financial services clients approached this alignment by building life style packages around their employees’ needs that also matched their customers’ preferences. Typical examples of this are ‘family packages’ - for those who prefer term time working because they have children and ‘student packages’ - for those who want supplementary income through evening and weekend work only.

Another way that contact centres use to approach the problem is simply to staff to meet their minimum requirements and oustource calls that appear in peaks. Outsourcing clearly has it’s own do’s and don’ts, but if your contact arrival pattern is very transient this may be the only way you can avoid overstaffing and optimise your operational costs.

3. Don’t scheduling systems negate the need for human intervention into call centre planning? What are the limits of these technologies?
Even with sophisticated systems for forecasting, events that will drive additional contact such as marketing campaigns often still require a manual estimate of the additional volume so that this can be included in a forecast.

Also, forecasting and scheduling will help you successfully anticipate how many people you will need and manage them into position at the beginning of a day or shift. But, what happens if volumes peak or dip unexpectedly during the day itself? Intraday re-forecasting and scheduling within a system will enable you to re-plan the day. And, flexible contracts will mean you have the flexibility to bring more people in or keep them at home. However, communicating these changes to staff still requires the hard work of calling people and asking them if they would like to come in earlier or stay at home.

4. Do you have any evidence - empirical, case studies, anecdotes - that show the power of good planning in call centres?
Vodafone has been a very successful and accomplished user of workforce management systems to underpin good resource planning practice and has achieved many business and customer service benefits including:
* Improving service levels from 74% to 85% of calls answered in 20 seconds
* Lowering average overtime costs from £50k/month to £3k/month
* Reducing staffing requirements by 300 full time equivalents (FTE)
Martin Blacher is Director of Marketing for QPC who provide resource planning consulting and the IEX TotalView workforce management system as a hosted and managed service.

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