TMCnews Featured Article
May 21, 2012
Contact Center Planning for Proper Performance Measurement
By Susan J. Campbell, TMCnet Contributing Editor
The contact center is designed to solve a number of challenges for an organization. Without the right contact center planning, however, the center could in effect cause more challenges than it remedies. Bay Bridge (News - Alert) offers insight into how companies can effectively use contact center planning for process improvement and to avoid “silly” errors.
This Bay Bridge slideshare presentation highlights a common scenario – the call center that gets hammered on the first day or two of the month. Because service levels only hit 45 percent on the first two days due to heavy call volume, overtime is pushed the rest of the month to try and make up for the service shortfall. Contact center planning that centered on service level performance, resulted in exorbitant overtime and higher costs.
If contact center planning instead focused on the ASA (average speed of answer) model in the above scenario, 22 percent improvement could actually be achieved. The workforce management trend now is to manage service according to the percentage of intervals met. An incentive then exists to save cost by missing the peaks and averaging poor service peak intervals with high service valley intervals.
When contact center planning includes Bay Bridge’s CenterBridge, service is weighed by minute or volume weighted. The heavy volume intervals then have more impact and if the contact center is properly staffed, no games take place. Likewise, the contact center needs to be staffed according to volume to ensure agents are always productive and downtime doesn’t hurt the bottom line.
To truly drive efficiency in the contact center, a few elements must be considered in the contact center planning. First, the center must be occupied to staffed time. Measurements must pay attention to the amount of time agents are available for contacts, how much time they spend in the building, the ratio of time in the building to time on the phone and the total amount of time on the phone versus total paid hours. Likewise, for the total number of paid hours, how many of those hours was the agent available for contacts?
CenterBridge is a valuable contact center planning tool in that it provides forecasting, strategic planning and what-if analysis system capabilities. It is designed to complement the tactical workforce management tools through a focus on strategic decision making and relies on a discrete-event simulation model for effective contact center planning.
The unexpected will happen in the contact center, but management can plan for the unexpected with the right contact center planning tools. Combining these tools with the right approach to management and measurement of performance and the contact center is better equipped to deliver the kind of service customers have come to expect.
Edited by Brooke Neuman
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