The smaller the center the bigger the problems

The smaller the center the bigger the problems
Our expert helps managers of small call centers improve operating efficiencies and reduce the number of daily "hair-on-fire" events.

As a consultant, I've had the opportunity to partner with numerous small call centers and found many struggling with the same basic issue -- gaining an understanding of the dynamics associated with small agent groups and how to provide offerings and service similar to larger centers.
The good news is that lately, there has been more attention focused on this market segment, along with the development of new software tools targeted specifically at small call centers. This attention is encouraging, but the leaders of many small call centers are still challenged with the basics that technology can't fix. What follows are findings, best practices and recommendations to help the managers of small centers move their environments forward.
Challenges in Small Call Centers
Call centers are challenging operations. In many cases, the smaller the center, the more these challenges are exacerbated.
Below are a few challenges we typically find small call centers struggling through:
• Everyone gets to know each other -- Although this can be a benefit, it can also create challenges in environments that do not have fair or balanced measures of agents in place. If left unaddressed, mediocrity among agents is quickly noticed by others on the team, and negativity can spread quickly.
• Little room for error -- Just one poorly planned activity or a couple of agents not following their schedules can significantly impact the service provided to customers and how the agent workload is distributed.
• Significant forecast variances -- Call volumes and handle times are, in most cases, less predictable and they directly impact the number of agents required to meet a service level objective in every interval.
• Fewer reaction options -- There are typically few, if any, other places to send calls during crises, and real-time recovery routing creativity is typically limited.
• Budgets and lack thereof -- In many cases, capital spending budgets are limited and there is often a heavy entry price to obtain the latest technology.
• Lower agent occupancy rates are required -- Agent occupancy is an uncontrollable outcome and a reality that must be accounted for and understood in small call centers.
1. Fully Understand Agent Occupancy
Although the challenges seem to outweigh the benefits of being small, by understanding and appreciating a few simple concepts, these challenges can be significantly minimized.
The first and by far the most important concept for small call centers to understand and appreciate is that of agent occupancy. For small call centers it's the main driver behind many of the efficiency challenges and the most frequently overlooked necessity.
Simply put, agent occupancy is the average time of all agents who are occupied with talking to customers or in an after-call work state. One way to understand occupancy is to look at it from the inverse perspective. The inverse of occupancy is idle time, or the time agents wait for the phone to ring.
Idle time is a reality in every call center. The larger the call center, the less idle time is required to meet a given service level objective. In a large call center, agents become available to take calls more frequently, resulting in less idle time, than in a small call center. To see how occupancy varies depending on the number of agents, take a look at figure 1.

Here are highlights from figure 1:
o Each row is an example of a different call answer group.
o The objective, in all five examples, is to answer 90% of calls within 30 seconds during a half hour.
o The inputs are: *Volume -- The number of calls you expect agents will receive during a half hour *Average Handle Time -- The average of the sum of talk time, hold time and after-call work time for each call
o The outputs, which we generate by using an Erlang-C software program, are: *Staffing Required -- The minimum number of agents you need during the entire half hour to meet the service objective *Average Speed of Answer (ASA) -- The expected average answer speed if you staff your call center with the minimum number of agents *Occupancy Rate -- The average percentage of time agents are occupied in direct support of customers (the inverse of a call center's occupancy rate is idle time)
o The bottom row shows a need to have eight agents available for an entire half hour to answer 25 calls within the service level objective. For 25 calls, the agent occupancy rate is 59%. The eight agents will either talk to customers or will be in an after-call work state an average of 59% of the time. As we pointed out earlier, it's easier to understand occupancy when you look at the inverse, agent idle time, which, in this case, is 100% minus 59%, or 41%. During a half hour, idle time would represent about 41% of each of the eight agents' time, or a little more than 12 minutes per agent.
o Contrast that with the top row that shows that 119 agents are needed to handle 575 calls with an average occupancy of 91%. The inverse of a 91% occupancy rate is 100% minus 91%, or 9% idle time, which, during a half hour, is about two and a half minutes of idle time per agent.
When expanded to an entire day, the chart shows that the agents in the smallest call center will be idle an average of two hours for every seven hours of phone time, compared to only 35 minutes of idle time in the large center. Given that occupancy is a function not only of desired service levels but also of the size of a call center's workload, small call centers require more idle time than large centers to meet the same service level objectives.
2. A Planning Culture is Critical
The best thing you can do for yourself, your customers and your employees is embrace the concept of a planning culture. A planning culture is one in which everything that can impact the call center's quality and service levels are considered in each business decision. A planning culture is especially important to most small call centers, given the very limited margins of error available to them.
Before trying to improve processes, make agents happier or introduce new technology, you have to get the staffing part right. This is the most basic activity, regardless of size, but it is often the most overlooked.
What makes staffing more of a challenge to small call centers is a lack of appreciation of the value added outside the center. More often than not, small call centers are supported by departments that also assist other parts of their organizations. Below are some examples:
o The telecom department provides ACD support for the call center and all of the other telephones in the company.
o The human resources department is tasked with screening call center agents, but spends the majority of the time staffing for other parts of the company.
o Workforce standards used in other parts of the company are applied to the call center (examples can include full-time equivalents, or FTEs per customers, as well as other static models).
At the heart of overcoming these challenges is a well understood and appreciated planning process driven by service level objectives. Without it, managers spend a lot of time explaining "why," and those outside of the center continually question changes. The bottom line is that creating a planning culture is the ticket to everything that makes call centers run better -- process improvements, targeted training, coaching and quality initiatives.
3. Nothing Can Be Skipped
We often see small call centers struggle because they don't engage in the first and most basic activity: choosing a service level objective. In many cases, small call centers focus on telephone objectives, such as average speeds of answer or abandon rates, in place of a service level focus.
Service level, the percentage of calls a call center answers within a given number of seconds, is an essential metric. It is the tried-and-true indicator for call centers and is the basis on which all commercially available workforce management systems are built. A service level is often viewed simply as a performance measure or goal for call centers. It is true that this metric does provide the best overall indicator of caller treatment, but it also serves a much greater purpose. A call center's service level objective provides the foundation for the most fundamental activities in a center: planning, staffing and execution. The service level objective you choose directly influences the number of people you hire, how many people you need to have on the phone in each hour of the day and when you need to implement a real-time recovery plan.
Once you have a service level in place, you must also have a formal process for addressing all of the steps that follow, such as staffing, scheduling, determining accountability and finding ways to continually improve. A common mistake made by leaders of small call centers is thinking that being small allows for shortcuts. Reality requires just the opposite, and additional challenges must be overcome along the way.
4. Recognize an Agent's True Capacity
The true productivity available from a call center agent is frequently misunderstood or misapplied. It's not uncommon to have to staff two people for every one hour of customer support workload in small call centers. The first step is to fully understand where all the time is going. Let's use the table below to help illustrate this point.

The table shows that once all activities are accounted for, an agent who works 40 hours per week will be dedicated to serving customers for an average of only 19.8 hours per week. The required occupancy rate alone accounts for a reduction of 8.5 hours per week when the expected service level objective is being met. As illustrated in the occupancy example above, the smaller the center, the more idle time you must factor into the process.
Many small call centers try to account for this non-productive time by scheduling other activities, such as handling outbound calls during idle time. Under the right circumstances, this approach can be successful, but it's important to make sure that the assigned activities don't take agents from their desks or cause them, as is the case with handling outbound calls, to go into call blocking states.
5. Don't Give up on the Forecast
Call centers can use several approaches to forecast call loads. (By definition, you calculate a call center's call load by multiplying the center's call volume by its handle time.) For small call centers, forecasting based on historical call loads normally works pretty well. Here you look at what happened in the previous weeks to forecast what to expect in the next week. The data is typically available from the phone system and can be easily trended in a spreadsheet or database application.
Unfortunately, many small call centers tend to give up on forecasting because they're never able to achieve sufficiently low interval variances -- the difference between the number of people they think they need versus the actual need. My advice is not to give up because you'll most likely find that there will always be some type of volatility present. Keep tracking interval variances and look for ways to reduce them.
Let's say that you're normally within a 12% absolute interval staffing variance. As you're working to find ways to reduce the 12% variance, you should account for this variance, just as you would account for your required occupancy and actual adherence rates, in your schedule.
6. Get Creative With Schedules
Once you have an understanding of your true daily interval staffing needs, getting creative with schedules becomes easier. For small call centers, this is one way to reduce some of the inefficiencies introduced with a lower required occupancy rate. Below are some ways to help improve departmental efficiencies by ensuring your workforce is properly aligned with the workload:
o Move static start and stop times to more flexible shifts.
o Conduct departmental training or team meetings outside of traditional hours.
o Provide agents with the option to combine breaks and lunches to take the combined time off during a non-peak period.
o Train back-office personnel to handle routine inquiries during peak times or lunches.
o Consider allowing agents to swap "return" breaks for early release time.
o Transition the routine or common inquires to a part-time or temporary workforce.
o Reward agents who are open to daily adjustments to schedule changes.
o Share a resource or two with a department outside of the call center and rotate non-phone tasks throughout the call center.
o Move additional (simple) responsibilities to the call center to take advantage of the required idle time.
7. Plan to React in Advance
Real-time management is thought by many to be a call center savior, but it often drains the energy of everyone involved. Typically, larger call centers have people running an intra-day desk, continuously monitoring activities and adjusting call routing and agent skills based on internal and external changes.
Small call centers normally don't have the resources that larger centers have. Nor do they have the ability to be as responsive as larger centers. So, formal recovery plans are a necessity and everyone needs to understand their roles. It is also important that you have a way to communicate the current state to the entire organization. This can be accomplished through the use of electronic displays, as well as through alerts on agents' computers or on agents' phone sets.
Bottom line: The best way to prepare for real-time management is to plan to react in advance. This may sound like an oxymoron, but it is exactly what we do in call centers; we use historical information to predict future needs. If the planning process has been followed correctly, a call center will have an accurate picture of the interval staffing that is required compared to the staff scheduled.
Your ability to react in advance starts with creating a way to perform an interval gap analysis. This is your daily plan that shows how many people you need by interval balanced against the staff scheduled. Everything that impacts the staffing requirement or staff availability must be continuously updated and reflected in the plan. This provides the opportunity to anticipate service deficits and to do something about them in advance. The table below is an example of a tracking tool that can be created to illustrate this opportunity:

As we show in figure 3, we expect to have enough staff to meet our service level objective during the half hour intervals from 7:30 am through 9:00 am, but the two subsequent intervals lack the minimum required staffing. By having this information available when the day starts, the call center can implement plans to avoid queues several hours in advance. By not doing anything to address a known staffing deficit, a call center is essentially planning for failure.
No matter how much planning you do, there will be times when things don't go as anticipated and you'll have to react on the fly. A common mistake in small call centers is to implement a recovery plan too quickly. It is important to remember that queues aren't necessarily bad things. When managing to a service level, a queue is actually part of the overall plan, and small call centers, compared to larger centers, typically have longer hold times for calls they don't answer within their service level objectives.
The first step in setting the right real-time thresholds is to understand how your call volume and service levels impact the number of calls and length of a planned delay. Getting it right does involve some trial and error, but you can get a good feel for where to start by spending some time reviewing the output available from a simple Erlang-C calculator.

8. Focus on Adherence and Quality
Just about every one of the small call centers that we've partnered with have one thing in common: opportunities to focus an agent's attention on measures that are within his or her direct control. Measuring quality and schedule adherence are at the heart of running efficient, effective call centers.
Regardless of size, you must have a formal process in place to monitor and measure the quality of the service your call center is providing. The table below outlines the basics needed in every call center.
Some call centers drive the wrong agent behaviors by focusing on so-called productivity metrics such as:
o Total calls per hour
o Transactions per day
o "Normalized" or "Occupancy adjusted" calls per hour
o Defined talk or wrap time
o Telephone availability
o Individual agent occupancy
o Telephone state utilization
Using any of these measures to drive agent performance calculations can ultimately send the wrong message: provide quality, but hurry. Even when call centers get creative with an overall ranking, we typically find that these metrics track circumstances that are outside of an agent's direct control.
The way to overcome promoting unhealthy behaviors and unfair comparisons is to set goals around the one telephone measure that is directly within an agent's control: schedule adherence. Call centers can also set goals around metrics such as attendance and punctuality, but any of the other telephone indicators, such as handle time, should be managed without defined departmental goals.
When working with centers to improve performance reports, we often get questions regarding how to control agent behaviors without specific goals. We encourage call centers to start by adopting an operating philosophy that assumes agents are always doing the right things to serve customers. If, for some reason, a call center isn't comfortable with this mindset, there should be some self-reflection and evaluation of current processes that don't encourage this type of thinking. Such self-reflection and evaluation are often difficult, but they can reveal whether the metrics and incentives a call center uses may be driving the wrong behaviors in agents and, in some cases, among the management team.
Running call centers of any size can be a challenge, but as we've discussed, the smaller the center, the larger the operational efficiency challenges. To overcome these challenges, managers of small centers need to have a clear understanding and appreciation of call center dynamics.
More importantly, call center managers must be able to clearly articulate their challenges and operating dynamics to everyone in the organization to obtain the support needed to operate efficiently. When this understanding is firmly entrenched in the organization, small call centers can meet -- and sometimes surpass -- the operational results recorded in larger centers.