Call Centre Consultants

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   The Consequence of Experience

Call Centre Productivity

Availability

Most Outsource organisations measure their Contact Centre productivity in terms of their agents’ availability to take calls after breaks, holidays, scheduled training and One-to-One sessions have been taken into account, along with a percentage of time allocated for absenteeism due to sickness.

Apart from addressing issues such as sickness and absenteeism, agent availability should be a known and pretty stable factor.

As a guide, Contact Centre staff will be available to take calls or answer e-mails for around 70%+ of their paid working time.

Utilisation

Most contact Centres work every day and for long hours. In reality the call centre agents will not be handling calls or e-mails for the entire time they are present in the Contact Centre and physically available to do so, as your company’s call patterns will dictate when the agents will be busy and when they will be quiet. The first step to improving productivity is in getting the agent Utilisation right!

The key reasons why a Contact Centre’s Agent Utilisation may be affected are:

• The Shift Planning & Call Metrics are not correctly aligned.

• The Recruitment policy needs reviewing – [too many full-time staff working standard hours, when the call profile requires more part-time resource working different shifts].

Productivity - Change the processes 

Once Availability and Utilisation have been addressed, there are a number of other issues that may affect the Contact Centre agents’ ability to perform and therefore adversely impact on both Agent and Call Centre Productivity.

They are:

• The Recruitment policy

• Pay & Reward Scheme

• Shift Planning & Call Metrics

• Inadequate Call Monitoring

• Inadequate Training

• Staff Turnover & Retention

• Management Issues

• Silo Mentality

• Systems & Processes and double-keying

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