I have a team of 55 Agents that answer complex Social Services calls from Carers, Social Workers, Patients, etc.

Roughly 60% of the Calls Answered are Referrals in which the Agents spends about 5 to 6 minutes taking details, finishes the call, goes into Wrap and spends between 40 minutes to 2 hours completing a ‘request for service’ Referral form online. Once complete they go back into idle for the next call. The Calls Abandoned rate is about 30% - 40% per day due to the amount of Wrap time on Referrals.

The average Talk Time is around 4:30 minutes and Call Volumes about 500 calls per day Monday to Friday. Can anyone advise me -

1. How would I obtain an accurate Staffing Requirement using IEX Totalview for this sector with regards to the amount of Wrap time?
2. How effective would a separate Referrals Team be with the time taken to complete one Referral?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Ken.

Ken,

First thing would be to seperate to two work streams, the initial contact
then the back office paperwork function.

As far as I'm aware IEX allows for Wrap in the AHT in the time
it uses as the base for the staffing calculation.

Al it should do is use the Average of Tlk+NRD(Wrap)to work out the AHT
for that queue.

From personal experience seperate escaltion / Referral teams work VERY well,
provided they are kept away from the day to day call flow and have their own work stream. [1]

Drop a line back or send a mail if you want more.

Regards

DaveA



[1] Scott, remember this one?

I have yet to see a WFM utilise a FO/BO mix well when the total AHT combined is around 30 mmins or more.

Given that just over half your workload is referral and therefore only 200 calls a week are 4.5 mins long, I would split the work, but use a shift rotation across the 2 call types.

I would expect that your FO team would only consist of enough agents to cover opening hours.

I would also request a review be undertaken of the back office 40 mins - 2 hours worktime. It may be worth treating this team like a correspondence team, depending on your SLA's

I would disagree here. I would not split the work into call taking and referral making. I have worked with organisations where they gained much improvement by eradicating the Front Office / Back Office split and moved to just what you have: the people who do the work taking the calls. Actually that isn't exactly what you have but you will be moving in the wrong direction if you separate the work.

Why do I say this? Because currently you have the people who complete the referrals taking the calls. This means when they are on a call they are experts and they will know what to ask for so that they can complete a referral. If you separate this work the people taking the call will necessarily not know so much about completing a referral so therefore you will then have more bad or incomplete data passed to the referral team.

Rather I would do this:

1) Study the demand. All of it. Not just the referral calls. Ask why people call. You will learn a lot.

2) If you want improvements. Look not just at the calls and referral making process, but all the way down the line to who the referral goes to, what do they do with it and the execution of any further actions.

3) Measure from the customer's point of view. When you take the entire work view as in (2) measure what the customer would care about. Sounds like end-to-end time from the first call to the correct completion of the work may be appropriate here. Other customer measures will be relevant too.

By the way, it wasn't me telling my clients to remove the FO/BO split, as described above. That was their decision after they studied their own system.

Rob,

I'm interested in your thinking behind this one...

Something is driving a 30-40% Aba rate, and I would guess a
fair proportion is repeat attempts to get through.

If I may re-phrase the problem.

At the moment there is (for 60% of the calls) with an AHT c360sec.
Process A

This applies to 300 calls, the other 200 we don't know content or AHT.
Process B.

So we have two processes A and B with A leading the requirements and very possibly the
failure demand pushing up the Aba rate across BOTH processes.

Now IMHO splitting out the secondary part of A into a seperate workstream
and to be handled independantly *should* improve the Aba stats and
reduce the repeat callers.

Your comment:

If you separate this work the people taking the call will necessarily
not know so much about completing a referral so therefore you will then
have more bad or incomplete data passed to the referral team.

I would disagree with. You actually take some of the more experinced staff
for escalation / referral work for precisely the reasons you give, they are more
experienced and do know more. Therefore are in a position to be able to
complete work with a far greater degree of efficiency.

I understand it's completley out of phase with your viewpoint, however,
I have seen and implimented it myself in a very similar situation with
exceptional results.

As with everything, there's obviously no one correct way.....

The one thing I will completely agree with is the fact that you need
to understand why people are calling and the whole process flow (Rob's points
1-3 above). You can never have too much information about why
people call. A BIG sheet of paper (preferably brown, I'm old fashoned)and a
process map drawn out will tell you a lot.
you do need it graphically though, it's easier to spot the bottlenecks.
Regards

DaveA




EDIT: DA: Added a bit

Dave,

Can I start with the maths?

The total amount of time in the call centre is this:

time to answer referral calls + time to deal with other calls + time to complete referrals

This is with 55 agents.

Let us assume that nothing will change, the number of calls, the time to deal and the time to complete referrals will not change. And you are not allowed any more resource! If you simply place the referral completion process in a separate team, what have you gained? You haven't gained any time, you still have the same number of people doing the same amount of work so logically you will still have the same abandon rate.

So you have gained nothing, but you have lost something. You have disrupted flow. Before a referral was completed straight after the phone was put down by the agent who took the call. Perfect flow. You couldn't do it any quicker (unless the agent could complete some of the referral while on the call). But now you have people taking referral details and putting them in some sort of queue where they wait to be made into a referral. How does that affect the customer's end-to-end time? It gets worse.

So you need to change something. You need to affect one or more of the following:

1) Reduce the number of calls
2) Reduce the time it takes to complete a referral
3) Get more people

You can affect (1) by finding out what your failure demand is and stopping it.

You can affect (2) by examining that particular process.

You can affect (3) spending money.

But this is all speculation really, on my part as well as yours. I am happy to repeat myself when I say that you should study the work as a system first. Gain understanding of the what and why of current performance before you do anything. Then if it makes sense to split referral completion then do it. If not, don't.

It is just that in my experience people jump to conclusions about splitting work up a la Adam Smith only to further fragment the flow of work.

And just to address something you said, which was:

You actually take some of the more experienced staff
for escalation / referral work for precisely the reasons you give, they are more
experienced and do know more. Therefore are in a position to be able to
complete work with a far greater degree of efficiency.

If I am clear here you are saying that you would take the more experienced staff off the phones and put them in the referral team? If I have that right then you are doing exactly what I think you shouldn't. You are moving the expertise further away from the customer. So if you have less experienced staff taking the referral details you are more likely to have information missing or wrong when it is picked up by the referral team. So you then increase waste because you

(a) submit an incomplete or incorrect referral or,
(b) have to wait for the customer to call back or,
(c) have to call the customer for clarification.

Interesting question.

I hope Ken will report back on what he does. We don't often hear about what happens when people post about problems like this.

Rob,

I am inded advocating moving some of the more experienced (note some)
into a referral team.

I'm working the assumption the excessive Aba rate is due to
availability. Therefore making the front end available and moving
staff who have the best skills to tackle the more time consuming part
of the operation should drive efficiency.

Results...

More avilability as AHT at the front end is A LOT lower (360 sec
Vs possible 2 hrs).

There is no way you can schedule effectivly with such
a disparate range of handle times, you have to move something to
stand any chance of an effective plan.

One of the knock on effects will be a drop in call volume, there's
no way that the 40% abandoned calls do not try again. If you can eliminate
them at the outset you can potentially drive call volumes down by removing
the repeat attempts.

I do advocate your process mapping and callflow analysis, but, in this case
from a pure planning point of view there is a need to stabilise the operation,
forecast effectivly and drop the Aba rate. By moving some more experienced
staff (who will take less time to complete the work) you can free up resource
on the customer facing side.

I don't think we're going to agree on either principal as we've both
strong ideas. I would gather you've had sucess with your methods as I have
had with mine {GRIN}

Pistols at dawn? {he he he...}

Oh and Ken, as Rob said, do let us know how it goes.

Regards

DaveA

Pistols at dawn? {he he he...}

You won't laughing for long when I put a bullet between your eyes. Then we will see the blood flow. Flow. Geddit? Flow.

But you are right, there is no one answer to these type of problems. It is like the old joke. Ask two consultants what they think, get three opinions.

So Ken, has any of that helped?

Why does a form take up to 2 hours to complete? Get with the agents and find out what is taking up all that time. Get feedback on your referral form, try to reduce it and optimize it.
Non-optimized for real life computer programs are the bane of most call centers and my pet peeve.
If you can get all the info you need from the caller in 5-6 minutes, then most likely the form shouldn't take 20x that to enter.

Hi,

Just to update you that we decided to go with an offline team that deal with the lengthy and complex referrals that are transferred to them by the frontline agents. This allows the frontline agent to deal with more calls.

The frontline agents transfer any referral calls to the offline team. This has resulted in the PCA increasing from high 70's to mid 80's in just a couple of weeks.

We have also created a real time team to focus on this sector and monitor excessive wrap, not ready and report on utilisation and conformance.

Also, a recent recruitment campaign has brought in a potential 16 FTE that we will distribute across the days/shifts that require more FTE.

Most of the staff have risen to the challenge and are aware that the performance of their sector is high profile and have reacted accordingly. Although several staff have resigned, not happy with the new direction.

Thanks for all your comments and suggestions. They all came up at one point or another during the ongoing meetings and discussions.

Thanks, Ken.

Ken,

So can I ask, in the new configuration are the frontline agents simply transferring the referral calls to the offline team (which is what I understood from what you wrote) or are they taking the 5-6 mins worth of information from the caller?

Also, did the PCA shift occur before you had the new 16 FTE in place?

Cheers,

Rob

I believe the implemented solution was effectively creating a human IVR, filtering the calls without taking details. certainly would have been the most likely solution beyond having 2 seperate skill groups and an actual IVR doing the job. Overall workload remains, possibly a little more to allow for tansfer times, but initial speed of answer improves due to the quicker churn of calls being much easier to plan for. It also improves the abandon rate for the same reason.

The longer term risk that may be worth avoiding is that this leads to a culture of "front" and "back" office if you should ever need the flexibility to use the staff on the other skill at some points.

Does your telephony support having overflow skill groups? this could ensure in busy times for either that you can still pass on some of the calls to the other group. Keeps their hand in, but also offers an extra line of support to avoid abandon calls. I've seen this used well, with delays in when the overflow kicks in ensuring the original problem does not occur.