Calls per day vs calls per hour

[Mike Knowles]

You have to measure by the hour to get any kind of idea on employee productivity.

I work for an outsourcing company, and we normally get paid on handle minutes. I base our overall performance on our Handle Minutes per hour numbers. Sure, we have occupancy goals and handle time goals, but when you get right down to it, all our goals are either to make our clients happy or to increase our profits.

Making the client happy is obviously the number one concern, but when dealing with our own internal goals they all point to one thing: Productivity.

If an agent averages rougly 40 to 45 handle minutes an hour then they generally are productive enough without being overworked.

If you are not an outsourcer, this may not be too helpful. But this formula, for me, has worked with many clients across many lines of business.

[Mike Knowles]

This is what HR is gettign calls on. The CSRs have come to realize that they may miss a few hours for a doctors appointment and have it count against them but a more popular employee can miss for the same thing and not have it count. An easy way to resolve the issue is to just count calls per hour. [/B][/QUOTE]


Why worry about calls per hour? Calls per hour prompts poor service by telling your reps that they need to close the call as quickly as possible.

If you have a handle minute goal, then allow your reps to go up to that goal. This will allow a Handle Minutes/hour measurement. If their are calls queued, then push the reps to close calls quicker. If the queue is slow, then have the reps take a little more time and ensure higher quality. But if you are measuring handle minutes you are measureing the amount of time that the agent is actually working.

Or you can take Avg. Handle time + available time + Idle time (to get an idea of a production minute) and divide it into the total time on the clock. This will give you an idea of their utilization. a 90% utilization goal is not unreasonable and ensures that reps are in the seats when they are scheduled.

[Steve Turton]

Hey Belle:

You say you have some tools (CDR Reports) in the office but you don't know how to use them. Find out who does... and then learn them too.

Sounds like the upper management don't know about the tools either and have just come up with this 'wild and crazy' way to measure performance.

The tools can do all that and more. Learn them and all your arguments will be supported with facts.

Steve