My Brain is Fried RE: AHT

[Gina]

The center I came to work for about 9 months ago made a BIG boo boo...

They were having an ACW problem - a lot of abuse from what I understand. Instead of Correcting the problem via proper management tactics.... they decided to use a "project code" for certain types of ACW. Now... as many of you might already have figured out this is reeking havoc in our forcast/scheduling. Unfortunately, no one here (other than myself) knows the First thing about WFM... which brings me to my dilema...

I am trying to help the "scheduler" aka the person who never wanted the job and admittedly doesn't know the first thing about it show the CCM's and the VP the error of their ways... I have obtained the reports that show total amounts of the project code that I spoke about earlier, I have also obtained total minutes spent in wrap/talktime and hold time for the month of december. Please verify that the below formula is correct and then if you don't mind, take a look at my example and give me some feed back as to what you might think the issues are.

Total Handle Time (talk+wrap+hold+project)/calls Handled/60 = Actual AHT

here is the scenerio I am working with...

12953286 min (wrap/talk/hold) + 37529 min (project)/16161 calls handled/60 = 13:40 AHT...

Now here is my delima - we use eWFM, it fed a 13:20 AHT into the forcast and when I ad an additional 37529 minutes of handle time into the scenerio it only raises the AHT 20 seconds.

Is my formula wrong or is eWFM wrong or am I loosing my mind? I promise you it could be either....

Thanks in advance!

[JobGone2India]

Sorry but I'm not familiar with the terminology ACW so that might make this reply misleading.

I did a quick calculation from your figures below, which look to me to be rather long call durations (although again, without knowing exactly what it is you do, I can't say for sure).

12953286/16161/60 = 13.36 (Note this figure is hours but not minutes as the numbers behind the decimal point are in 100ths so it is, in fact, 13 hrs 21 mins 36 secs)

(12953286+37529)/16161/60 = 13.40 (13 hrs 24 mins)

So the additional project time has increased your AHT by 144 seconds.

Does that help?

[Gina]

JobGone2India

ACW - After Call Work or Wrap.

Actually 13:40 is what I get as well, believe it or not I think that is too low for what we are doing. We are an integrated telephone co/Data service provider. The reps that work for us are in the Move, add, change Disconnect department - in short we place the orders that make everyone's service work.

I did some data mining and I have come up with not only this calculation but with some other factors in mind - that our AHT is closer to 20 minutes... our VP is going to flip :)

[Dheed]

Hi Gina,

Maybe I'm poor with math, but it seams like your numbers make sense. Keep in mind that projects are only a fraction of a percent of your total time.

Here's what I do that has made things a little easier for us. Any work that is related to a customer, regardless of what it is, is ACW and we use average talk time per call and average ACW time per call to figure the handle time. Everything else that would involve a project unrelated to customer work is administered as exception time. We schedule it in advance to ensure that we are not understaffed and it is factored out of the agent requirements. This helps us track handle time and improve efficiency without penalizing people for projects. We also address issues where people log out as project to do customer work.

[JoeB]

Gina,

The calculations are fine, it is the large numbers that make the results appear strange.

Your original AHT is indeed 13.497 hours, which is 13:24, as JobGone2India pointed out
You added 37529 minutes to handling time, which is only 2.9% increase. The resulting AHT is increased by 2.3 minutes to 13.436 (13:26) hours, an increase of 2.9%.

Notice that the fact that an increase of 2.9% in handling led to the same increase in AHT is because the “contribution” of project time to AHT is very small relative to handling time. If project time was significantly larger, a change in handling time would have a smaller impact on AHT.

I hope this will helps. BTW, not to add to the anxiety, I would suggest that measuring AHT this way is interesting, but insufficient. With this large number of calls you must also measure variance, which is a much better indicator of quality and, in fact, may give you a better understanding of your AHT

Joe