Leadership Staffing Needs

[Lo Monte]

I am currently creating a proposal to take our call center back in-house. I am having difficulty in determining what the leadership staffing needs will be for the center.

There will be 50 FTEs made up of 30 FT & 40 PT agents in the 24x7 call center.

Currently, we are thinking that the following might work best:

1 Manager, Call Center Operations over

1 Operations Supervisor over

2 Shift Supervisors over

3 Leads each over

12 to 15 Agents each

In addition we will have two Training/Quality Assurance positions that will report directly to the Manager.

I am very interested in how other call centers are structured. Please let me know if you can share any insight on this.

Thanks.

[mikael]

Your draft approach is pretty straightforward, and seems appropriate, based on the information you provided. As a consultant, my approach is to ask questions about the strategy of the company and the role of the contact center, and then create a complete flow chart of the incoming call handling process in order to set up a foundation for the org chart.

You are proposing to bring your center back into the company, so I am assuming that it has previously been outsourced? If correct, I'd love to swap some of my consulting time to review your plans in exchange for you telling me about the reasons you want to bring it in-house again. I'm starting to see things that suggest that onshoring and in-sourcing are happening or being seriously considered in a growing number of companies, and I'd like to explore the issue. If this is of interest, please e-mail me at the address below.

[ctaylor]

It lokks like you have got a good basis for your planned move back in house. I have a few comments that might assist you in this planing;

1- You have not identified any Quality Assurance staff. How will QA be addressed, who will be doing it, what are the performance standards you will be targeting. If this work is being placed on the Supervisors sholders how will it impact on their ability to 'Supervise'? Remember the role of a Supervisor in any workplace is to "maximize the production".
2-You have not idenitified how you will handle staffing, forecasting and workforce managment. In center of the size you are looking at, it is likely a part-time activity, but who will be doing this?
3-Training/coaching is also absent, now these could also be dropped onto a Supervisor, but the more functions you assign to your supervisory staff the less time they will spend actually supervising.
4- Evaluate your job descriptions and make sure your roles/responsibilities and risk/reward compensation are aligned with the call center and corporate goals and objectives.

I hope that I have added some value to this discussion. If I can be any further assistance please contact me directly at ctaylor@thetaylorreachgroup.com

Colin