Unanticipated Call Volume

[JoeBro]

Due to a new aquisition our Call Center has expanded from 4 state coverage to 38 state coverage and from 500,000 customers to 1.5 million customers.

Reported call volume for the new coverage area was drastically below what we have actually received, therefore we have been fighting an uphill battle to staff up. We staff about 40 people year round and, utilizing local temp agencies, we staff up to 100 plus agents in the winter (we're at 162 agents currently). Our business is very seasonal, most volume coming in the winter. We are a 60 seat center which is not enough to handle the call volume. In addition we have several new systems to learn and no onsite IS support when those systems fail.

Agents and management alike are working more hours and are growing increasingly frustrated with the challenges. We have plans for changes - increased training time, starting staffing up sooner, specialized positions, etc. However most of our changes can't be implimented until the spring.

Has anyone else had similar experiences? If so, what did you do? I'm doing my best to keep my staff motivated via emails, pats on the back, simply showing I care and I understand what their going through , and keeping them informed. I would just like to know if there's more that I could be doing. I welcome any feedback. Thanks!

[NBosch]

We were in the exact same position for one year. We closed one call center and took over their incoming calls to ours.
The reported inc. volume was completely incorrect (actually we only got 20% of their incoming traffic reported. The othter 80% were the abandoned calls).

What I did was:
1. Explain the situation to all employees (outside working hours)
2. We created more space to seet people (45 places where normally only 30 would be)
3. We communicated our plans to build out the center within 6 months and did all we could to keep motivation as high as possible
4. We restructured the schedules to the optimal and hired as many new staff as we could place.
5. We followed our plans, showed the staff what we were doing to solve the problem etc.

This resulted in an excellent 2004 in which we achieved all of our targets over the last 9 months and the overall score for 2004 was only 2 % below our goals.
Staff is motivated and has faith in the management (we did an internal query that proves this in December, 1 year after our "collapse" )

The most important thing you should keep doing: communicate with your staff ! Take them seriously and value their input !

Good luck (and feel free to mail me at : niek.bosch@medion.com )

[ctaylor]

Joe,

been there done that. If you can't get control of the process, you may see a huge increase in turnover and a corrsponding decline in agent morale, both or either of these situations will make a bad situation much, much worse.

If you have seasonal volume surges I would suggest you partner with an outsource vendor to manage your seasonal overflow. This will serve to protect you internal environment (which can be undermined by use of significant amounts of temps).

Use of outsourcers in this tactical manner is not unusual and can allow you to add significant stations for a short term tactical basis at a cost that is likley similar to what your internal costs are today.

I have worked both on the captive center and outsource center environments over the past 25 years.

I hope that I have added some value to this discussion. I would be happy to discuss this matter in more detail, you may contact me at ctaylor@thetaylorreachgroup.com

Colin