Consistency achieving intraday SL

[jadarvev]

Hello.
I´m concerned about the consistency of achieving a service level each half an hour of the day. Despite I try I just reach something like this:

# Intervals above 85: 55%
# Intervals between 75-85: 20%
# Intervals under 75: 25%

Our target service level is between 75 - 85 % answered before 20 seconds.
We answered about 12,000 calls a day with a peak in the morning (9:30 - 11:30) other in the afternoon (15:00 - 17:00) and other in the night (19:00 - 20:30). For example the performance in one day is:

Int SL
8:00 95
8:30 84
9:00 82
9:30 87
10:00 59
10:30 82
11:00 86
11:30 95
12:00 97
12:30 99
13:00 89
13:30 79
14:00 89
14:30 86
15:00 91
15:30 85
16:00 63
16:30 73
17:00 81
17:30 90
18:00 90
18:30 96
19:00 96
19:30 99
20:00 96
20:30 76
21:00 88
21:30 77

I´d like to know if this performance is good or bad, to share information about this.

Thank you.

[CecilSaxon]

Assuming the proper staffing is in place, as it appears it is- take a look at your schedules. Are the scheduled break/lunch windows allowed in a too narrow time frame? It appears that perhaps the scheduled events taking agents off the phones may be driving SLAs down. Since you did not mention the volume distribution as a problem I can again assume it is relatively constant.

[thetuan]

Hi Jadarvev,

Is the intraday that you posted an average intraday of a couple of weeks? In order to analyze the efficiency of your schedules, you will need to look at the intraday by day of week (DOW). Also, you will need to add columns for call volume, handle time, and # of operator. This way, if you have a dip in any half hour for SL, you will have more data to look at to analyze the issue further. I think if you look at your intraday this way, you will have a better understanding of how good or bad your operator schedules are.

By looking at the intraday that you have posted, I see two possible scheduling issues that you might want to investigate. It appears that you have a break issue at 10am and a break or lunch issue at the 1:30pm - 2:00pm time period and you have too many CSRs ending their shifts at 4:30pm. Your SL dips down to 59% at 10am and at 79% at 1:30pm. This is a common mistake in assigning breaks and lunches. By the look of your intraday, it appears that your call center opens at 8am. So it is natural for the operators to break at 10am but you will need to have your workforce team spread the breaks out evenly so that your SL will not dip too much. If you can not spread out anymore, then you will need to have support staff on standby at 10am in case you see a surge in incoming calls. The support staff solution is a temporary one and you will need to find a long term solution for it. Also, your service level dips to 63% and 73% from 4pm to 5pm. This is a typical symptom of too many operators ending their shifts at these times. You can move some of the 8am start times down to make sure that you have more operators on the phones as other operators are ending their shifts. It looks like you have excess capacity at 8am so you can move some of the operators that start at 8am down to 9am. Assuming that the operators work a 8.5 hours shift, you will have more operators working to 5:30pm and that should help to improve your SLs from 4pm - 5pm. Also, you are overstaffed starting at 6pm so I am assuming that your call volume really drops off after 6pm. You have the option to move some of these operators start time back a hour or two so that their breaks and lunches will not hit the 3:30pm - 5pm time period where you are currently short staffed.

Again, you will need to look at the intraday by day of week and you will need to include more key indicators so you can properly see the weak areas in your scheduling as a whole. My analysis is based on this one day intraday service level and that analysis might not be accurate for other days of the week.

Good luck