Calls per Hour

[NAZ2002]

Our Call Center currently does not measure Calls per hour,
however I have been tasked to research this measurement.

How do you report Calls per Hour? Does this benefit the
organization? Do your agents adapt well to this measurement tool? Is this something that is considered part of their
evaluation? If so, how is this calculated. What is the average number of calls per hour in your organization?

Any information on this subject would be helpful.

Thanks!

[beejay]

It's not all that straight forward and there is much to consider. It can be and is part of the agent productivity measurements and agents can be held accountable for it. But you need to be sure NCO is high enough for everyone to attain this expectation or you end up bridging it on the monthly agent review. Within your center, if is 24x7, certain shifts may not have enough NCO to compete.

The calls/per/hour expectation and measurement is also based upon the type center you have. If the center is a fairly typical inbound customer service center, the calls per hour will also take into account AHT that is expected and the length of the tour. So if your AHT is 360 seconds and the tour is 7:30 (allow also 2
15-min breaks) then you shoud expect 8 calls per hour.

This measurement helps drive not only the AHT you want to attain but also schedule adherence. The total assessment of the agent performance has to be tempered with a quality monitoring assessment or you will only drive the numbers and cause your customer base calling percentage to escalate.

[tmoty]

Just a few words of caution regarding calls per hour.

In our consulting practice, we frequently find call center’s driving the wrong agent behavior by focusing on call volume based “productivity” measures such as:

§ Total calls per hour
§ Transactions per day
§ “Normalized” or “Occupancy adjusted” calls per hour
§ Defined talk or wrap time
§ Telephone availability
§ Individual agent occupancy
§ Telephone state utilization

Using any of these measures to drive agent performance calculations can ultimately send the wrong message – provide quality, but hurry. Even when call centers get creative with an overall ranking, we typically find elements that are outside of an agent’s direct control and therefore result in comparisons that are not quite apples to apples.

The way to overcome promoting unhealthy behaviors and unfair comparisons is to set goals around the one telephone measure that is directly within an agent’s control – Schedule Adherence – Did they follow their schedule the way we expected. Call centers can also set goals around items such as attendance and punctuality, but any of the other telephone indicators (handle time, calls, etc.) should be “managed” without defined departmental goals.

Here is a link to an article that references some additional challenges agent occupancy adds to a call per hour calculation. http://incoming.com/consulting/consultantsfile.html

Please feel free to contact me if youÂ’d like to discuss this further.

Regards,

Tim