Not Ready Occurrences...

[BeeZee]

I'm in a 10 person call center. We get about 185 to 230 calls per day. We use the Symposium software by Nortel. I've been working with my Director trying to improve our numbers, and I'm now looking for some guidance. 3 of the 10 people are set in a 2 priority, meaning their phone doesn't ring unless all other 1s are busy. Essentially 7 of the 10 take the majority of the calls. We ask that if you leave the desk or are working on something time sensitive, you go into a Not Ready status, which of course, takes you out of the loop. I just pulled our numbers for last week, and the lowest number of occurrences was 21 and the highest was 80. So we are struggling with what should be an acceptable average for each day. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

[Kevinized]

Calculate how many people need to be available during peak incoming times for the service level you wish to achieve and let your agent know what that minimum number of agents is.

With the minimum number available known, either have the agents police themselves to maintain that number or assign the times they NEED to be available.

[LindaH]

There is really no way to assign an acceptable average, as it is dependent on your center's requirements. If you have real time stats available you can see when your agent's are in not ready and determine if this is acceptable based on call volume and number of calls in queue. With some technologies, codes can be assigned when the agent goes into not ready enabling the supervisor to monitor all the " not ready activity" of each agent and make adjustments to the schedules.