Promo Peak and Bus Continuity

[zoinks]

I have recently been analyzing my new organization to prepare for a promotional peak that will be the largest in many years. It got me thinking that I could almost wrap this analysis into a Bus Continuity Plan.

Does anyone have any knowledge gained from a similar experience with either BCP or capacity planning exercise? I am trying to put together a big picture operational plan to prepare ourselves for a potential peak (maybe 50k-100k calls) over 1-2 days. Any ideas on what to be aware of in infrastructure, staffing, marketing, etc would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers

[Earl]

Zoink,

I have worked on similar situations in the past. The following are areas you need to be concerned with:

1. Marketing- compare this peak volume to past marketing initiatives and determine the amount of mailing that is going out. Identify the response rates by percentages and add this volume to each day's forecast you anticipate.

-Identify the growth rate you anticipate and begin training or cross training to ensure staffing plans are close to accurate to meet budgets. A good work force Management tool can help in this area. TCS/Aspect, IEX, Bluepumpking and GMT to name a few, can assist in tracking your trends and budget impacts

2. Infrastructure- Seating and space capacity. Often times companies plan for staffing resources and never review space resources. The schedules created will help you determine how many seats/desks are needed. Permanent desks are great for employees but as business increase, the employees may have to go to a hot seating situation which means they may have to switch desks daily or as few as 2 days a week or often as 5 days a week. There is software on the Market call Call Center Floor Manager that will help facilitate this. Go to WWW.CallCPM.com
This software picks up where work Force Management tools leave off. The company is CPM (Call Center Performance Management)

3. Infrastructure- Call Routing. This may be insignificant but if you are a multi-site call center, call routing and balancing workloads between several centers may become an issue if you are not using adequate load balancing tools such as Geotel

4. Infrastructure- Trunking space. If you don't have enough trunks for calls to come through the center, customers may experience fast busy signals which could potentially affect revenue. Working with your network or PBX group to determine trunking utilization is key. Most of the Work Force Management tools will help you in determining trunking increase and cost.

5. Shift bids- Most companies often attempt to change schedules of staffing in a more antiquated way which doesn't keep up with the business and customer. Eventhough you are taking higher call volume, your call arrival patterns for the new call volume often match your current call arrival pattern and you may just have to add schedules on top of the existing schedules.

Most companies perform schedule bids and throw out everything and start over which causes anxiety to the agents on the phones. As you already know, most of your schedules will be replaced. I have implemented shift bids that has given me strong benefits for the company, employee and customer by grandfathering a certain amount of agents and allowing them to bid for new schedules that are better than what they currently have. They would bid for these schedules and if what they want was not available, they would default to their current schedule. "No harm, No Foul" . The othe percent which were agents that were new and/or recently hired in the past 6-12 months had to plan in the shfit bid and preference schedules that fit their liftestyle. I have used software such as Call Center Bid Manager from WWW.CallCPM.com and have seen attrition reduction increase morale and have met service levels better by having the agent a part of the solution rather than the benefactor of a schedule.

I have used the work force Management bidding tools in the past but have had lines outside my door that I could not explain why the received what they had. This new process has eliminated that and am in a better situation.

These are a few of the things I can mention to get your juices going. If you have questions please call me at 770-974-1820