You must be good with numbers to successfully run a call center. The goal is to have the right number of people in the building at any given moment to handle the demand. If you don’t know how to achieve this, you will struggle in your role.
The call center staffing model is a complex one, but it works quite well once you have it mastered.
Figuring Out the Workload
Your first job is calculating the workload for each hour of the day. All you do in this situation is learn about the forecasted number of calls for each hour and then multiply it by the average amount of time that it takes to handle a call. This gives you a good idea of how many staff members you should have working throughout the day.
How It’s Different
Staffing for a call center has patterns than you wouldn’t find in other businesses, which makes staffing more of a problem. For example, if you work in a courier company, you have a good idea of when packages will arrive and when they’ll be picked up. You’ll also have a pretty good idea of how many pieces will come in on each truck. If you have to sort through 200 packages per hour to be successful, you know exactly how many staff members that will take because there aren’t other variables involved.
Call centers are different because you are dealing directly with another person on the line, so it’s not as predictable. For example, you could end up taking 200 calls per hour, with each call taking 10 minutes to complete. Logic would suggests that each employee could take 6 calls per hour, so you would need approximately 33 employees during that hour. The problem is that there is no guarantee that the calls will come in at those intervals. You could end up with 40 calls coming in at once and if you only have 33 people on staff, it will create a backlog.
Extra Staff
For this reason, many calls centers have more employees than they need on staff at any given moment. The amount of extra employees that you will hire depends on how comfortable you are with people waiting on the line. The shorter the delay, the better it is for the customer.
Erlang C Model
When you use a staffing firm to handle your employee needs, it will likely use the Erlang C model. This model is used to predict how long callers will be delayed with a certain number of people on staff. The objective is to come up with a number that is suitable for everyone involved. The end goal is to provide the best possible service at the lowest cost, which is why many call centers now outsource their staffing to experienced providers.