Hello,

I am in charge of setting up outsourced customer service operations for my company. We will be deploying an advanced set top box and I am trying to come up with an estimate of what our call volume is going to be. Can anyone help me out with this. We are ancticpating going from 0 to 175,000 customers in 2004 and want to come up with some kind of way to estimate our customer service call volume and the related cost.
Any advice is greatly appreciated.
Thanks

Hi Krista,

I am presuming that the calls are inbound. What type of product or service do you offer and how long are the calls?

You can get unlimited numbers of inbound call handling for no cost and get ongoing stats as well but I would need to know the types of calls and product and I can ascertain your needs better and let you know what to exopect

What will you be using the set top box for?

Regards

Shaun Sen
Director

Shaun,

Thanks for responding. We will be deploying a set top box with a highspeed internet connection that allows customers to access all their digital media (i.e. digital photos, digital music, digital videos) in one place. It will also have a PVR functionality similiar to Tivo. So, we are anticipating that we will get call concerning problems with the high speed connection, problems with hooking up various devices (cameras, etc). We are just trying to figure out some benchmark for estimating our monthly call volume. Any advice you might have is extremely welcome.
Thanks!
Krista

Hi Krista,

It is very difficult to determine call volumes as it could be as little as 5 to 10% or higher at certian peak periods.

We do work with a solution (if you are in the UK) that can give you unlimited capacity for calls so it doesnt matter if you have 17000 calls or 1700 calls, you can cope with large peaks and troughs. It also means you dont have to have as many lines, calls can be taken on mobiles or home, stats are included etc etc. This is from as little as £500

If this is of interest let me know and we can talk further

The main part you need to think about with regards to the calls for any number of customers is the peaks and to cover those.

Hello Krista,

This is a very common question, but there is neither theory nor a standard or average that will help you. There are several factors that drive customer calls and are very specific to each case. Some examples:

· The MTBF of the set-top unit
· The reliability of the network
· The complexity of setup and operation
· The user community: demographics, are they experienced Internet users, experienced PVR users?, etc.
· Coverage and range of services – are we talking technical support only or also billing questions? Are you also an ISP?
· Do you expect users to call you when they are supposed to call the cable company or the ISP?
· Repeat call rate

These are some immediate parameters I came up without analyzing your specifc situation, prodcut, and industry, and additional analysis will uncover additional factors. Once you have broken the question into its individual component, you can analyze each separately and have a pretty good estimate. Any other method of guessing the number of calls is error prone.

Please contact me directly if you are interested in the specifics of this type of analysis, which shouldn’t be that difficult. I should be able to obtain data from a company in a similar business that can be extrapolated for this purpose.

Joe Barkai
www.DiagnosticStrategies.com
jbarkai@DiagnosticStrategies.com