Can anyone give me any advice on how to work out how to get a feel for our customer's tolerance levels. I know this is not simply the average wait to abandon from the ACD but am not sure what level to pitch at.

Also looking for an indication ofwhat utilisation rates are being aimed for and achieved out there.

And finally (I promise !!). If anyone has used Mitan's PhoneCalc demo can they advise whether the agent required figure it suggests include an element of utilisation built in orif for example it said 20 agents were required to reach the desired service level would thsi have to be increased to account for lower utilisation?

Mark,
A couple of things for you regarding your questions:

1. The average wait to abandoned useful information, in that it does give you a bit of a 'tolerance level'. However, most call centers will use the actual abandoned percentage as a service metric. For most call centers, 3% abandoned or less is considered very good, and will calibrate well with a Cumulative Service Level (CSL) goal of 80% of all calls answered in 20 seconds or less.

2. Utilization. This is usually measured at two levels. The first (known usually as an occupancy percentage) is the total talk time plus after call work time (or wrap-up) divided by total phone time. This gives you a productivity percentage for your call center. Depending on the size of your center, this percentage will range anywhere from 60% (small centers) to 85% (200+ seats), assuming an 80-85% CSL. Higher than 90% occupancy on a regular basis is probably killing your agents, and hurting your CSL.

The other level of utilization is the percentage of PAID time that an agent is logged into the phones. Depending on how much time in breaks, vacation, sick time, team meeting time, training, etc, that you provide your for you agents, this ordinarily runs between 65%-70%. It's usually helpful, however, to break out this non-productive paid time by category in order to manage it more efficiently.

3. I've never used the PhoneCalc tool you mentioned, but ordinarily these kinds of tools provide FTE recommendations based on staffed time, not paid time, with an occupancy variable (input by you).

Hope this helps, Mark - feel free to drop me an e-mail if there's anything else.

Brent

We have a target abandon rate of 5% and 80/20 service level. However, we constantly monitor the callers activity in the queue looking at both the average time to abandon and the distribution of abanoned calls by duratuion. This later figure being mutch more usefull for showing the main hang up points.

In addition you should remeber that a customers prepensity to hang up varies according to why they are ringing. For example a service caller will wait longer than a sales caller. So if you are the only company to offer a product or service customers will wait longer than in a crowded market place.

For example I used to work for a major flower delivery business. Normally average wait time was around 25secs before abandon. However around Valentines
day this jumped to over 20minutes average (unbelievable stats those periods something like 60% abandon and 2%SL - and no customer complaints about queues!).

So in conclusion, analyse when customers hang up and look at what the customers are experiencing at that point in the queue (another message etc!) change that, move announcement forwards or backwards and see what happens. You can influence customer tolerance in this way. (And I have not even talked about music yet!)