I supervise a 24seat Call Centre for local government. We currently have 18 staff (10ftes, 8part-timers). The call centre is open Mon-Fri 08:00-18:00. We handle incoming calls for Council tax & General Enquiries, which come in on different numbers & queues.

I currently forecast and do the workforce planning seperately for each service, as Council tax has a significantly higher AHT that the GenQ service and I believed it was having a negative impact. Also they both have different service levels and our workforce planning spreadsheet can only account for one service level.

We have a workforce planning spreadsheet that was built for us by an external consultant but by using 2 seperate copies of it (one for each service) I think it is overforecasting our staffing, so it constantly looks like we are understaffed.

Am I right in trying to forecast seperately? And as I put my shrinkages on both spreadsheets are they being counted twice?

Any help/advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Elaine

Hi Elaine

If your workforce planning spreadsheets are using erlang and you are planning each call type separately then you will be overforecasting the resource requirement as you won't be modelling the efficencies you get as both call types are handled by the same team.

To solve this I would merge your forecasting into one spreasheet by

- Combining the calls together into one overall forecast
- Work out the composite AHT across all calls
- Aim the staffing requirement at the tougher service level

This should produce a requirement buch closer to your current FTE compliment.

If you need anything else then feel free to give me a call, details on our website.

Eamon
www.beCogent.com

Elaine,

Eamon is pretty much spot on.

The only thing I would add is remember to weight
the averages when working out an average AHT.

Assuming your model has been set up correctly
this should do it.

Good luck,

DaveA

Thanks. All advice much appreciated, I was getting concerned as it was fairly obvious we were showing as understaffed, when in reality we weren't. Will combine onto one spreadsheet.

Thanks again.

Elaine