Making Better Use of Agents’ Time

Contact Center Pressures

Benchmark research carried out by Ventana Research shows that contact center executives and managers are under pressure to provide the best possible customer service while staying within tight operational budgets. At the same time centers must handle increased volumes of inbound calls and respond to other types of interactions such as email messages and chat sessions. To demonstrate success, managers must improve the key performance metrics on which they are assessed, especially customer satisfaction scores and agent utilization rates.

If companies really want to focus on improving center and agent performance, they need key performance metrics that better reflect overall business goals.

This increased pressure falls on agents as well, and our benchmark poll on agent productivity shows that more than four-fifths (81 percent) of companies recognize they must improve the performance of agents. It also makes clear that there is dissatisfaction with many aspects of contact centers. Only 70 percent are satisfied or very satisfied with how well agents conform with regulations, and the numbers decline from there: 63 percent are satisfied or very satisfied with customer satis-faction scores, 61 percent with agent turnover rates, 46 percent with first-contact-resolution rates, 43 percent with agent utilization rates and 41 percent with the way agents spend their idle time.

Against this background, many companies are looking to improve the situation: 81 percent say they are taking steps to improve customer satisfaction, 72 percent to improve first-contact-resolution rates, 65 percent agent satisfaction and 37 percent the use of agents’ idle time. However, the poll shows that the most frequently used key performance metrics are average call-handing time (78 percent), agent quality assurance scores (69 percent), customer satisfaction scores (61 percent), total call-handling time (42 percent) and total after-call work time (40 percent), which indicates that companies and their contact center managers are more driven to achieve efficiency than to improve customer satisfaction. This contradiction between stated drivers and key performance metrics used leads us to conclude that if companies really want to focus on improving center and agent performance, they need key performance metrics that better reflect overall business goals.

Agent Utilization Targets Missed

Agent occupancy is a measure of the percentage of the time agents are logged into the automatic call distributor (ACD) when they are handling calls; as such it is primarily an efficiency metric but also can be an enabler of effectiveness. The results of our poll show that most companies set high targets for agent occupancy: 53 percent of them aim for between 80 and 90 percent, although 7 percent target 100 percent utilization. Companies recognize that in addition to interacting with customers, agents have other tasks to do (70 percent cited this as the number-one reason for less than 100 percent utilization), and 41 percent said a rate of 100 percent would cause agents to burn out. Others said that such a rate is impractical given the uncertainty of inbound call volumes and patterns (18 percent), 11 percent decided not to make the target 100 percent for other operational reasons, and 3 percent because they cannot forecast when idle time will occur.

Whatever the target, the poll results show that in the main companies are not reaching it; less than one in five achieve 75 percent utilization (13 percent), 80 percent (15 percent), 85 percent (16 percent) or 90 percent (16 percent), and not surprisingly only 1 percent achieve 100 percent agent utilization. Although the poll did not investigate why companies meet their targets so infrequently, we believe it is due to a combination of the reasons companies gave for not targeting 100 percent utilization and the level of granularity with which companies can schedule and monitor agent activities.

The Challenge of Unproductive Time

Previous benchmark research by Ventana Research shows that the main tools companies use to manage agent schedules are spreadsheets, workforce management (WFM) products, systems developed in-house or manual methods. Our research shows that to improve agent utilization, over the last seven years more and more companies have adopted formal WFM products. The results from this poll show that 43 percent of companies indicated it is very important to improve agent utilization and a further 32 percent indicated that it is important. Adopting WFM allows companies to use historic patterns of inbound call volumes to create agent schedules that are likely to meet similar demands in the future. However, most WFM products are designed to manage scheduling in time slots of 15 minutes or longer, with the result that the majority of companies schedule agent activities in slots of either 15 minutes (33 percent) or 30 minutes (32 percent). In contrast, day-to-day requirements, indeed minute-to-minute requirements, are driven by actual inbound interaction patterns, and so the challenge for companies is to spot when agents are idle and then try to utilize agent idle time as effectively as possible.

This inflexibility of conventional systems and processes in the face of the dynamic call volumes and patterns of the real world makes it hard for companies to maximize the use of the agent’s time during each shift.

The primary activities agents are expected to carry out during a shift are to answer calls and respond to increasing volumes of other forms of interactions (such as email, chat sessions, letters and social media), complete any tasks required after finishing handling an interaction (the most typical is updating systems by entering information captured during the interaction), and take part in training or coaching sessions. The rest of a shift is taken up with other miscellaneous activities such as breaks, reading news or product updates, attending meetings or standing idle. The chart below, derived from our poll, shows the average percentage of a shift that agents spend on primary and ancillary tasks.

This chart shows that agents spend on average almost a quarter (23 percent) of a shift on non-primary tasks − taking breaks, off-phone work, idle time, reading internal communications and attending meetings. If breaks are excluded, this means in a typical shift of eight hours, companies have nearly 80 minutes of agent time to optimize, including idle time.

The uncertainty of inbound interaction volumes and patterns means this time occurs in non-regular periods; for example, the poll shows that idle time occurs most often in one-to-two-minute slots (29 percent). This makes optimizing this time so difficult that approximately 14 percent of companies don’t even try to do it. For those that do make an effort, 56 percent allocate agents to off-phone tasks, 40 percent assign them to handle other forms of interactions, 31 percent allocate additional coaching and 20 percent have agents take online training courses.

The poll findings show a lack of discipline in how companies allocate and monitor what agents do during idle time. The majority (59 percent) of organizations have supervisors allocate tasks, while 24 percent leave it up to agents to decide what to do and only 17 percent have automated the processes using a WFM system. Equal numbers of companies indicated that they do or don’t track what agents do during this time, either getting agents to record what they do in the WFM system (44 percent) or an in-house developed system (22 percent), or having agents or supervisors record what is done in spreadsheets (20 percent).

Trouble in Managing Training and Coaching

Pressure to meet operational targets means that many agents don’t receive the full amount of training.

To improve agent performance, companies place high importance on training and coaching, and the results show that these take up considerable time, effort and cost. After initial training, most companies target agents to take training for less than half a day per month (41 percent) or half a day per month (21 percent); a few exceptional companies (4 percent) allocate a week or more. However, the pressure to meet operational targets means that many agents don’t receive the full amount, with fewer than 30 percent receiving more than 90 percent of the target.

Companies’ approaches to coaching are even less disciplined, with more than one-third (37 percent) setting no target, 7 percent targeting 15 minutes per week, 33 percent targeting 16 to 30 minutes, 9 percent targeting 31 to 45 minutes and 14 percent targeting more than 45 minutes. In addition, we believe that the high occupancy rates set by companies cut into the time available for training and coaching, and the situation is made worse by the unpredictability of inbound interaction patterns.

Recommendations

Pressure to hold down costs and meet agreed service levels drives companies to improve agent utilization. There are barriers to achieving this goal that include the unpredictability of inbound interaction patterns, the inflexibility of processes and applications used to manage agent work schedules, unpredictable agent activities (such as illness or absenteeism), and the large volumes of data that need to be assimilated to understand minute-by-minute operations.

Companies therefore need to adopt new approaches and supporting systems that can collect and analyze large volumes of data quickly and thereby enable them to optimize agents’ use of time to much higher degrees of granularity. In making changes, companies should also review the metrics they use to monitor and assess agent performance and align these more closely with their overall business objectives. Newfound operating efficiencies may enable them to focus more on these areas.

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