Workforce Management: How to Staff a Support Center without Guesswork August 6, 2010

Guest blog:  Bob Last, HDI, Content Manager

One of the most important and least understood aspects of support center management is staffing; how many people does it take to have an effective support center?  Workforce management refers to the way in which staffing levels, analyst availability, the need for additional resources, both internal and external are scheduled to meet SLAs and how these are determined.  staffing and scheduling can be a very time-consuming, and sometimes frustrating, task.  Too few people, and the customer waits for a response forever (the customer perception of a wait time is three times higher than the reality); too many people, and the budget is busted.  There is a sensible middle-ground that can be obtained using an understanding of the dynamics of inbound contacts, statistical calculation, and sophisticated software.  The one method that is NOT useful in determining the headcount of a support center is to wait until your customers are complaining and your staff is exhausted, before adding more staff.

Another misunderstood aspect of support center management is the importance of identifying HOW customers contact a support center.  The dominate contact channel is still the telephone, but two decades of experience has taught us that customers will happily use, and now expect, alternative methods of contacting a support center.  Additional channels of communication include:  email, chat, instant messaging, self-service tools, web logging, fax and walk-up.

Each of these contact channels requires a conscious assessment of the workload they generate and the costs they incur.  Simply assigning people to respond to the incidents, inquiries, and questions from each contact channel in isolation from each other is wasteful and counterproductive.  The experienced support manager will be able to assess the potential workload from each channel and use that information as part of their staffing calculations.

The baseline figure for staffing ratio is approximately one analyst for every 80 to 260 customers.  The exact ratio depends on the technical savvy of the customer base.  If most of the customer base are technically competent and highly mobile, the ratio will be 1:80-110.  If most of your customers are NOT technically proficient and are mostly static in their location, the ratio will be higher, more like 1:120-160. 

In determining staffing needs do your research, don’t just approach it with the “we need more people!”  Your research should include:

1. Determine the number of incidents received (per year)
2. Determine the average incident-handle time (include after call work time)
3. Categorize by customer department, problem type, contact channel, product, etc
4. Determine Total Work Hours Required per year:  # incidents per year X Ave. incident-handle time = Total Work Hours Required
5. Determine Actual Work Hours Available:  2080 potential work hours – vacation, sick days, holidays, breaks, etc. – training, projects, administration = Actual Work Hours Available
6. Staff required:  Total Work Hours Required divided by Actual Work Hours Available = # of staff required

Unfortunately, with the economic pressures of today, many organizations have had to sideline staff ratio analysis to accept mandates of reduced staffing for cost-cutting purposes.  This approach is an example of arbitrary business decisions impacting customer service, employee satisfaction, and support center productivity.