Difference between revisions of "Real-Time Activities"

Revision as of 09:34, 13 April 2014

Real-Time Performance Management

Real-Time Performance Management is one of four cornerstones of Workforce Management: Forecasting (F), Scheduling (S), Real-Time Activity (RTA) and Business Intelligence (BI). The performance of each call center is highly dependent on how closely CAEs follow their scheduled activities. Service level goals, shrinkage and occupancy are all driven by the degree in which agents adhere to their activities, which directly impacts the cost structure in the care organization.

Due to the importance of adherence, a group of real-time analysts are assigned the task of monitoring the "scheduled" vs. "actual" activity by agent within a call center. The real-time analysts also monitor additional factors that require real-time adjustments to the schedule plan, and may be tasked with additional activities, such as posting outages messaging within the IVR, and coordinating or shifting floor activity (Breaks, meetings, coaching, etc) to respond to events.

Real-Time KPI Goals

To measure real-time call center performance, several KPIs are selected with fixed target goals. Below are the primary KPIs used in the real-time management of call center activity.

Service Level Goals

The Company has set Service Level goals as follows:

AHT Goals

The Southern Division has set Average Handle Time goals as follows:

Occupancy, Shrinkage & Adherence Goals

The Company has set Occupancyand Shrinkage goals as follows:

Currently, no universal Adherence Goal has been established yet; the Southern Division is completing its transition to a single WFM platform with standardized activity codes and AUX/phone state mappings. The philosophy behind adherence objectives has been determined to minimize exception codes to include items that impact groups of CAEs, but not to grant exceptions to "single events". Examples would include granting exceptions to a group of CAEs who had a team meeting shifted, due to availability 30 minutes before the activity was originally scheduled. The end goal is to establish a realistic adherence goal, without attempting to drive a goal higher and higher through the input of many manual exceptions.

Real-Time Monitoring Objectives

The continuous monitoring of ongoing service level, and balancing againstthe agent staffing and activity management is the key objective of a Real-Time management team. Intervals are measured on 30 minute segments, and decisions are made to adjust staffing activities in real-time to respond to variance to the service level goal. Dips in Service Level may require off-phone activities be suspended to restore service level to goal, while a service level which is significantly above goal should prompt the Real-Time management team to take advantage of coaching, meetings, the movement of breaks, or even early release of agents, to return the service level to goal.

While service level is the primary real-time performance measurement for the Southern Division call centers, additional measurements, such average handle time and forecast to actual volume variance should be considered by the real-time monitoring team.