I have trawled the archives, but couldn't find anything that matched exactly what I was looking for, although I have found some extremely useful advice and some other bits and bobs that will be of use to me inthe future, so here goes.

I am looking for anyone who has some experience of staffing up a centre for very high peaks, in my case 23,000 plus calls a week for the first 4-6 weeks of the year and then dropping off to around 7-8k per week thereafter.

I have looked into annualised hours, which are already in place here, but even this cannot cope with the volumes described. The call types rule out the use of temps in any capacity as the training required would push up the costs and i'd never get it approved.

The annual volume of this ccentre is in excess of 600k calls with a high handle time of 7-10 minutes depending on the complexity of the call. Almost a third of the annual volume arrives in Jan & feb, so as I mentioned above it is a nightmare.

I have forecast volumes and heads all I need now is some kind of amazing idea to get from my 100 odd heads for 4-6 weeks down to 60 odd heads afterwards.

Any ideas, experiences, help, magicians welcome, if you need any more info give me a shout.



Simon

I have experience of this, (outsourcers do it all the time) we used temps for a 25,000 peak over 2 weeks, in the event the peak did not materialise and we laid lots off after 48hrs.

My suggestion would be to hive off the simpler calls using clever IVR and temps, being involved in training I cant see how the training is a significant cost for easy calls. Have you asked training for input on chepeast options to meet quality requirements?

Also use a graveyard shift to pull of an input messages left during the day.

What targets are you trying to achieve and are they realistic given the constraints you outline?

PS. David Blaine emerges on Sunday, he'd love something to get his teeth stuck into.....

We are aiming for 80% in 20secs here.

With reference to the temps, the cost would be more to do with the actual hire of the temps and management are reluctant to go down that route.

Given that it's only 4-6 weeks, I was going to take a hit, but the Revenue available in those weeks is too high and the aim is to move to a better customer experience.

All of our calls are for Tailor Made holidays and we only deal with 4 & 5 star hotels, so you can imagine the kind of people we get on the phones here. (I have a lasting memory of the £69k stag weekend for 16 people!)

I'll have a probe of the INDeX to see what clever tricks I can come up with.

Simon

Amy chance you can poach staff from oher departments or sections of the company for this period - at least they would have some company knowledge. Even if they can take details on paper for someone with system knowledge to process or confirm later?

Or could your local college travel and tourism course come to some arrangement for work experience? They may agree to do training specifically aimed to cover this?

Otherwise I don't know!

good luck!


Z

>>>With reference to the temps, the cost would be more to do with the actual hire of the temps and management are reluctant to go down that route.

>>>>but the Revenue available in those weeks is too high and the aim is to move to a better customer experience.

Given the issues you've outlined and the potential revenue/profits on offer it would seem your problem is not HOW to take the calls but in getting management to embrace a solution you come up with.

Its pretty easy to build and cost a case for outsourcing, pretty easy to build and cost a case for hiving off some calls, pretty easy to cost any kind of training and also relatively easy to forecast the effects of a drop in quality for this busy period, its also easy to forecast the effects and cost of losing so many calls if no solution in implemented as well the subsequent knock on effect for quality/reputation.

Given all of that, if you've put the cases both for and against (ensuring they meet corporate goals)and if there is still reluctance from managment then I'd suggest you are better off concentrating your efforts elsewhere.

Lemme see if I can provide a solution here.Simon I am assuming that this is 24*7 call centre and u need staff through out the day.There can be two solutions to this.For both the solutions,key thing here is for u to have the historical data of half hourly call trend in a day(weekdays as well as weekends)

1.If ur centre handles more than one programme/campaign: In this case u need to train the other callers---inbound/outbound for this programme also.This would mean one agent would be having knowledge of more than one programme.Now based on daily call trend ensure these multi tasking agents are logged in to both the programme during the peak hours and you ask your tech guys to set the priority.This would ensure that the calls which has high priority would be handled 1st.

2.Again based on the half hourly trend u need to ensure a specific staffing is being done-----------a daily roster type of a thing.Now as per the roster requirement u can put a group of agents on Break Shift.What that means is that this group of agent would come in for say 2 hrs during a specific hour of the day, go back home and come back again for the rest of the shift.If u can divide ur agents in group then this is possible as each group on a weekly basis does the break shift.

Hope this makes sense to u.Ask for any clarifications,--------U have a tough task in hand mate!!!All the best

Cheers,

Anjan.