Let’s talk graphs. I received my first big promotion when I was working for Northwest Airlines after I drew my first sensitivity analyses graphs- those graphs became the basis for all of the cool analysis graphs that CenterBridge provides. Each one has cool interpretations.
Service Level versus Occupancy is one of the most confused pieces of analyses that we see. It represents the ironclad relationship between the amount of time an agent will spend working a contact, compared to the time he will spend waiting for a contact to arrive.
Clearly, if you want the phone answered more quickly, then there needs to be more agents potentially available to pounce on the call. Hence, as service level increases, then the amount of time- on average- that an agent spends waiting for the next call also increases, and occupancy decreases. Simple, yes?
And so you get a graph that looks like the one above.
Note one thing: the relationship between service level and occupancy will be different for each contact center- customer patience and economies of scale play into these graphs a lot, and those vary by contact type.
Now the dangerous part. For the call center described above, an 80% service level results in a 68% occupancy. That is ironclad; it is an unbreakable law of math. But what it doesn’t mean is that agents who work an 8 hour day have 32% of their time available to do other things! It means that there may be a 30 or so seconds between calls, before the next one comes in. It also doesn’t mean you can get rid of 32% of the workforce.
