Many organizations fail to understand the drivers of AHT and therefore under or over-estimate the forecasted AHT, resulting in inaccurate capacity planning outcomes.
The use of current trending AHT may not accurately predict the AHT requirements for the future planning horizon. Drivers of change in AHT include:
Changes in program requirements
New system implementations or system updates
Changes to processes such as authentication requirements, transfer protocols
New or updated knowledge management tools
Seasonality
Call deflection to self-service resulting in more complex agent interactions
New hires due to agent attrition and growth
AHT and New Hire Learning Curve
Organizations often fail to define the AHT for fully-proficient tenured agents and importantly, track and utilize new hire learning curve in determining a forecasted AHT.
Many organizations use proficiency or maturity factors that do not provide the level of granularity for new hire learning curve and may not be regularly updated.
However, they do not consider the learning curve of new agents hired as a result of attrition, replacement or growth.
Focus is generally on trending AHT from the last 3 months or year, rather than on the potential for change during the planning horizon.
New hire learning curves can vary from 1 month to 18 months or more depending on program complexity, nesting and ongoing coaching which drives the need to consider an alternative approach to defining forecasted AHT.
Organizations often fail to define the AHT for fully-proficient tenured agents and importantly, track and utilize new hire learning curve in determining a forecasted AHT because of complexity and lack of available tools that make it simple to do so.
EXAMPLE: Government Department
Inputs:
Call volume: 100K per month
SL Target of 80% in 20 seconds
Trending AHT: 672 seconds
AHT – Tenured Agents: 600 Seconds
Hours of Operation: 5 days a week
Attrition: Varies by month – 33% annualized
Shrinkage: Varies by month – 34.5% average
Outcome:
Difference of 6 seconds in AHT results in a shortfall of 2 FTE and a forecasted decrease in SL of 4.4%
SL consistency is also impacted, ranging from 72.6% to 80.1% throughout the year