True Calls per Hour: Balancing Quality and Productivity in Your Contact Center

Contact Centers are complex environments — but the principles behind running them well can be learned.

That’s why we created our Contact Center Management Series — a collection of articles that bring together practical guidance and insights to help Contact Centers run better and deliver stronger results.

It is also part of our Team Leader Resource Series — a collection of practical articles to help Team Leaders grow their skills, shift their mindset, and elevate the way they lead.

Let’s start with a caveat.

The Customer contacts we’re talking about in this article are those that need to be handled within an hour — at most — of arriving.

Phone Calls, Chats, Walk-In Customers and some Social Media contacts all fit into this classification.

In industry-speak, these are Service Level-based contacts.

Targeting Quantity Handled per Agent for Service Level-based contacts is and always has been problematic.

If you’re wondering what the Quantity Handled per Agent metric sounds like, here are some examples:

• “We expect our Agents to handle 80 calls a day.”
• “Our target for Agents is 22 chats per hour.”
• “Our best Agents operate at 44 chats per shift while our lower performing Agents operate at 34 chats per shift.”

I think you can see exactly what this looks like when expressed as an Agent metric.

For a metric to be fair, the person or role responsible for that metric should have realistic control over that metric’s outcome.

When it comes to Quantity Handled by Agent as a metric, there are mathematical realities that limit the Agent’s control over the number of calls or chats they handle.

These include:

• The Service Level set and its resulting Occupancy rate (higher Occupancy rates correlate with greater quantity, for example)
• The health of the Forecasting, Staffing, Scheduling & Real Time Management process at the interval level
• The size of the Queue or Agent Group at any given time (a mathematical reality known as The Pooling Principle)
• The undeniable mathematics of random contact arrival (which is why we use math such as Erlang C and its variations)

If I Could Ask Only One Question

If I had only one question to ask to see if a Contact Center professional knows their operations, it would be this:

Is it appropriate to target your Agents on the quantity of calls, chats, or walk-ins they handle?

If they answer NO — be impressed. That’s the right answer.

And it signals a Center that knows its operations and is focused on both Agent and Customer Experience.

If the answer is YES — avoid being judgemental.  I never am.

Because people don’t go to school to learn Contact Center operations.

So many people end up learning on the job or following whatever they were told by their bosses.

But let’s be clear. Targeting Quantity Handled per Agent is wrong.

Not because of some moral high ground.

But because of the mathematical realities at work in an inbound Contact Center.

Is There a Better Way We Can Look at Quantity Handled?

When I teach Contact Center operations, I use a fictional restaurant chain — Pizza Palace — to illustrate how the calculation works.

This True Calls per Hour calculation is an advanced technique and you’ll need to have a good understanding of Occupancy.

Imagine Pizza Chefs Making Pizzas Across Different Pizza Palace Outlets

Analyze this scenario:

• In our Delhi outlet from 1:00 – 2:00 PM, the Occupancy Rate is 87% and Chef Prachi made 22 pizzas.
• In our Chennai outlet from 1:00 – 2:00 PM, the Occupancy Rate is 46% and Chef Sangeetha made 13 pizzas.

Which Chef seems to be more productive?

Pretend You Are in My Class

Pretend you are in my class. Take a moment to come up with your own answer to this question.

The Occupancy Rate — 87% in Delhi and 46% in Chennai — reflects how busy our Employees are when they’re in capacity doing the work.

The higher the rate, the busier the Employees are during the specified time interval.

In this scenario, our Delhi Occupancy Rate is higher.

This could be due to its prime location in a busy train station. There are just more Customers walking in.

Or it could be that Chef Prachi in Delhi is busier because two other chefs who were scheduled did not turn up for work.

The Occupancy Rate in  Chennai is lower. This could be due to its rather remote location in a quiet neighborhood.

Start with the figure for the quantity they ‘made’ (in this case how many pizzas) and divide that figure by the Occupancy Rate they experienced during that interval.

You can see Prachi made 22 pizzas.

And the Occupancy rate was 87%.

So you take 22 ÷ .87 = 25.3.

That’s the rate — or speed — at which Prachi is making pizzas.

The use of the word rate or speed is important.  Prachi is working at the rate/speed of 25.3 pizzas per hour. 

If her Occupancy rate had been 100%, this is how many pizzas she would have made.

Using the same calculation,  Sangeetha is working at the rate/speed of 28.3 pizzas per hour.

13 ÷ 0.46 = 28.3

If her Occupancy rate had been 100%, this is how many pizzas she would have made.

Our True Pizzas per Hour calculation allows us to fairly compare the quantity rates for both of our Pizza Chefs — apples to apples.

Now substitute the word calls or chats for the word pizzas — that’s the True Calls per Hour Calculation.

The math works exactly the same way.

In All This, What Have We Forgotten? Quality

When I’m teaching the True Calls per Hour Calculation in a class, someone almost always figures out what we have forgotten to consider (drum roll please).

We haven’t spoken about the quality of the pizza.

Are the pizzas that our Chefs are making so good that Customers want to come back again? Tell their friends about us?

Or are the pizzas sloppily thrown together and unappetizing? That’s what the poor comments we get on social media say. 

What we haven’t considered in this calculation exercise so far is what the appropriate or best rate is. 

Because we want our Customers to love our pizza. We want them to come back again. Give us great testimonials. Tell others about us.

And if we don’t factor in thinking around Quality — then what we’re doing is pointless.

We’ll never run a sustainable pizza business.

We Need to Establish Our Quality Range

Fast-food companies conduct rigorous time and motion studies.

These studies help them determine how ‘quickly’ hamburgers (for example) can be made that also meet defined quality standards.

There’s no point making the hamburgers so fast that they don’t taste good.  Or so slow that we’re throwing away efficiency.

That’s where the idea of a Quality Range comes in — the sweet spot between speed and standards.

A burger chain might conduct its time and motion studies and determine that the right Quality Range for making burgers — one that meets quality standards and is efficient — is 45–50 burgers per hour.

Pizza Palace can use the same Quality Range approach.

After conducting its internal time and motion studies, let’s assume that Pizza Palace established that a Quality Range of 22 – 25 pizzas made per hour is ideal.

Remember that we’re not looking at how many pizzas were made.

We’re looking at the rate at which pizzas are made. That’s a super important distinction.

Let’s Draw Accurate Conclusions About the Performance of Our Chefs

Chef Prachi, operating at the rate of 25.3 pizzas per hour, is probably fine. She’s operating at the upper end of the Quality Range but still (essentially) within range.

Our Quality Assurance folks will continue to taste samples of her pizzas regularly as per our normal process.

On the other hand, Chef Sangeetha is operating at the rate of 28.3 pizzas per hour.  She is outside of the defined Quality Range and on the high side.

Our Quality Assurance folks will straight away taste samples of her pizza to ensure that quality hasn’t been compromised.

What we do next depends on what we find. That might mean updating the equipment she’s currently using or providing coaching.

Remember not to jump to conclusions about why she’s overshooting the Quality Range.  Do the root cause analysis.

It could be that Chef Sangeetha has come up with an innovation that enables her to produce more quickly than others — without sacrificing quality.

We’d be smart to adopt her innovation more broadly and help everyone become more efficient.

You Need to Know Your Quality Range

Without knowing your own Quality Range, you won’t be able to identify who is ‘slower’, who is operating ‘within range’ and who is operating ‘faster’ — distinctions everyone in your Center needs to understand in order to draw the correct conclusions.

Related reading:  How to Help Your Contact Centre Agents Improve Their Performance

Don’t Target Agents on Quantity Handled

The best Contact Centers don’t target Agents on the quantity of contacts handled for Service Level-based contacts.

I regularly share stories, strategies, and insights from our work across Contact Centers, Customer Service, and Customer Experience. If this article resonated with you, I’d be pleased to stay connected.

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Daniel Ord
[email protected]
www.omnitouchinternational.com