The Silver Bullet for Your Staffing Shortage?

Labor shortages are having a huge impact on businesses across North America. The impact of this problem on the contact center is ten-fold. In the best of times, CX leaders struggled to fully staff to meet their service levels. With the pandemic and the “Great Resignation,” CX leaders are in full-blown crisis mode.

Could a “fractionalized work” model be the answer to this problem?

Fractionalized work looks at the total agent capacity requirement of any contact center and breaks it down into “shift hours.” Let’s say a contact center requires 100 FTEs (full-time equivalent employees) to achieve its key performance metrics — abandonment rate, hold time, average handle time, CSAT, etc. That suggests the contact center has 800 shift hours per day. (100 FTEs x 8-hour shifts = 800 shift hours.)

These 800 shift hours are likely distributed across a 10- or 12- or even 24-hour workday, with a heavier concentration at peak hours.

Seems straightforward, right? Every CX leader knows it’s not that simple. There are at least three significant factors that any contact center manager needs to account for when planning for required capacity to achieve their target service levels:

• Occupancy & Shrinkage. This measures how much of an agent’s time is actually available to answer calls. “Shrinkage” is what happens when an agent is on break, at lunch, in training, talking to a colleague — anything that takes the agent away from being logged in and available. Best-in-class contact centers may be able to achieve an 80% occupancy rate (20% shrinkage), but most are closer to 70% or worse.
• No-show. It’s crazy to consider, but no-show rates have skyrocketed in most contact centers. In the best of times, most contact centers could plan on at least 5% of their scheduled staff to not show up for their shift each day. In our current environment, that number is 10% or even 20%, which is a massive cost to the business.
• Adherence. This measures how closely agents stick to schedules. Do they log in on time at the beginning of their day? Do they log back in on time after a scheduled break? Best-in-class contact centers strive to hit 95% adherence, but even at that number, 5% can still represent a big expense. If adherence falls to 90% or 80%, that number becomes scary big.

There are other key factors that CX leaders need to consider, but take just these three to start to get an idea of how you have to staff.

Suppose for a moment that your adherence number was best in class at 95%, your occupancy rate was average at 75%, and you’ve maintained a 10% no-show rate. That translates into 35% in the aggregate. That means if you’ve modeled you need 100 agents to hit your required service levels, you actually need 135. Ouch.

CX leaders have been trying to change this math since the beginning of contact centers. There are ways to improve these numbers, but more and more the negative hits are beyond leaders’ control and have simply become a cost of doing business.

Suppose for a moment there was a better way. What if you could come close to eliminating these negative numbers?

Enter fractionalized work.

This is a groundbreaking approach to staffing for hourly work. With our same example contact center, a fractionalized work model starts with the total number of shift hours required, in this case 800 per day. Then, instead of building a team of 100 agents working eight hours a day, you build a pool of fractionalized (part-time) workers that can fill those shifts. For the model to work, the pool needs to be three to four times larger than a traditional pool of full-time agents to make sure you can achieve 100% fulfillment of your shifts.

Putting aside training and quality concerns for a moment, what’s the impact on the basic math? The variables outlined above can be radically reduced, and in some cases, flat out eliminated. Here’s why:

• Occupancy & Shrinkage. By breaking shifts down into short two- or four-hour shifts, you don’t have to account for breaks in the day. You can come darn close to 100% occupancy on a two-hour shift, which is impossible to do on an eight-hour day.
• No-show. Again, you only pay for agents that log in. As long as your pool is large enough, you can present fractional shifts to your pool of workers and ensure you’re not affected by someone who doesn’t show up.
• Adherence. In a pure fractionalized work model, you only pay for the time an agent is available. If they log in five minutes later than they were supposed to, you don’t pay for those five minutes.

So, am I saying that you could reduce your labor expense in this example by 35%? Well, on your own, that’s not practical. Likely you are already struggling with recruiting and retaining your team of 100. How would you ever build a pool of 300 or 400 fractionalized workers? And even if you did, how would you possibly train up that pool and hit the quality expectations the business has? Those are major roadblocks to any business adopting a fractionalized work model and suggest this idea is a non-starter.

Well, suppose for a moment there is a platform purposely built to accomplish exactly what I’ve just outlined. Further, suppose that some of the biggest brands and government agencies on the planet are already successfully leveraging the platform while maintaining or even exceeding their key performance metrics. How quickly would you start exploring this solution?

The platform is Shiftsmart. And CX Effect is excited to bring this transformative solution to your organization. Contact us today to learn more.

Andrew Pryfogle is founder and CEO of CX Effect.