Tool Time

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Tool Time

4/29/2005

By Mikael Blaisdell

Trying to balance staffers and time with a growing volume of pleas for help? It may be time for workforce management tools.

Maybe you’ve heard these questions lately: “Can someone help me figure out a workable shift schedule for my help desk? Is there a software package I can use that will tell me what I need to know?” Possibly, the questions are a bit more basic: “Is there software that can tell me how many agents I need?” Or, the reverse: “I’ve got 12 agents, and the administration is telling me that I’m about to lose two of them. Is there a product that will show me what the effect will be on my help desk?” Such queries are common in the campus IT support community; they turn up regularly in discussion forums and around the tables at the end of convention days. The answer to all of these questions is generally, “Yes, there is software—workforce management (WFM) tools from a number of companies that can help you, if you do your homework first.” WFM tools are not magic wands, however. In order to use them effectively, you will first need to build a supporting structure of usable data. In fact, the answers to the questions above depend, in large part, upon the data.

Feeding the Formula

A campus help desk manager, like the university itself, is actually dealing with a knowledge inventory management problem. The help desk manager has to try to maintain, in balance, a knowledge inventory, the access channels to it, and the demand from the campus community. Let’s look at one access channel, the telephone line, to see what this might mean in terms of staffing. On one end, we have faculty members, students, and administrators with technical problems—and all of them want an answer as quickly as possible. On the other end of that phone line, we have some help desk agents who have access to the knowledge in their heads and (hopefully) in their computer knowledgebase system. If we give a WFM tool the right data, it will tell us part of the answer to the question: “How many agents do I need?” The equation looks like the chart below:

Responsiveness is simply how fast the caller can be connected to an agent. Staffing is the number of agents that are ready to take calls. AHT, or Average Handle Time, is how long those calls will last, and the Volume is how many of them we will have to deal with in a set time frame. If you enter the AHT and the Volume figures, and provide either the Responsiveness piece or the Staffing piece, the tool will give you the missing element. In general, though, if you want faster response, you’ll need to add more people or decrease the number of incoming calls. Push one end of the seesaw down, and the other end g'es up. Simple, right? After all, you already know how many staff members you have available to be assigned to the phone. But what about the other required pieces of data? If you have a good telephone system, it should be able to give you both the AHT and an idea about the volume to be expected from historical data and trends.