Access Informatics

Aligning the contact center’s staffing with forecasted volume and workload is one of the key cost reduction tools available within a contact center. Staffing costs account for greater than two-thirds of a typical contact center’s budget. Access Advisors will calculate your staffing needs and deliver a schedule to your team each week to assure staff time is not wasted and highly optimized.

If the contact center is primarily staffed with full-time employees, contact center staffing is likely not optimized. We use sophisticated tools that measure call volumes within 30 minute historical segments, account for upcoming call spikes, and include work required by the contact center that is not related to phone activity. In fact, our system informs call center leadership when to complete the off-phone work to maximize service and reduce the abandonment rate.

The following illustration shows our basic staffing analysis required for the upcoming week. If off-phone work is required in the contact center, this would be accompanied by a staff schedule to optimize the following week’s performance.

The Employee Performance Rating (EPR) is a single and comprehensive proprietary metric developed by Access Advisors that measures and scrutinizes numerous agent metrics designed to accentuate agents for further investigation. This tool provides contact center leaders a streamlined approach to agent oversight, thereby increasing supervisor coverage and reducing leadership costs.

Contact center leaders can now focus on agents not meeting expectations and potentially driving down patient satisfaction. The EPR analysis is only one of numerous reports provided to allow targeted coaching of employees.

The following illustration shows that agents 4, 5, and 7 are not performing to benchmark expectations and will lead to further analysis by Access Informatics.

Access Informatics compares and contrasts numerous metrics to determine the likely candidates that are negatively impacting patient satisfaction scores. Through our industry expertise, we have identified the key data points that allow us to highlight the candidates for further review.

For example, one of the metrics closely tied to negative patient perceptions is excessive hold time. This metric is benchmarked against other organizations and best practices are reached through various research studies.

The following illustration is used to assess hold times against these indicators. The team shown here is struggling to maintain the benchmark for hold times. In addition, Agent 4 has unacceptable hold times and is also showing an increase each month. A specific program and timeline would be developed for the agents to improve their performance.

One of the primary drivers of performance and cost is the contact center’s ability to focus agents on call activity. The more agents not logged into the call queue, the more agents that are needed to answer incoming calls in a timely manner. This information is benchmarked among peers within your contact center, and is also measured against industry best practice benchmarks. We have found great success in reducing a center’s staffing costs through this in-depth analysis.

The following is an example of peer benchmarking that shows the agents within standard deviation of the benchmarked activity. It also shows the agents that are well outside this standard deviation and would trigger a further analysis.

The power to synthesize data to identify agents that are not performing according to their peers is the key to early coaching and reduction of high turnover costs. In addition, we are able to quickly identify employees that may not possess the right skill set for contact center operations and limit their negative impact on patients and referring providers.

In the first illustration, we compare the agents’ volume of calls answered with their handle time to identify outliers. Here, we can see that Agent 2 has high handle times and low volume, indicating low contribution to the team and a knowledge gap on how to handle calls efficiently. You can also see the performance has been declining over the last three months.

In the second illustration, we trend agents against numerous performance targets to identify both top tier agents and those agents that are not progressing according to benchmarks. This information is paramount to providing leaders with targeted coaching opportunities.