Setting the Correct Associate to Management Ratios in your Call Center

00:00Hi, guys. Tom Laird here. You've heard me break down contact center technology on the podcast time and time again. Now, it's time for me to help you with your challenges. As your contact center technology advisor through our new company, Expivia Digital, I can help you with things like CCaaS selection, any type of AI implementation, and NICE studio and integration services. It's the same honest and fair. The geek applied specifically to your operation. Visit ExpiviaDigital.com to get started. That's ExpiviaDigital.com. This is advice from a call center geek, a weekly podcast with a focus on all things call center. We'll cover it all from call center operations, hiring, culture, technology, and education. We're here to give you actionable items to improve the quality of yours and your customer's experience. This is an evolving industry with creative minds and ambitious people like this guy. Not only is his passion call center operations, but he's our host.

00:54He's the CEO of Expivia Interaction Marketing Group and the call center geek himself, Tom Laird. What's up everybody? Welcome back to another episode and thank you for listening to Advice from a Call Center Geek, the call center and contact center podcast. We're trying to give you some actionable items to take back in your contact center, improve your overall quality, improve your agent engagement, hopefully improve the customer experience as well. My name is Tom Laird. I am the CEO of Expivia Interaction Marketing. 500-600 seat call center outsourced located here in Northwestern PA. How's everybody doing on this Monday as I recorded is March 29th and spring is slowly starting to creep in. I hope it's creeping into you guys as well wherever you are listening from. Hey, I got a couple things I want to talk about today. Number one, when we get into kind of the meat and potatoes here, I want to talk about ratios I've had some questions on you know what is the rep to supervisor ratio what is your QA to supervisor to rep ratio what is your WFM ratio you know those types of things how many trainers do I need so let's let's talk about some of that stuff here today but before I do that I want to invite you guys to something so we have tried desperately to get some engagement on on our advice from a call center geek Facebook community and we have failed miserably.

02:23So we've kind of gone back to the drawing board on that. I posted on LinkedIn a couple, maybe a week and a half ago and asked if you guys would be interested or at least the link to my LinkedIn connections if there'd be any interest in a LinkedIn group. And the feedback seemed pretty good, at least initially on the post. So literally about an hour ago, and that's probably one of the main reasons I wanted to do another podcast today to kind of throw this out. We now have the advice from a call center geek, call center operations tips and tactics group on LinkedIn. So please, we are looking to have, again, a group of kind of like-minded customer service and call center professionals have a place where they can go, ask questions, get some best practices from other people in the industry, not just hearing my voice, but hearing all of your voices in a way that we can all help each other.

03:18Again, there's no solicitation on there. There's no sales on there. I'll take any of those type of posts down, not let that person post anymore. So again, this is just hardcore call center knowledge that we can all share because all of us have such expertise in so many different areas that it'd be great if we can just have one real place where we can talk about those types of things. So again, it is the advice from a call center geek, call center tips and tactics LinkedIn group. So please, you know, head over there if you are on LinkedIn, join that group. I'm not even, you know, once you click you're in and you can start posting. I'm not even gonna, I mean, I'll look at all the posts but, you know, as soon as you post it, you know, sometimes you can have the admins review and I'm not gonna do that unless I see, you know, we have a big issue.

04:11But speaking of that, Also I'm looking for three admins that would like to help, just kind of moderate content. Again, not a big undertaking here, maybe once a day go on and just kind of check to see if everything is okay or if anybody has any questions. So if you would like to be a moderator or an admin, I would appreciate that. Just kind of hit me up on LinkedIn or send me a message. The other thing that I wanted to kind of talk to you guys about and kind of generate some interest hopefully is I'm going to be doing, as of right now, the date may change, but it is April, April 7th, I'm going to be doing an Ask Me Anything on Reddit, right? So if you're unfamiliar with that, basically it's just a couple hours where literally you can go on to Reddit and just ask someone anything in an AMA, right?

05:04So that's what an AMA is. So, you know, they've got everyone on there from President Obama to, you know, plumbers to electricians, right? So it's really, it's any topic that, you know, there could be some interest in that you're a quote unquote kind of expert, I guess, I guess I kind of am an expert, or at least I definitely am doing this for a living. So again, something I think that could be kind of cool on May, I'm sorry, April 7, doing an AMA on Reddit on call center operation. So if you have any questions, that's a place to go. And then also this next week, we're going to be doing a clubhouse. If you are part of the Clubhouse app, we're gonna be doing that on some call center operations and some QA. Okay, so let's talk about what we wanted to kind of get into today, which is kind of ratios, right, on your call center floor.

05:56And again, this is not a cookie cutter, one size fit all, this is how you should do it. All I'm gonna do is give you how I do it, understanding that we're a BPO, right? So we're an outsourcer. We work for different clients that are basically looking to outsource their customer service. So it's not like I have a floor of 150 agents all making the same thing or at least taking just sales or service or tech support for one client or one internal center like I know a lot of you guys do. We work for a lot of different clients. So it is a little bit different on how we do this, but I think you'll get an idea. Industry average, and I love when I say that because you guys sometimes attack me on, we disagree on what industry average is, but it's about a 15 or 16 to one ratio that comes through rep to supervisor.

06:48So I would say that's what we do. Right now we're about 15 to 16 to one for our reps that are on the floor that have gone through training. We like to cut that in half for nesting, right? So, you know, we're about at an eight to one, seven to one ratio. And basically we have our supervisors, our team leads, and trainers that are involved with that for nesting. So I wouldn't have a 15 to one ratio for your new guys that are coming out on the floor for the first couple of weeks. I think those ratios need to be a little bit lower. But overall, when you get to kind of status quo, 15 to 16 to one is kind of where we're at. When it comes to QA, and this has evolved for us. And I think with the technology that's out there, has actually made us much better in having a higher quality contact center because of the analytics and because of that.

07:43But for our QA, we pretty much double our supervisor ratio. So I'm about 25 to 30 to one when it comes to QA per rep. So we kind of double our supervisor. And before it was much less than that, both analytics, listening for everything, You know, our QA folks have really turned into analytic folks, so to where we're setting up dashboards and trying to listen to specific things, seeing trends with reps, focusing on certain reps even more than we, you know, we did it just kind of an overall overarching or if we had a supervisor say, hey, will you listen to Janie a little bit more? But now we actually have data that says who we should be listening to, right? So that's kind of how we've kind of evolved our QA. Having said that, you know, between all of our supervisors, team leads, management trainees, which I'm going to get into this in here in a second, we are still trying to get about three to four scored calls per week per rep, right?

08:49So you know, before that, that kind of slowly came down on the on the QA staff, that's initially how we set it up. But then as we have grown, you know, supervisors are monitoring all the time, right? So it just made sense that they would become involved as well to a certain part of their day that they're scoring calls as well. Not the whole day, but we definitely have some time set out for them to make sure that we do that. Let me get back to this quick, this 15 to 1 ratio too as well. So the other thing that we do, I know a lot of you guys have team leads, right? In our call center, we do have team leads, but they're kind of few and far between. And those are, team leads are maybe, you know, a step before management training, right? Somebody who's trying to become a management trainer, wants to be a supervisor, they could be a team lead, right?

09:38Or it's somebody that's like, you know what, I really don't want to be a supervisor. But you know, we kind of see them as a leader. We like to pay them a little bit more, give them a little bit of responsibility. But they're kind of, they're happy with where they are. They're happy, you know, taking calls or, or, you know, being that leader on the team, but really don't want to, you know, are okay with not being a supervisor. kind of just not for them. So what we do is basically we try to have it you know a team lead and it's basically you know about every one team lead for about every three teams that we have. So you know if we're talking a 15 to 1 ratio that's about one for every 45 but what we do is we have our management trainees. Our management trainees are like our team leads. So we have most of the time most teams have a management trainee on them as well. So that's kind of a working supervisor, I guess you could say, right? They're taking calls, they're on the floor, you know, they're doing the job of the associate. If the supervisor needs to in to go on break, if they're off, they're kind of the substitute teacher, right? So they come, they take over the team, they work through the day if a supervisor's off or has, you know, PTO or anything like that. So that's kind of how our hierarchy works with, we call it our OIC, which is kind of our site manager, right?

10:52And then we have supervisors, and then under the supervisors are the management trainees and then sprinkled in our team leads as well. That can help in an emergency, but they're also there to kind of sit with the newer reps, make sure that, you know, those things are, that the new reps are comfortable and we can get through as much higher quality as we can really early on when a rep comes off the out of training and out of nesting. We've added analytics an analytics team right to our QA staff we have an analytics team that handles about 50 reps and that normally breaks out to about you know three teams right and this is a little different because we may have just one dedicated analytic team member or manager for a specific client the client may have a hundred seats so we might just have them work with them but you know some of our smaller programs that may be just a 15 seater we'll look at you know three different 15 seeders and they'll be the analytic lead for that so not only are they looking for the QA analytics but they're looking for overall customer sentiment they're looking at trending keywords or looking at those types of things that we can give back to our clients right to give them some some added insight they develop the reports that we do either monthly or quarterly depending on what the client wants, from an analytics standpoint.

12:14So that's kind of an evolving job description, I guess, that is something that's relatively new, probably the last year and a half that we've kind of took away from QA and kind of made it its own specific area because it is a different type of skill set, I think, to really to do it right. Same thing with our WFM. WFM for us, we have two WFM managers for the organization. They basically split shifts, really don't have any from WFM on third shift. So it's kind of a first shift, second shift kind of deal. And they're basically handling everybody, you know, we have that kind of under control. So they're doing everything from the staffing and then, you know, looking at service levels, looking at doing forecasts, those types of things. So those two guys kind of team up together, they work within the analytic group. So there's a little bit probably more than just two WFM guys that could do it, but they're kind of dedicated to that role.

13:14And then for us, the trainers, we are probably a little bit more trainer heavy than an internal contact center because we have so many different clients with so many different types of programs that training is a huge part of what we do from a quality aspect standpoint. So we say that we can handle about 50 reps per trainer and that depends if we are in a heavy onboarding phase where we may pull some supervisors for some added assistance but kind of steady state, that's kind of what we look at from an ongoing education for when new information comes out. That's kind of how we at least look at that from a financial standpoint and then also from a viewpoint that we think it's the most benefit to the client and to the rep as well. And then it's kind of the same thing with our HR staff. We like to have an HR member for about every time that we get to about 75 new reps or 75 more reps, we will add another HR team member, right? So our HR team members are doing everything from, you know, talking to them about attendance to doing 30, 60, 90 day reviews, which, you know, are a little bit different than our weekly agent analysis. If you don't know what that is, check out that podcast. But, you know, they're there for more of the support from the agents from the HR. Pay time off kind of the benefit overseer as well. And we do all of our own recruiting, right? We don't hire temps.

14:43Everyone here is full time and it is up to the HR staff really to rally. They man all of our Facebook and other social feeds that we're using to recruit agents. So it's really their job to do the interviewing, make sure that we have the team members, make sure that the classes are confirmed and doing all the legwork that it takes to fill the center and then also working directly with client services and with our trainers to make sure that training's going on as it should. And then if there's obviously any issues or anything that comes up during a day or a week on the call center floor, they're there to kind of help and assist should arise from that standpoint. And then they're also answering a ton of associate questions as you can imagine when you get to the 500, 600 people. There's lots of questions on lots of different things, especially as we've been growing and kind of onboarding.

15:34So it's funny how different areas take stress on, depending on the growth of your organization and also not just the growth, but where you are at that timeframe. With COVID and us onboarding so many agents so fast for all the two-on-ones and for the vaccines. We've really stressed our HR and tried to beat that up. And I think that will somewhat go away and we'll have different roles than for our HR staff. They won't be recruiters, but we'll be really focusing then on attrition and talking to associates and those types of things. So that's kind of what I got for you guys. I think hopefully that's helpful just to kind of give you a little background on what we do from a ratio standpoint, how many supervisors, how many management personnel do we utilize in our contact center? And maybe that'll help you streamline or maybe beef up certain areas that you think are understaffed from a management perspective or overstaffed from a management perspective as well.

16:37Please let me know if you have any questions, shoot me a DM on LinkedIn or a message. I'm meeting with two listeners this week who just have some random questions on things. So I'm always open for that as well. I always like doing that. And again, just if you are listening at this far into this podcast, you really are a call center nerd and geek, which I appreciate. So please look to join that LinkedIn group, Call Center Tips and Tactics from Advice from a Call Center Geek. Thanks guys, and I will talk to you all very soon.