Call rate per analyst

[iggy]

Does ITIL determine the average daily call rate per analyst? Does it instruct on how long the most effective call should last??? Does it regulate anything in respect of call duration as well as the number of calls that 1st line agent is capable of handling, considering that further actions such as recording ticket must be taken? Is there any information stating that average call should take not longer then 5 min for example otherwise it should be passed onto 2nd line agent.

Can anyone answer these questions, please???

thank you

[dboylan]

[iggy]

Ok, I formed my question incorrectly, it is obvious that ITIL does not provide any exact figures, but from someone's experience, what is the most accurate rate of handled calls per analyst considering all aspects of servicedesk activities. For example 25 calls per agent daily, would more calls affect the service in any way?. I understand that all those things are indyvidual and depend on workload. In my case there is roughly 200 calls daily handled by 5 agents which gives us 40 calls per head. Agents also deal with emails. Do you think is it too much or average?? Can someone share opinion???


thanks

[dam]

It makes sense that ITIL doesn’t state about how many minutes a call should last. It depends strictly on the organisation of your service desk. You have high profile 1st line agents? (highly skilled, highly experienced) They could resolve directly most of the incidents, calls may take a while. You have 1st line agents that look like a real case scenario (modest competence, little experience) : calls should be short.

What you could do is measuring the average durations in your context (for a call that gets to the incident’s resolution, for a call that produces nothing but an escalation to 2nd level ) and then fix some targets.

Don’t forget that there are other factors that may influence the duration of a call. Typically the fact that not all the customers are equals, you’ll naturally end to take more care of very important customers than minor ones. Sometimes such behaviours are stated in SLAs.

[dboylan]

I can say from many years experience manning and managing a large Service Desk (700+ calls a day) that a good tier 1 support person can handle between 40 to 60 calls per day. This is entirely dependent on:

-The complexity of the environment
-The nature of the calls (majority password resets, application issues, hardware issues, etc)
-The tools available (access to all security systems, remote control software, accurate inventory)
-The skill level of the analyst

I set the record at the Service Desk just to see how many calls I could take. It was the first day back after a two week company wide shut down for the winter holiday, 99% of all the calls were password resets, I type at 120 wpm, I implemented the Incident Management tool and knew how to log tickets with the fewest keystrokes, and I almost never touch the mouse. I logged 217 calls in 8 hours.

[UKVIKING]

Dboylan

Well you should take off that S T shirt before you blind us oh master of the keyboard.

giggle

I can type about 5 - 10 words per minute. Depending on the keyboard type and whatI am doing

A NOC service desk / help desk person has a 8 hour shift

this can be broken down into 480 minutes - take out 80 minutes for his lunch and other breaks - smoke/toilet/snacks/reboot brain ( bad calls where the staff member needs to clear head)

This leave 400 minutes. If a call averages about 5 - 10 minutes, the call volume would be 40 to 80. Take the happy medium, 60 calls a day

How many calls are made to the phone number on a daily basis (average)
Say 2000 calls to the NOC with a average duration of 5 to 10 minutes
so that would be 10k to 20k minutes of calls in a business day. If your business day runs from 0800 to 1800 that is 600 minutes a day in which the 10 to 20k minutes of customers call have to be dealt with

10k / 600 is 16.67 20k is twice that. That means if your NOC / Service Desk is busy, there should be an average of 16 - 32 call pers business minute. Therefore, if you take a happy medium of that, you should have 20 - 30 people on staff during the 10 hour period

But it all depends.

How long do you want the users to be on hold. Are you penalized for hold time ?
Can you separate the call types by Intelligence direction - you know push 1 for Password push 2 for mail push ... etc

If you can divide the calls into this sort of framework, the password call will be average about 1 - 3 minutes, the others would be longer etc
_________________
John Hardesty
ITSM Manager's Certificate (Red Badge)

Change Management is POWER & CONTROL. /....evil laughter

[dboylan]

There was a mathematician born in the late 19th century who came up with a calculation for how many trunk lines would be needed to handle a projected volume of phone calls. The calculation is named after him and there are three varieties. The Erlang A calculation is for trunk lines for non-queued call (callers get busy), the Erlang B calculation is for trunks where calls can be held in queue, and Erlang C is for number of operators needed to handle a predicted number of calls.

The Erlang C calculation is perfect for calculating the staffing of a Service Desk if you have the parameters of:

# of calls per hour
max desirable queue time
average in-call time
average after-call time

Do a search for Erlang C on Google and you can find lots of calculators.

Don

[iggy]

Thank you all for your replies, basically I wanted to estimate what sort of call rate per agent would be most reasonable though I realize that too many thnigs are dependant so that it's not such a simple thing to provide any accurate figure. Too many things have to be considered while analysing all aspects of call handling e.g. time spent on registering tickets, checking e-mails, ad-hoc actions, and many more. Thank you anyway, your opinions give me a general overview on how the other servicedesks may be efficient.

Regards

[scook2003]

Call rate per analyst in my experience is a bad measure and should only be used where you are running a pure "catch and dispatch" service desk.

Otherwise you should look at analyst call closure and user/customer satisfaction, quality not always quantity!

I put the phone down on every user that rings - high call count low customer satisfaction!

[dboylan]