How To Survive Call Volume Spikes 10th Year Anniverary Edition

Tenth Anniversary Edition (First Published 08/1997)

By Peter McGarahan

© McGarahan & Associates. All rights reserved. 1
www.mcgarahan.com
Tenth Anniversary Edition (First Published 08/1997)

By Peter McGarahan

A Practical Guide to Successfully Handling Call Volume Peaks & Valleys

Introduction: What ‘‘How to Survive Call Volume Spikes’’ Did For Me Robert S. Last, Content Manager, HDI August 30, 2007 Every profession has a handful of articles and books that form the cornerstone of the professional cannon

for that profession. Such works are the result of a convergence of talent, experience, events and luck and

have such an impact on the members of a profession that they stay relevant for years.

In the case of Pete McGarahan’s excellent article, ‘‘How to Ride Those Call Volume Peaks and Valleys’’ it

has been ten years since it was first written and released and it is as important a work today as it was in

1997. It is one of the best single-source articles ever written on managing high call volume peaks,

problem solving and troubleshooting techniques, service level management and leadership. It is an article

that every support center leader should read and read again. In my case, I came across this article in my

second and most demanding support manager’s job.

I’d been in the support industry for several years by 1997 and I thought I had a good idea of what to do

when my operation got ‘‘slammed.’’ I WAS WRONG! I was treading water and not at all sure of what to

do when I had over 100 telephone calls in my call queue and executives yelling at me I always survived

such events, but I knew I could do a better job in managing them, but I wasn’t quite sure how to do so. It

wasn’t until I came across Pete’s article that I learned two things:

First, I wasn’t alone! Managing an unplanned call volume peak is frustrating, stressful and exhausting and

Pete’s description of his own experience paralleled mine exactly. Second, by using logic, by learning from

his mistakes and by using good leadership skills, Pete learned to manage his peaks and valleys successfully

and you will too. Ten years old or not, this is still an excellent training tool for leaders of support centers

and can be a terrific resource to support center professionals at all levels and will be particularly valuable

for new leaders. Thanks, Pete! You’ve done our profession a great service by writing this article and there

are a lot of us that are grateful for your insights and your and suggestions!

© McGarahan & Associates. All rights reserved. www.mcgarahan.com

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How to Survive Call Volume Spikes


Don't let call volume mow down your support team! You can save the day and

prevent tomorrow's disaster, too, with intelligent preplanning.

OVERVIEW You're minding your own business, the message boards assure you that all is well, even the call avoidance and proactive management programs are starting to show a return in reduced call volume. Yes! Your support team is in control. Yet all at once, the quiet is deafening; the birds and animals outside the call center windows stop dead in their tracks. The theme from Jaws starts spinning in your head, and then BAM! BOOM! WHACK! The message boards light up like Christmas trees, the phones start ringing off the hook and your customer support reps turn to you with that "deer in the headlights" look. You're getting slammed by a spike in call volume. Anyone who has ever experienced it, knows what "getting slammed" means: no matter how many Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) you have available, it's impossible to meet the current demand for your services. But, you say, the unexpected spike in call volume was brought on by circumstances beyond your control? Well, maybe not. A Short, Sad Tale There was a time when I was working the operations help desk at Taco Bell, and an "unplanned" software distribution went out to 4,000 restaurants. The result? The back office systems of those 4,000 restaurants were frozen-and then they all called in at the same moment. We got "slammed" and couldn't manage to funnel less than 75 calls into the queue. My team panicked, I panicked, the restaurant managers were angry and frustrated, and we were having a hard time getting Development to respond to our severity-one pages. In desperation, I went to our CIO and apprised her of the situation. "Pete, can you give me some indication of the severity of the problem?" she asked me. "Where is the data and a high-level analysis of the situation? Do you have a recommended solution? What is your action plan for handling this type of emergency?" I was speechless. I was Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man: the information I needed to effectively communicate to her was sitting in a system somewhere, but it sure wasn't where I needed it at that moment. From that minute on, I have been prepared with an action plan; I have only approached senior management for assistance when my analysis of the problem is complete and I am able to recommend solutions. My support team and I have since ceased to view ourselves as victims. Look at the Causes



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Before you can prepare for or attack call volume spikes, you have to identify their causes so that you can head them off at the pass. What are the circumstances, variables and events that drive the peaks and valleys of your call volume? Causes fall under the headings of planned and unplanned. Use this outline to guide you, and add your own causes as well: I. Planned Causes Monthly, quarterly and year-end financial and operational reporting processing Technology upgrades (e.g., software, hardware or operating system upgrades) Operational, organizational or process changes (e.g., geographical reorganization in the field) Time changes Mondays (after weekend IT changes, upgrades etc.) Holidays and the day after (same problems as in "Mondays," plus everyone forgets his

password) System maintenance (e.g., mainframe reboots, router microcode upgrade, backups) Promotional product programs (e.g., buy one, get one free; gift-with-purchase; discounting)

II. Unplanned Weather Utility outages (power outage, phone lines down) Infrastructure failures (e.g., phone systems, dial-up modems) Departmental communications that say "Call the help desk" Disasters (floods, fire, bombing, earthquakes) All circumstances and variables - if you're not in the "loop"!

Map Those Peaks and Valleys Once you've identified the causes of your call surges, you want to see if you can establish any patterns in the sudden rise and fall of call volume. Take a look at the graphical representation of your call volume that is produced by the data gathered by your automated call distribution (ACD) system; there you can actually see the peaks and valleys of demand for your services. There is a great deal of information represented in these graphs, especially if you can identify the "planned" versus the "unplanned" peaks for the demand of your services. The "planned" peaks are the call volumes by "day-part" (or hours) that are consistent over a period of time. For example, you may see that every Monday morning from 6:00 to 10:00 you have a consistent peak demand for support services, while each day from 11:30 am to 1:00 pm, you have a valley of demand for your services. The "unplanned" peaks occur when a software distribution or a technology upgrade to multiple sites fails, a promotional program is launched without clear instructions or process, or a failure of wide area networking connectivity equipment causes the call volume to hit the moon. Conversely, a company meeting or a weather-related event might be the cause of an unplanned valley of demand for your services. Once you can identify these historically planned and unplanned peaks and valleys, analyze and profile them so that you can learn from the information in order to fine-tune the scheduling of your CSRs. The better you assess what goes on in your environment, the sooner (what you thought were) unplanned peaks and valleys will turn into planned peaks and valleys. Then you, your team and your customers can benefit directly from the resulting fine-tuning. Automation vs. Common Sense



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If you have the budget and want to automate scheduling your CSRs against your call ebbs and surges, you might consider an investment in workforce management or staffing/ scheduling software. These packages use current and historical ACD data, plus other information, to forecast the volume of calls generated by planned circumstances, variables and events for any given time period in the future. The program can then tell you how many agents you need to handle those calls, and the better products will even let you enter variables-service level agreements (SLAs), for instance-to create a schedule that fits your environment's particular needs. (See "Manage the Demand for Your Services," bottom of page 36, to effectively leverage SLAs to manage call volume.) But if you don't have access to these types of tools, you can still achieve the same results by using a common-sense six-step approach:

1. Using historical data from your ACD system, graph the number of incoming calls received

each day, by hour ("day-parts"). 2. Do this for six to eight weeks so that you can detect patterns, record monthly peaks and note

call volume spikes that might occur during every delineated time period. 3. Identify all support demand peaks and valleys. 4. Identify and filter-out peaks that were planned vs. unplanned. Your goal is a normal

distribution or representation of your day-part or hourly call volume with labels identifying the unplanned peaks.

5. Create a phone schedule based upon the normal day-part distribution of calls. It's best to create an algorithm or model based upon certain variables that are unique to your environment. These variables would be the number of shifts you need to staff; how many resources (CSRs and other support staff members) you have; what your volume of incoming calls is during those specific day-parts; what your average "talk time" is; time allowance for follow-up, research, information gathering, etc.

6. Profile and perform analyses on the unplanned events and get a better understanding of what they are and how they affect your call volume. Find out who or what department is at the root of these unplanned events and have a meeting with them to learn: Are these regularly scheduled events within the corporation, department or service

provider? Who, specifically, is accountable for the event, to answer questions or refer customers? In the future, how can the help desk assist the department or individual in better planning

of the event so that the call volume is not affected? Can a quality process check be implemented by the support group, with help desk

manager sign-off on anything that might affect help desk/support center customers? To minimize "getting slammed," have the help desk actively involved in testing and quality assurance of all software and hardware that is put into the hands of customers and/or end users. Transform your help desk into a one-stop solution center and empower your CSRs to handle all requests for technology-related hardware and software. Direct your customers to initiate any request through the help desk. Standardize, standardize, standardize; the fewer variances you have in desktops, operating systems, office suites, e-mail and printers, the better! It's critical that the help desk have input about the quality of the technology before it reaches the customer and begins its lifecycle. In short, it's "Pay me now or pay me later."



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Know Your Own Environment An important way to grasp other possible roots of call surge activity is to make sure that the help desk manager gets a better understanding of what his own help desk does. The easiest way to ensure this (and the method with the biggest payoff ) is for the manager to spend time with his CSRs while they're on the phone. You'll be amazed at what is learned by listening in on live calls with staffers-insight that can be useful in determining the circumstances, variables and events that are affecting the support environment. You and your support manager will also learn what your customers are asking for and what issues or problems are making them call your help desk in the first place. All of this can tell you how well the help desk processes are working or which processes need to be put in place in order for the CSRs to better resolve calls on first contact. Over time, you will notice a trend: open problems in the CSRs' inboxes are most likely the categories of problems that are lacking solid process-or any process at all. What's more, as managers continue to spend more time with their CSRs, they'll have a chance to get to know individual staffers, and an opportunity to gauge their strengths and weaknesses and help them to help their customers better. Maybe additional training would better enable certain reps to handle problems that later lead to call surges; possibly, staff positioning can be altered or modified to improve early problem resolution as well. After two weeks, everyone should have a clearer picture of the circumstances, variables and events that are affecting the support environment, and thereby influencing call volume. In addition, make certain that you and your help desk manager are active participants in the larger environment-the company communication loop. Each time someone in the organization is planning an event that could adversely affect your call volume, he should say, "We need to alert the help desk manager so that Support can be prepared and informed in case customers call with questions or problems." To encourage this behavior, teach and nurture it by training and rewarding the business units. Educate and market the benefits of having people in the corporation informing the help desk about anything that might affect customers. Take advantage of informal company networks as well as the formal network (i.e., meetings) to gather important information and stay informed. At the end of the day, your help desk manager should be one of the most in-the-know people in IT and in the corporation. Likewise, the help desk manager should promote the same behavior among his support team staffers and reward them for uncovering information regarding unplanned events. If all support members can maintain regular contact with the decision-makers affecting call volume, you'll be surprised how easily unplanned events will turn into planned events and how quickly this will affect call volume and customer satisfaction. Manage the Demand for Your Services A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a tool to help manage the call volume demand for your services. This agreement between you and your customer is really an expectation-setting mechanism that helps determine the client's service need relative to the level of service that your help desk is financially resourced (people, process and tools) to deliver. SLAs enable the help desk to manage its workload (open problems and new ones)-a direct result of incoming call volume. Service level agreements predefine just how an incoming call will be handled, based upon the criticality of the



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problem being reported. If all reported calls were a high priority, then a help desk would only be able to handle a relatively low call volume based upon the "drop everything" nature of these severity-one type calls. Customers who had requests, "how-to" questions and less severe problems would probably never be serviced at all. Imagine the stress levels of a help desk where every call is a high priority and allowed response and resolution times are immediate! There is nothing controlled about this type of environment. A well thought-out SLA can make your CSRs feel like they're poised for success in the battle against the planned and unplanned circumstances, variables and events that affect call volume. It empowers them with confidence when handling surges in call volume because they are managing their open problems according to a predefined battle plan. Call-to-Action Plan A support team-whether they support internal or external customers-is an emergency squad, just like a fire-fighting company. An action plan for your emergency team includes training and preparing the support crew for any number of possible emergencies-invaluable in handling call volume spikes that are due to unplanned events. The team should not only be well-trained and prepared for emergency situations, they should react out of instinct, and perform at their best. Preparation for emergency situations and the resulting minimized disruption to normal service will allow your team to continue to meet their SLAs for the existing workload. But to achieve all this, the action plan must be created by the team itself and must be tested by simulating unplanned spikes in call volume. Furthermore, the team members who assisted in creating the action plan must be held accountable for specific tasks. Rewards and Post-Mortem After an emergency situation-real or simulated-is over, recognize and reward the support team and any outstanding individual contributions. The team should be assembled for a debrief wherein they and the support manager share observations about what worked and what didn't, and discuss how future responses to call volume crises can be improved. These observations should be used to fine-tune the action plan. Staff to the Peaks and Valleys One of the best ways to combat call volume crises, is to learn to effectively staff to both the peaks and valleys of call volume, on an ongoing basis. "Strategic resourcing" (or co-sourcing) is the concept of staffing to the valleys of demand for services with an internal core group of well-trained professionals, while providing additional resources necessary from established outsourcing partners, to meet peak demand for services. This kind of co-sourcing can give any support organization enormous flexibility. To best achieve a strategic resourcing model, the help desk and the co-sourcing partner must agree upon an arrangement that is mutually beneficial to both companies. Enter into these outsourcing partnerships with the answers to the following questions: Exactly which part of your operations are you outsourcing? Does the outsourcing partner have the experience with references, trained people, process and

tools to be able to meet and exceed your expectations?



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Additionally, you must know the details of the operations that you are allowing the outsource partner to manage for you. Be specific in the contract as to what services you are expecting them to provide: complete a "roles and responsibilities" document that clearly states what each party is responsible for bringing to the partnership. For instance, when my help desk first entered into a strategic resourcing partnership, it was critical that we were able to provide the outsourcing partner with detailed documentation of the environment and business operations. This should always be the case if you want the contractors augmenting your staff to feel like part of your team. The more they know about your business and operations, the more confident and successful they will be in supporting it. And if you involve them in team activities, meetings and company functions, you will create an atmosphere of cooperation rather than a feeling of "us against them." During a critical call volume surge, your customers will find it impossible to distinguish between a full-time employee and a contractor. More benefits: Better access to outsourcing partner's specialist skills Enhanced scheduling flexibility not just for emergency situations, but for vacations,

departmental or team meetings and absenteeism. (Contractors' hours can also be cut short during call volume valleys or budget cutbacks.)

Selective assignment of value-added tasks to full-time employees while off-loading low-leverage functions to outsourcing partner.

Improved operational effectiveness and leveraged economies of scale. Is the outsourcing partner contractually committed to achieving your support organization's operational goals? Were they selected based upon prior experience and the people, process and tools that they bring to the relationship? If so, the partnership will be successful.

Better career pathing for full-time company employees because they are broadening skills by a) working on more value-added tasks, b) supervising contractors, and c) finding more opportunities to work with other departments and gain exposure within the company. In addition, flexible staffing services enable a company to:

Utilize trained contracting or consulting pros from the outsourcing partner when cost-effective Place full-time staff closer to customers and what affects them Maintain service level commitments at peak volume times Provide flexibility for scheduling concerns. The outsourcing partner should be prepared to

supply an unlimited amount of trained resources to meet the peak demand for your services. Cost should be the only determinant.

The Big Picture Call volume spikes do not have to throw your support operation into chaos. They can be forecasted, prepared for, attacked and even prevented; they are not entities unto themselves. Moreover, your help desk's response to them is a clear indication of inherent strengths and weaknesses on many other levels. Don't let call volume manage your support organization! Get out in front of it, understand it, measure it, analyze it and pull together an action plan that puts you back in control.


Peter J. McGarahan is the founder and president of McGarahan & Associates. Pete just completed his tenure as the acting Chairman of the IT Infrastructure Management Association, a sister organization to HDI. Pete’s value to the service and support industry and business is his thought leadership. As a practitioner, product manager and support industry analyst and expert, he has influenced the maturity of the service and support industry. His passions for customer service led the Taco Bell support organization to achieve the Help

Desk Institute Team Excellence Award. IT Support News also named him one of the “Top 25 Professionals in the Service and Support Industry” in 1999. Support professionals voted McGarahan “The Legend of the Year” in 2002 and again in 2004 at the Help Desk Professionals conference for his endless energy, mentoring and coaching and his valuable contribution to the support industry and community.

Contact us at:

Peter J. McGarahan President

McGarahan & Associates [email protected] (714) 694-1158 office

(949) 697-1272 mobile


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How To Survive Call Volume Spikes 10th Year Anniverary Edition

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