Planning for Support Teams
Your support team plays a pivotal role in providing assistance, troubleshooting, and resolving customer issues across various channels. However, with the lack of a well-thought-out capacity planning strategy, support teams may struggle to handle increasing workloads, leading to longer response times, overwhelmed agents, and frustrated customers.
“Capacity planning for customer support” refers to the process of determining and optimizing resources to meet the demands of customers seeking assistance or resolution of issues. To make sure that the present resources can support the anticipated workload or demand, it involves analyzing historical information, forecasting future demands, and making informed decisions.
“Capacity planning is more of a science and an art”
By implementing capacity planning strategies, you can achieve a balance between resource availability and customer demand, ensuring that your support team is adequately equipped to handle incoming queries and provide timely resolutions. In addition to assisting in the prevention of future shortcomings and delays, this proactive strategy also empowers your support team to provide exceptional customer service.
Benefits of Capacity Planning:
Better Resource Management :
As you undertake capacity planning, you’ll have a far greater awareness of how your team spends its time:
- What are the different tasks on their plate?
- What is the timeline of tasks?
- Which channels do they spend the most time on?
The planning process will get you a clearer insight into all the ongoing activities, enabling you to allocate and manage resources efficiently.
2. Be Prepared Ahead of Time :
With effective capacity plan execution, your team will be proactively prepared for volume variations, rather than resorting to reactive management, which runs the risk of increasing response times and unsatisfied customers. It can take many months to recruit, train, and adjust a new team member. If you start to hire additional agents only when your team is already bogged down with work, your support system can have shortfalls. Therefore, advanced planning for higher workloads is essential for customer support success.
3. Accurate cost planning :
CS leadership often encounters significant challenges when it comes to the recurring task of requesting additional resources from the Finance department to meet their ambitious targets. Unfortunately, it is highly probable that without presenting solid data and figures, they might find themselves empty-handed or, at best, with a fraction of the requested headcount.
With capacity planning, you can eliminate the guesswork and present concrete data to the Finance department to make your case.
4. Streamline Workflows :
Capacity planning can help you understand the sequence and dependencies of tasks. As a result, it’s possible to spot roadblocks, get rid of redundant processes, and optimize the flow of work. This can result in smoother operations, reduced delays, and improved productivity across the support team.
Steps for Capacity Planning:
Establish a timing :
The majority of capacity plans propose a projection of resource requirements by month, quarter, and year. Build on the capacity plan based on your specific business goals.
2. Gather preliminary data :
An effective plan requires years of historical data that show where you’ve been as well as where you are right now. Getting historical is simple if your company has been operating for a while. However, you need to apply guesswork if you are just starting off.
Gather data about:
- Customer demand
- Support channels
- Available resources and their productivity
- Costs
3. Identify the variables :
As a simple equation, calculating customer support capacity can look like this:
But it isn’t a straightforward calculation. There are many variables that influence this equation.
Let’s explore the important ones:
- Shrinkage: In customer support planning, shrinkage represents the difference between the total scheduled or contractual hours for agents and the actual productive hours available for handling customer inquiries.
There are various internal and external factors that can contribute to shrinkage.
Factors that account for External Shrinkage: Planned Time Off, Sick leaves
Factors that account for Internal Shrinkage: Meetings, training, breaks, administrative tasks
Here’s an example of how to calculate average time shrinkage per agent:
An agent is expected to work 22 hours for 8 hours/ day, that makes his expected hours to be 176 hours. Thus, the shrinkage time is 28%. That makes your agent’s working capacity ~125 hrs/month.
How to calculate capacity from this data: Therefore, if the average handle time for a ticket under your SLA is one hour, one of your agents can process 125 tickets per month. If you anticipate a monthly volume of 3000 tickets, then you would require ~20 agents to balance the demand.
- Occupancy: The term “occupancy” represents the ratio of support staff members’ active work time to their total available working time.
For example, if an agent spends 6.5 hours handling customer inquiries during an 8-hour shift, the occupancy would be calculated as follows:
Occupancy = (6.5 hours / 8 hours) * 100 = 81%
There’s no “right occupancy percentage”. However, it’s crucial to maintain a balance because unreasonably high occupancy can result in agent burnout, lower customer satisfaction, and reduced assistance quality.
- Channels: Each support channel has its own characteristics, customer preferences, and resource requirements. When planning support team capacity, it’s crucial to consider the different channels and their respective demands. Analyze data to understand the volume and complexity of customer inquiries across various channels. This analysis helps in allocating resources effectively and ensuring sufficient coverage to meet customer expectations.
For example, as email is an asynchronous channel, an agent can have almost 100% occupancy there. Whereas you don’t expect inquiries on chat and phone back-to-back, so the occupancy can fluctuate for both channels.
- Concurrency: Support teams often need to manage multiple customer interactions concurrently, especially in channels like live chat or phone support. While on chat, an agent can handle 2-3 inquiries simultaneously, the same is not possible for phone support.
4. Quantify the variables :
Calculate the impact on demand, productivity, and cost for each change. In most cases, you can estimate changes based on history. However, if a new variable appears, you have to guess because there will be no relevant data. It is advised that you consult with and calibrate this activity with your partner departments, such as finance, sales, and product, as they are likely to have data and information you can utilize to produce estimates that are more accurate.
5. Create a model :
Build your capacity plan template using Microsoft Excel or a similar program. In its simplest form, it should start with your baseline data, have a value for variables (positive or negative), and then provide an estimate of future demand and necessary resources.
Best Practices for Capacity Planning :
- Establish clear SLAs to determine the desired response and resolution times for various support request categories. SLAs can serve as a standard for evaluating performance and assist with resource allocation based on priority and urgency.
- Invest in workforce management tools that can automate and streamline capacity planning processes. Such tools can help with shift scheduling, forecasting ticket volume, and resource allocation.
- The first capacity plan model version would never be final. It’s obvious that you’ll need to make changes to this version. Make sure to retain the change history for future reference.
- Make Excel tables that can be flexible and automated. Set up a formula that automatically adjusts the capacity plan whenever any of the variables go up or down.
- If you provide multi-time zone or multilingual support, measure capacity for each independently.
Conclusion :
Capacity planning is crucial for delivering exceptional customer service while optimizing resources. Make capacity planning a top priority and keep improving your strategies to meet evolving customer needs and demand trends.
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With there being 3.5 billion smartphone users in the world, mobile becomes one of the key elements of an omnichannel strategy. With the addition of hundreds of millions of users in a month, it makes sense for a customer to seek support on their mobile devices too.
According to a study conducted by SuperOffice, 90% of customers stated their customer service experience on mobile was negative and 52% of customers said that a poor mobile experience makes them less inclined to the brand. To improve on this factor, make it easier for your customer to navigate and get support. The top complaint of customers for customer service on a mobile site was “difficult to navigate”.
With there being 3.5 billion smartphone users in the world, mobile becomes one of the key elements of an omnichannel strategy. With the addition of hundreds of millions of users in a month, it makes sense for a customer to seek support on their mobile devices too.
According to a study conducted by SuperOffice, 90% of customers stated their customer service experience on mobile was negative and 52% of customers said that a poor mobile experience makes them less inclined to the brand. To improve on this factor, make it easier for your customer to navigate and get support. The top complaint of customers for customer service on a mobile site was “difficult to navigate”.