Face Your Hang-ups

Spaide outlines four ways to sharpen your call center staff and reduce customers’ wait times.

1. In addition to your full-time staff, develop a permanent flex-time staff. Assign, say, four- to six-hour-long shifts per flex-time agent, and guarantee each a work week of no longer than 30 hours.

For call centers with staffs of 50 or more, Spaide uses the benchmark of 20-percent flex-time agents. For those with a staff of 20 to 50, he uses the benchmark of 10-percent flex-time agents.