Part 2 - Agent Efficiency

What is agent efficiency? For the sake of this posting it is the difference between agent productive time and agent paid time. Different companies use different definitions and different terms to describe the same thing. It can sometimes be referred to as utilization, or production quotient. Agent productive time is the time an agent is logged into a call queque ready to take a call or is actually handling a call.


Many times when trying to determine the full cost of a production hour, efficiency is one of the most important facts NOT taken into consideration. Many insourcers attempt to equate a paid agent hour in their site to a billable production hour for an outsourcer. This can be a very costly miscalculation.


As demonstrated in my earlier post, we came to the conclusion that a fully loaded agent wages can be really running you close to $19.30 versus just the $12.00 hourly wage you are paying them. When an agent is paid 40 hours a week they are not actually on the phone ready to take calls that entire time. In general their 40 hours could be broken out as follows:


40.00 Hours Paid Time
7.50 Paid Breaks (2 paid 15 minute breaks each day)
2.50 Hours breakage (15 minutes lost time per day)
1.00 Hour coaching time each week
1.00 Hour team meeting each week
1.50 Hours of earned paid time off (assumes close to 2 weeks paid time off each year)
0.75 Hours of earned sick time (assumes 1 week paid sick time each year)
25.75 Average production hours per week

25.75 / 40.00 = 64.375% Efficiency

So now how does this translate to cost? For every production hour produced you have to pay an agent on average 1.55 hours (1 hour / 64.375%). If an agent is costing you $19.30 an hour and it takes 1.55 paid hours to produce 1 production hour each production hour is really costing you $19.30 x 1.55 = $29.98.


When you pay an outsourcer you generally ONLY pay for the production time, all unproductive time is on the outsourcer's dime. Wow, outsourcing may be a better deal after all.


Stay tuned, we still have not paid for supervisors or other overhead expense.

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