Business Math: 20 agents handling 6 calls per hour over 7 working hours,

chress9985

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I have been banging my head on this one. I am thinking that the math is just not correct but, thought I would put it out to the smart people. The question is how did they come up with the "10 hours". I Have broken this down to the minutes, per hours and cannot come up with this. Help =-)

This is easy enough to demonstrate. If you have 20 agents handling 6 calls per hour over 7 working hours, you will have a daily throughput of 840 calls. If you can lift the base number by just one – from six to seven calls per hour – your daily call rate climbs to 980 calls. That’s a weekly increase of 700 calls, the equivalent of an extra 10 hours work which you don’t have to pay for! Extrapolate the numbers and time frames acrossall your staff and you can easily see the potential to reduce the number of staff required for any given project.

Thank you in advance for any help.

Best,

Chris
 
I have been banging my head on this one. I am thinking that the math is just not correct but, thought I would put it out to the smart people. The question is how did they come up with the "10 hours". I Have broken this down to the minutes, per hours and cannot come up with this. Help =-)

This is easy enough to demonstrate. If you have 20 agents handling 6 calls per hour over 7 working hours, you will have a daily throughput of 840 calls. If you can lift the base number by just one – from six to seven calls per hour – your daily call rate climbs to 980 calls. That’s a weekly increase of 700 calls, the equivalent of an extra 10 hours work which you don’t have to pay for! Extrapolate the numbers and time frames acrossall your staff and you can easily see the potential to reduce the number of staff required for any given project.

Thank you in advance for any help.

Best,

Chris
You have 20 agents, each working 7 hours a day and each averaging 6 calls an hour. That implies your current volume of calls is indeeed
20 * 7 * 6 = 840 calls a day. Good so far.

And, keeping things the same except for the number of calls serviced per hour per agent to 7, that implies the number of calls that could be serviced jumps to
20 * 7 * 7 = 980 calls a day.

Assuming a week of work is 5 days, 840 calls a day turns into 4200 calls a work week, and 980 calls a day does turn into 4900, a difference of 700 calls a work week. Unclear exposition, but the arithmetic is fine.

That is 140 extra calls a day. With 20 agents, that is 7 extra calls a day. But currently each agent handles 6 calls calls per hour. So you are getting the benefit of a bit more than an extra hour of work from each agent each day. That is somewhat more than 100 hours each week from the staff of 20.

Whoever said this to you is clearly careless. There is no way that the numbers make sense. There is also a hidden assumption. That is, if you increase the number of calls that an agent can handle that will cause the number of calls received go up. That is not a plausible assumption.

Finally, an assumption that may not be clear is that hourly productivity is expected to increase about 17% across your entire staff. That is a huge increase in productivity. If that is true, it is amazing. It will in essence allow you to handle an increase in volume of about 17% with no adds to staff, but does not of course generate that increase in volume. It will also allow you to decrease staff by about 14% while still handling your current volume.
 
If you have 20 agents handling 6 calls per hour over 7 working hours,
you will have a daily throughput of 840 calls.

If you can lift the base number by just one (from six to seven calls per hour)
your daily call rate climbs to 980 calls.

That’s a weekly increase of 700 calls, the equivalent of an extra 10 hours work
which you don’t have to pay for!
Agree with Jeff...makes no sense.
700/10 = 70 per hour, but 120 per hour (840/7) is the existing production.
 
Thank you Jeff and Denis. I thought I had lost my mind :)

I really appreciate you taking the time to walk it down. That’s why I love these forums.

Thank you again!

Chris


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Since 7 calls per hour per agent are made, then 700 hours
translates to 100 hours, not 10.
Pretty sure it's that simple...
 
Perhaps easier to look at it the speed = distance/time way:

@120mph.........................4200m.....................>35h

@140mph..............................4900m.................................>35h

If the fuel cost is same for both....blah blah blah...
 
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