How to finagle display sets to show Occupancy in IDP

Occupancy is one of those squishy statistics that seems to depend on what your ACD is calculating as "occupied."  For the typical Call Center Manager, occupancy is a measure of how busy agents are handling calls versus their down time.  One of the misconceptions is that if an agent is unoccupied then they are unproductive.  I wanted to point this out because it isn't necessarily the case.  In the example I'm about to provide, the Aspect Unified IP does not count Auxiliary (Not Ready) time on the Workgroup report.  It only shows the amount of time logged on, and the talk/wrap times.  So a low occupancy score might be misleading if agents are busy performing backoffice tasks such as customer follow up, or emails. Nevertheless, the number does give an indicator of how busy the group is with the inbound volume.

Perhaps the ease of which we could calculate Occupancy is made frustrating by the fact that Aspect has not yet built a customized display field in IDP for Occupancy to display.  There was talk in the PRD and in some rumblings in senior support of having some extra customizable IDP fields.  Presumably, it would be easy to for development to build a blank field and you could enter any formula you desired; however, this request has somehow fallen by the wayside.  To Aspect's credit, they do a remarkable job staying ahead of the market trends and developing innovative tools.  Small things like this are easy to get lost in the greater interest of capturing future RFP's.  I think it is time to remind Aspect that this is something the customer base wants.  

So let's say you really really want to see occupancy in IDP.  Well, the good news is there is a way!  There is one limitation; although occupancy is something we think of at a staff group level, the only way we can get it into IDP is to associate it with a Forecast Group.  The Staff Group level pulls the APS values and there is only one field available. So, if you are using APS then you wouldn't want to lose that metric to pull Occupancy.  In fact, if you aren't pulling APS, then you likely won't want occupancy metrics, since both pieces of data come from the same data points on the Unified IP Workgroup report.  It's possible that isn't the case with other ACD vendors.  

So, how can we maximize all of our displayed metrics for IDP?  In my solution, I chose to pull Occupancy at a Forecast Group level.  At the company I'm consulting for now, their forecast and staff groups line up pretty well.  They are multiskill for sharing Service and Sales calls.  But we typically think of them as "service" or "sales" agents.  

**DISCLAIMER--You need to know what you are doing with WFM before you attempt any of these steps.  You are responsible for your own testing and implementation.  I am merely providing suggestions, NOT professional services, and my steps are not warrantied or guaranteed.**

1)  Let's take a look at the workgroup report:

For occupancy, we are going to add Preview, Talk, Wrap, Hold, subtract WrpA and then divide by the total Login time in C1.

2)  Build a formula set and name it Occupancy.  I just duplicated my inbound formula set for Unified IP.

Notice a few important things about this display set.  I am going to pull occupancy in the field RPHT.  That's towards the bottom.  

      a)    There are some VERY important reasons to do it this way.  First, the RPC and RPHT fields are reserved for outbound forecasting.  Since Service is an inbound group not tied to an Outbound Dialer or back office system, that means I can use the NCA, RPC, RPHT, and Backlog fields however I please.  

     b)  The RPHT field is the only other field in IDP that will display a weighted Average instead of an aggregate!  Because I want to see Occupancy averaged, and not aggregated at the end of the day, I must choose RPHT.

     c)  In the RPC field, notice that I pulled Column 2--the number of Calls Handled by the Workgroup.  This is an important number as well for a couple of reasons.  

                     i.  The Occupancy (or RPHT) is going to be weighted by the NCH (or the RPC).  So in order to get a correct weighted average for occupancy, I want to be sure to pull the this statistic.

                     ii.  The NCH for the workgroup has proven very useful at my current client.  That's because we deal with two groups (service and sales) that share inbound volume.  At a glance, I can see that the Sales queue may have had 30 calls in the past interval, but that the Sales Team may have only handled 10 calls during that interval.  That likely means there was a huge shift/change of burdens across the groups as sales calls flowed to Service.  It's a nice statistic that helps weave the story I'm telling when monitoring IDP's throughout the day.  

         d)  Finally (and this is VERY important!) note the field for NCO and AHT, and how it is entered.  You cannot leave these fields blank in a formula set.  If you leave NCO or AHT blank, it will not pull any data.  So I simply built a formula telling it to grab the NCH value, then subtract (or zero out) that value.  That keeps my data correct at the NCO and AHT levels for my Forecast Group.  If you don't do this, you will mess up your Forecast Group Data.

Finally, edit (or create a new) Display Set.  You will choose the ARPHT column, and rename it to "occupancy."  I added it to my "actual" tab in IDP.  Next, I added the ARPC column and renamed it "Total Calls Handled in Group" and added it to my Actual Column.  Now I can see calculated Occupancy, and Group Calls Handled at a glance in IDP!

   

Voila!  I've got Agent Occupancy, and it's weighted by the Staff Groups NCH--exactly what I want!

Rock on~!!

-Dr. WFM.

Aspect Unified IP AHT values in eWFM

So the last several weeks when measuring SL forecasts, I noticed IDP consistently predicting high AHT's.  I beg a hunt for this mystery that has led me down a path of shrinkage forecasting and AHT values.

This post is about adjusting the formula set for Unified IP within Aspect eWFM.  Like the Avaya feed (see my previous post), the Unified IP file includes Hold time as a separate column.   However, the original formula does not include this hold time.  I included the hold time and that has trued up my AHT's, and given me more accurate SL predictions.  It seems that eWFM excludes hold time in its formulas out of the box, and these need to be added back into calculations.

Here is a sample Unified IP file.  (The values have been purposefully changed to mask the 'real' data -- companies are private about the types of calls and number they handle).

The Aspect formula takes the Talk Column, Wrap Column and subtracts WrpA column.  I checked into this with our ACD technician who says that WrpA appears to be "wrap active" which happens when you are in wrap but make a DID call.  That makes sense for calculating AHT.  However, Held is not included.

Here's what the new formula with Hold would look like:

Voila!

Remember, when counting columns, you do not count the Svc column.  Parser skips that column, then starts counting once it sees the first piece of data.

Is your Avaya AHT missing a few seconds in eWFM?

When I consulted for Aspect, I knew from experience that the default formula sets in Aspect eWFM excluded Hold Times for the Avaya ACD switch.  This wasn't on purpose, it is just how it came out of the box.  Maybe it is how the developers were told to code the formula sets a long time ago when building the Data Feed interface.

At any rate, during my work with Chase, we discovered that the handle times being captured were too low.  We looked at the Avaya file coming over and saw the hold times as a separate column.  When we added it into the formula set, the handle times trued up correctly.  Since then, I had suggested to other Avaya customers to add Hold time to the AHT Calculation in the Aspect eWFM Formula Sets.   It's Column 7 on the Split Summary report (I'm going off memory here, so double check the raw data file coming over, I'll try to pull a sample Avaya Split Report and verify--but I'm pretty sure it's right).

The formula will look like: