In order to calculate the return on investment generated by answering more calls, we first must value the calls that are already being answered. There are two ways of doing this. The first is to analyse the current spend to answer these calls:

In this example, the Sales line has 72 agents on payroll (FTEs). As agents work in shifts and do not answer calls all the time, this works out at 45 staffed seats (a ratio of 1.6, which is typical according to the Department of Trade and Industry).

The agents are paid on average £14,945 per annum, and agent salaries make up 70% of the total cost of running the sales line (a typical figure, again from the DTI)

Between them the agents answer, on average, 2191 calls per working day and the sales line is open five days per week.

To generate your own estimate, just enter the figures from your own call centre and hit Calculate.

The second way of calculating the value of the answered calls is to look at the revenue generated by those calls:

Over the course of a working day, the sales team makes on average 1098 sales from the 2191 answered calls. The sales for the day totaled £12,928.00, giving an average value per call of £5.91.

Note: If you're entering your own figures and do not know the Number of Sales figure, just leave it as-is. The calculator can work out the Value of Calls without it.

The following chart shows the answered (green) and unanswered (red) calls placed to the Sales team during the day.

Over the course of the day there are peaks and troughs in demand for the sales line. The exact timing of the peaks are unpredictable, but on average more calls are received in the morning than in the afternoon, so this call centre has responded by having a morning shift of 50 staffed agent-seats, and an afternoon shift of 40 staffed agent-seats.

As agents need to take breaks, are often on leave or training, or take short shifts, the average call centre needs 1.6 as many agents as staffed agent-seats (Source: DTI). This sales line has an average of 45 staffed agent-seats, and so currently has 72 agents on payroll.

Though there are times of day when some agents are idle (when the incoming call frequency drops 'into the green'), there are also times of day when all agents are busy, and a queue forms. 50% of callers will hang up within 45 seconds of waiting on hold (source: Avaya), so this results in unanswered calls. With current staffing patterns, the sales line is only answering 87% of its 2,518 callers (Full Report).

The remaining 327 callers hang up, and do not call again.

This is costing the call centre money as calculated below.

In order to recover the lost revenue from these calls, extra staff will be needed when a standard on-hold queue is used. We've run our analytical model with various levels of staff to find out how many calls are answered. The results are shown in the following graph:

The graph flattens at the top, which implies there is a law of diminishing returns on adding extra staff. This is because of the peaks and troughs in call volume, which result in idle time when staff levels are high.

Our sales line is answering 87% of its calls. Looking at the graph, this means it only has 62% of the staffed agent-seats it would need in order to answer all the incoming calls.

When staffed for peaks, this call centre will need 76 staffed agent-seats in the morning, and 68 staffed agent-seats in the afternoon, or an average of 27 extra manned agent-seats, if it is not to drop any of its calls. (Full Report).

This means the call centre will need an additional 27 * 1.6 = 44 extra agents on payroll to staff the agent-seats required, which is a significant increase in the total size of the call centre.

Furthermore, The overall cost of running a call centre scales with the number of agents, so that agent salaries account for 70% of staff centre costs, on average (Source: DTI). The extra cost of running this sales line with enough agents to handle the calls can therefore be calculated as follows:

As can be readily seen, this is greater than the value of the dropped calls themselves. Staffing for peaks is therefore simply not a cost-effective strategy.

What is needed is a way of answering the dropped calls without the expense of staffing for peaks. In the chart above, we see that there are troughs in activity when some agents are idle. ORDERLYQ works by shifting the peaks in demand into these troughs, resulting in fully utilised agents all day.

We've run the same callers through the same call centre with OrderlyQ managing the queue, informing callers of their wait time, and allowing callers to call back without losing their place.

In our model, callers will hang up immediately when announced a wait time of greater than two minutes. Callers who stay on hold will also hang up on average 45 seconds after their announced wait time expires. Even with such picky callers, the call centre is now able to answer 99.9% of its calls with the same number of staff (Full Report).

As can be seen, OrderlyQ takes the hit for peaks and troughs in call demand (lilac line), presenting agents with a steady stream of callers (green line) at a rate they can handle. The maximum announced wait time in accross the whole day is only 8 minutes, so callers are still served promptly - but without the hassle of waiting on hold.

The value of OrderlyQ to this call centre is therefore

• £ 939,400.01 per annum in terms of staff savings, or
• £ 504,193.71 per annum in terms of recovered revenue.

Our flexible pricing model has been chosen to ensure that the cost of OrderlyQ is a small fraction of the value of the recovered calls, however large or small your call centre may be. For a full quote, including analysis of your call centre, please contact us for further details, and ask about our free trial.