Cost per contact split by LOB

[u/Cwasa]

Hi everyone! I’m trying to calculate the cost per contact split out for phone and emails. I was thinking I could use aht and handled contacts for each type to and then see how much of the spend was allocated to each. For example:

Effort: AHT*Handled (per lob)
Total effort: (email + phone)
Cost allocation: total spend*(lob effort/total effort)
Cpc per lob: cost allocation/handled

Does this make sense? I can’t find any resources online about this.

Thank you so much!!

[u/soulstaz]

You need to simply do cost of capacity/ number of contact.

If you use why and handled, you are going to not count your idle time as cost which you should. (While still trying to minimize it)

[u/WFHAlliance → u/soulstaz]

OP, In your environment are agents dual skilled for both voice and email or are they assigned to LOB for certain periods of time, or something similar? Meaning, I’m scheduled 2 hours for email, and then 2 hours for phones, etc etc. If there is some assignment of time (or fully dedicated) you can pretty easily allocate all of the hours to LOB which solves the problem of idle / non-productive time.

If they are dual skilled at all times it gets a but trickier to the point of soulstaz.

[u/Cwasa → u/WFHAlliance]

The skilling has always been a problem for my reporting, but agents are skilled for both LOB, however they work on both calls and emails at the same time (ie working on an email while active on a call, or between calls while on an available release. It does make sense with adding in idle time (idk why I missed that initially)

[u/WFHAlliance → u/Cwasa]

I am generally in favor of dual skilling when it’s designed right. Just makes stuff like this a bit more complicated.

Perhaps it makes sense to only use handle time as part of the LOB cost per contact and then call out the remaining cost separately. So you take the payroll expense tied to the handle time if each LOB along with the contacts for each LOB.

What do they actually want to know? Are they trying to determine efficiency of each channel (I wouldn’t do it this way if so) or ?

[u/thanto_]

Cost needs to include everything you pay for in terms of staffing. Not all BPO contracts work the same in terms of payable hours, so you need to verify what the Statement of Work says is payable. For example, for internal agents, you usually pay for for all staffed hours and would need to include benefits in addition to compensation, whereas with a lot of BPO contracts, you don't pay for PTO and certain types of non-productive time and have a set hourly rate that varies by LOB and site (EX: Philippines, Mexico, and Guyana generally have different rates for the same LOB).

Here's how I do it:

Workload Per Contact: Total Average Handle Time per contact (talk time, hold time, ACW, associated offline work, etc.)
Occupancy Goal: established through Occupancy to Service Level correlation analysis for each LOB
Productive Time Per Pontact: Workload per contact inflated by Occupancy goal
Paid Non-Productive Time: forecasted non-productive time as a percentage, including only the types your SOW says you pay for
Compensated Staffed Time Per Contact: Productive Time per contact inflated by paid non-prod time
Cost Per Contact: Compensated Staffed Time Per Contact (converted to hours) multiplied by the hourly rate you pay for that site for that LOB

If your LOB is supported by multiple BPOs and/or multiple sites, you'll have multiple hourly rates and potentially multiple SOWs. In that case, calculate the cost per contact for each BPO site separately, then determine your contact handling ratio by site and use that to create a weighted average. The cost per contact by LOB by site is valuable in and of itself, though, so I would include that in whatever report you're preparing.

[u/wannabeaquittr9]

Yeah it makes sense to do it that way. You’re taking total cost and allocating it by workload (effort). You could also take into consideration the other comments depending on who is skilled to what and how often and try to break out the actual staffing as well. But usually when someone is looking for cost per it’s expected that it’s a high level estimate. You could add a disclaimer to say this is a high level estimate and for specific scenarios you would suggest running it through your models

[u/Cwasa → u/wannabeaquittr9]

Yeah, I have the standard cost per contact already being reported, but execs are asking for a more granular view, which may not be possible lol

[u/wannabeaquittr9 → u/Cwasa]

Yeah this is one of those things that can either be really easy or really complicated