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SERVICE LEVEL NOT MEETING OBJECTIVES: My boss needs me to investigate why the service level cannot be met during the 30 minute intervals. What factors should I consider/compare with the forecast data?

Jay Minnucci, Director, Consulting Services, says: Generally speaking, there are four items you can check to see why you might be falling short on service level results. Start by checking the accuracy of your volume forecasts, then do the same for your average handle time (AHT) forecasts. After that, check your "schedule accuracy" - that's a comparison of the actual number of staff you scheduled for phone duty vs. the number you should have scheduled, based on your projections and output from the Erlang C calculation. Last, check the adherence to your schedule, and compare that to what you projected adherence to be.

Make sure that you run this analysis on the interval level, and over time you'll start to see patterns of where problems most commonly occur.