Two years ago we bought a new contact centre platform for our customer service team of about six hundred agents. The business case rested on time saved. Screens would load faster, the customer's history would appear as the call was answered, and notes after each call would be drafted automatically. We timed each step in a pilot, and the total came to four minutes per agent per day. Across six hundred agents and two hundred and twenty working days that was nearly nine thousand hours a year, which finance valued at a little over two hundred thousand pounds. The project was approved on that figure.
A year after go live, finance asked where the saving was. The platform had done what we said. Each step was faster, and when we repeated the pilot measurements they held up. But costs had not fallen. We had the same number of agents, the same rotas and the same overtime.
The four minutes arrived as a dozen pieces of twenty seconds, scattered across every agent's day. Nobody could go home four minutes early, and no shift could be shortened by a sliver. Agents used the time, quite reasonably, for a slightly longer pause after a difficult call. The time existed, but nobody could spend it.
A saving only becomes money when somebody changes a decision because of it. Saved time can do that in two ways: buying fewer hours, or doing more work with the same hours. Our business case had promised the first, and nobody owned the decision that would produce it.
Business cases that go to our board now separate the two. A cash saving names the budget that will fall, by how much and when, and the holder of that budget signs the case. A capacity gain is stated in hours, with what we will do with them, and is not counted as money. For the contact centre, a workforce planner finally turned the time into something real. As people left over the following year, five full time posts were not refilled, which recovered most of the original figure.
That took a planner and a decision, not a platform. I now read every claim of time saved in a proposal by asking who will take it, and in what form.
– Serguey Shinder
Top comments (1)
The arithmetic checks out: 600 x 4 min x 220 days = 528,000 minutes = 8,800 hours. If those are 8-hour days, that is 8,800 / (220 x 8) = exactly 5 FTE, which matches the five unfilled roles nicely. The point that saved minutes only turned into money once headcount changed is the key lesson. Curious whether you accounted for occupancy or shrinkage when converting hours into FTE, since agents are rarely productive for the full shift.