They do the same duty every week, often with the same start time and the same days off. Agents may even go for their coffee and lunch at the same time. This custom has usually evolved from a less demand-driven environment. Over time, the workforce has increased to meet an increasing workload, but the placement of people to shifts is done on the basis of covering either early or late shifts. This practice can work very satisfactorily in an office environment, but in a call center it is less than optimal.
Most call centers have quality of service targets the managers are asked to meet.
These targets are a means of measuring the service offered to customers. Typically, in a call center, the PCA target is in the range of 80 to 90 percent and the SO is 15 to 30 seconds. If we look at an example of the relationship between the number of agents and the achieved PCA, the result would be as shown in Figure 1 . Using this graph, we can see that providing a PCA of 80 percent would require 17 agents. If the service was under-provided by two agents, the PCA would drop to 53 percent, a decline of 27 percent.