For the past, oh, three months, I've been indicating quite plainly to management that we need more people to handle the calls that we'd be getting on our new Student Administration system. About six weeks ago, I was asked to start putting in writing what kind of staffing we would need to support the effort. I started off estimating that we would need three. It turns out we need five.
Well… I've written it up in a couple of different ways; but maybe I've come across as wishy-washy. Naw, that can't be it. I might be verbose - but wishy-washy isn't really part of my vocabulary. I've been telling them since those days that we need more people. I just didn't have hard data to prove that we would need the number that I am asking for.
Anyhow, I've been asked, now, to put a report together to state how many people I need. Well, I did that last week. But now I've been asked to REALLY put a report together. “Huh?” you ask. Yeah… same response I had. So… I went in to my boss today and asked her REALLY what they are looking for, because what it feels like is back when I was growing up and my parents used to ask me to do X to get Y… and I did X, but then found out after doing X that I had to do A, B, C, …, and W to do X to get Y.
Every other Tuesday, I have this meeting with about 30 other people, in which we get together and talk about what's going on with our organization, as far as caring for our customers is concerned. Appropriately, it's called the Customer Care Meeting. I can usually count on getting grilled in these meetings about the performance of the call center that I manage, as that seems to be where the rubber meets the road in this company. Today was no different. Today it was about the Staffing Model.
What is happening is that we're getting enough calls to demand a call center with 13 people, but we only have a maximum of 9 people available to answer the phones. “That's not a big difference between 9 and 13 people,” you might say. But it's the difference between drowning and being comfortably above the waterline. But the bosses start asking questions when you ask for more people… questions that really have no bearing on the situation.
So now I have to go into an education mode, which is fun, because typically one of the bosses shoots from the hip. So what ends up happening is everything I say gets questioned, or at least that's the way it feels… Typically nothing is accepted at face value… I'm sure I'm not the only one who goes through this, but it can be quite uncomfortable.
In the words of John Candy from Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, “I feel like a Whopper… flip me over - I'm done on the backside!”
No, not those kind of models… not the Madison Avenue type like Laetitia Casta… Staffing models, meaning the ones that tell us how many people we need to do the job that we are tasked to do. That's what I've been working on this morning. Fun…
Basically, what's happening is that my Support Center staff of 8.375 FTE (Full Time Equivalent workers) isn't enough to handle the call volume, which, if we had a decent service level model in place would require roughly twice that number of workers.
SO… what is happening is that the university is expecting that my staff will handle twice the number of calls that they should handle.
I've put togther the model before, and have turned it in to the VP who requested it. Then she came back and asked me to run it by my boss' boss. So I forwarded it this morning to my boss so she can forward it to hers.
I've jumped through the hoops.
Let's see what happens next.
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