Having the correct number of employees to handle customer needs on any given day or time is crucial to running a successful franchise. But how do you determine staffing needs when business ebbs and flows over the course of the week or even the day? We advise making a data-driven decision, and this article will share how you can use call analytics to determine staffing needs. Let’s dive in!
Staffing: A Delicate Balance
In a franchise business, it’s essential to accurately predict the number of employees you need to schedule for any given day. It’s about finding the right balance because when you go over or under, you will experience negative consequences.
Understaffing (not having enough employees on hand to run the business and take care of customers) poses many risks to your franchise business:
- Elevated Stress: Reduced staff means that existing employees are responsible for more work. That increased workload increases the stress of the employees, which can lower morale, lower job satisfaction, hurt mental and physical health, and increase turnover.
- Decreased Customer Satisfaction: When there are fewer employees to serve customers, the customers will feel it. The quality of the product and service will suffer, and the customer will not get the stellar experience you want them to have.
- Lost Business: Understaffed franchises will not have the capacity to fully meet customer needs. It may mean turning business away or customers choosing to go elsewhere because of a poor experience. For example, you may experience more calls than your staff can handle, resulting in abandoned calls and customer dissatisfaction.
Overstaffing (having more employees than are needed) can be just as dangerous to your franchise. Some of the negative impacts of overstaffing include:
- Cost: If you have more employees on hand than are needed to do the work at a given time, you are paying employees to do nothing (or providing them with ‘busy work’ that didn’t necessarily need to be done at that time). Overstaffing can cause serious financial problems when too much money is wasted on wages.
- Lack of Engagement: When there is not enough work to go around for everyone, employees can feel disengaged. As these employees become unfulfilled in their job, bored, and frustrated, it will spill over to their work and how they interact with customers.
- Layoffs: If you have an overstaffing problem, layoffs may be necessary. Financially, it makes sense, but it may cause stress and hurt morale for your other employees, leaving them to wonder how safe their job is.
Since understaffing and overstaffing come with severe consequences for your franchise, it’s crucial to find the right balance. Fortunately, using call analytics can help you do that.
4 Call Analytics to Determine Staffing Needs
To find the correct number of staff for your franchise business for each day and time, you’ll have to look at the data. Using call analytics to determine staffing needs is what many successful business owners do—and you can too. Technology is available to make finding call data easy and convenient. Here are the main analytics you should pay attention to.
1. Call Volume
By analyzing call volume, you gain insight into how many calls are coming in during each hour and day of the week (when you’re open and even when you’re not!). After all, how do you know how many people you need to answer the phone at a given time if you don’t know how many calls are coming in?
When it comes to call volume, it is important to look at it from an hourly perspective as well as a daily view. What times of day are the phone lines most busy? Are there particular days of the week when you see spikes in call volume? To make it easier to understand:
- Plot hourly call volume in a line graph to see changes in the number of calls you receive for each hour of the day.
- Plot daily call volume in a bar graph to see the busiest days and compare across days.
When using call analytics to determine staffing needs, the raw numbers are nice, but it’s also helpful to visualize the data. Fortunately, some modern cloud services offer data visualization tools as part of their services. For example, Clarity Voice offers a range of data graphics to help you visually understand, at a glance, the amount and distribution of calls coming into your business. By seeing the data on graphs, you will spot patterns so you can make better decisions on scheduling shifts, hiring more staff, or acquiring more phone lines to handle that volume. Without data, you’re only guessing, which could lead to understaffing and missed calls.
2. Missed and Abandoned Calls
If your call volume is high, you may believe your business is performing well. And that could be true… but could you be doing better? Every call is a potential sale, so if you are missing calls, you are missing opportunities. Missed calls:
- Mean lost business and revenue.
- Hurt customers who cannot get the answers or services they need.
- Can potentially damage your reputation.
The problem with missed and abandoned calls is that if you aren’t measuring them, you may be blissfully unaware that you have a problem. When you start tracking them, you can make changes to avoid them, including increasing staffing and adding a cloud phone system that offers unlimited phone lines. Every call you take is a potential for another sale and another happy customer, so dealing with missed or abandoned calls is a great way to grow your franchise.
3. Call Duration
The duration of phone calls may mean different things to different franchise businesses. If you run a restaurant franchise, the goal may be to take phone orders efficiently in as little time as possible. For other franchises, a longer call duration may mean higher call quality and a better chance of a successful conversion. So when you look at call duration, you’ll have to look at it with your unique lens.
Call duration (also known as call handling time) and call volume are two factors that go into the Erlang C Formula for determining call center staffing. The idea is that for however many calls come into your business, you have to factor in the time each employee needs to handle one call before they can answer the next.
Call duration is one of the call analytics to determine staffing needs because it considers how long staff will be busy and therefore unavailable to handle new calls. Call duration may also shed light on the need to improve or refresh training. For example, suppose calls are taking longer than expected. In that case, you may consider using tools like call monitoring and recording to listen in, coach employees, and provide additional training.
4. Call Source
It is highly valuable to keep track of call sources, especially if you use more than just one phone number in your franchise business. If you don’t use multiple phone numbers, it’s something to seriously consider!
The rationale for having multiple phone numbers is that you can assign a different number to each of your marketing efforts and evaluate their performance. For example, you may have a phone number on your website, then use a second number for your radio campaign and a third for your direct mail.
Using call tracking lets you know how each initiative is performing and if they are bringing an ROI. This will help you decide where to spend your marketing dollars and how to plan your staffing needs around your marketing efforts.
Call Tracking and Analytics Software
If you’re just getting started using call analytics to determine staffing in your franchise business, you may wonder where you can get all the data you need to make decisions. It’s easy – find the right software, and it will deliver these metrics (and more!) right to you in an easy-to-consume format.
When evaluating software, you’ll want to choose one that specializes in your business category and niche. After all, every VoIP provider will offer you call analytics and software. So instead of choosing a generic option, you’ll want to choose a service provider that has experience in your specific business area. When you do, you’ll find a partner who understands how businesses like yours operate, and can customize your VoIP service to include the specific features that will help your business run smoothly and grow.
Technology like FranchisePhones by Clarity Voice includes a full range of call tracking and analytics for franchise owners to gain valuable insight into their phone calls. This includes graphs displaying call volumes by the hour and day of the week, pie charts that break down call summaries, voicemail statistics, and even custom reports to track the specific metrics that make sense in your franchise. Our team has specific knowledge and experience in industries such as automotive, pizza/restaurants, medical/home healthcare and more, so we understand the best way to configure your phone system for your specific industry.
Start Using Call Analytics Today
Staffing is just like any other business area—you should be making data-driven decisions! With easy-to-use technology at your fingertips, franchise owners can jump into call analytics today and start using the information to determine staffing needs. With the correct number of employees scheduled for every hour and day in your business, you’ll find that your franchise runs smoother, customers are happier, and sales increase.
Do you have more questions? If you are curious about how features like call tracking, call analytics, and call monitoring can help your franchise business grow, then let’s chat!
