Quick Update on Command Center Workload Management
Mike Andes explains Command Center's staffing model: three 4-month seasons that scale up for spring rush, reduce in winter with guaranteed return dates for virtual staff, and track call pickup time and answer rate to keep costs down for franchisees.
Questions this video answers
Earlier average this year ≈ 8 seconds; recent average ≈ 3–4 seconds.
Approximately 99.4% to 99.6% answered.
February 14 (return/guaranteed start date).
Each season is four months (three seasons = 12 months).
Approximately 20 to 25 hours (or reduced hours), versus a 35–40 hour standard during the non-rush season.
Chapters
Hello, Augusta Nation. Hope you're all doing well. Let me switch over to my air. This is not going to be necessarily where we answer questions or mic minutes. I just want to do a quick update. I know it's a Saturday, so this is not typical for me to make a video for everyone. And this is not 911 set. So if you are busy with your family, just wait till Monday. It'll still be fine. But I want to give a quick update and kind of give a little bit of how we do things at Command center in terms of workload management. And let me explain why I'm doing on Saturday and why I'm doing it now. And then I'll jump into the actual what I actually want to say. And so today what basically happened is one of our team members at Command center was part of the Saturday shift and text on Connecteam, a whole bunch of franchisees saying, hey, if you miss any calls today, it's because we're short staffed. We don't have too many people at Command center. And the virtual team has been let go. So I want to add clarity around that and make sure everyone is on the same page. And this team member, by the way, is fantastic, incredibly awesome, and actually has really turned his life around the past few years and is feeling horrible right now. But I actually felt the positive thing is that it actually helped me go ahead and just share everything. How we kind of manage workloads at Code Command center. The the overall goal of Command center is to keep it as lean, as efficient as possible in order so that we do not have to raise costs like we did this past spring. And so what we're always trying to do, we've gotten really good in the past three to six months is projecting and anticipating what workloads are going to be and then monitoring our labor to to ensure that 98 to 100 of their day is working. If someone is twiddling their thumbs for 20 or 30% of their day, we need to reduce workload at Command center and make sure people are laid off or they work less hours, et cetera. During the winter, all of our internal team locally at the Command Center, I work one less hour per day. Mondays we work one extra hour because it's typically the busiest time because there's a lot to catch up on the weekend, there's payroll to be ran and a lot of people will ask questions about their invoices and a lot of you send your invoices out on the, on the weekend. And so therefore a lot a Lot of workload is on Monday. So that is something that we are always trying to do that is like make sure that the max amount of day is filled with work and they're not tooling their thumbs because as soon as they're twirling their thumbs, that's waste. As long as there's waste, they're going to not make P4P. And furthermore, all of us as franchisees are going to have to pay more because ultimately Command center is there for us as a resource. And if it's not efficient, we have to raise prices, which we do not want to do in order to cover the cost. So.
Yeah, I just want to kind of be up front and honest about that. When it comes to Saturdays and it comes to every single day, we're looking at how many calls are missed, we're looking at what the response time is. Over the past two to three weeks, our, our response rate has actually gone down massively. Our call time, our pickup time, it's gone down from an average this year it was around eight seconds for pickup. We're now down to about three to four seconds, which is really, really good. We've been refining a bunch of stuff on the back end of RingCentral and where the calls go, how they split up between people that are virtual versus in house. We've been working a whole bunch on that, improving that make it much more efficient. So that's been really, really good. And we've had a pickup rate of about 99.4 to 99.6%. And that is, that's percentage of calls that get answered. And again, most of them are before the second ring ever happens.
So today when that happened, what, what happened once we actually dug into it is there was an hour where there was about quite a few calls that came in. And because there was less people at Command center and we've been working, we've been leaning out as everyone, everyone is, you know, decreasing in revenue. We need to also do the same thing at Command center to ensure it's always efficient. And so as we've been doing that, there was a couple calls that were missed in an hour. And we're not used to that Command center, especially the people have been hired in the past three or six months because we've nailed it down. And so one of the did send out that text message on Connect Team saying hey, we might be missing calls and I don't want anyone to panic because literally just a couple calls were missed. So just know that we track every single, especially the Saturday shift But every single day we are tracking number of calls. We're tracking the call pickup time. Be that live on dashboards in Command Center. I see it every single day. All the managers see all, all the team members see every single day. In terms of the virtual team, what we have done over the the past few weeks is reduce or eliminate their hours for the winter. Again, the reason for that is in order to stay as efficient as possible and make sure that when someone is working, they are able to work their entire day without twiddling their thumbs. If we run out of work, it's an inefficient model. And so what we have really refined over the past several weeks and been more clear about with our team is in order to serve the franchisee the best, what we need to do is really look at Command center as three different seasons. Four months, four months and four months. The first four months we have would be spring rush, typically like March, April, May and June. That's the first four months, the next four months, and then the next four months. Right. That first four months is where we need to train up and gear up in January and February in order to get enough people on staff. And during those four months, they can work as many hours as they want. They can work as many overtime hours as they want. We really don't care because ultimately we've got to get the work completed and the workload like quadruples during that season. So it's like all hands on deck. Work as many hours as possible. There's not going to be a lot of vacation time accepted, etc. The next four months is going to be more standard, 35 to 40 hour workweek, pretty much full time. The next four months at command center is going to be similar to what all of you do. And what we recommend you stay on the field is that during the winter months you can go get another job and you'll have a guaranteed position to come back. This is the first year that we have done this at Command center and that is because we now actually have a very good understanding because of the past couple of years of understanding what the workload management looks like and what workload happen during the winter. And we know that we don't need the entire team throughout the winter either A, everyone's only going to get 20 to 25 hours or B, we've got to cut staff and then come back and that's what we've done for the virtual team. And they'll all be coming back. Every single person that we had to let Go or cut their hours during the winter. Have all will all be returning full time hours. February 14th if I'm not mistaken. But they all have a guaranteed start date. They're actually still on the team just in the different chat and they stay up to date with everything and they will be coming back with the entire team in February. So again, the reason we do that is to make sure that when someone is at Command center that they are able to stay active and working the entire time. This is the advantage of having Command center where we can throttle labor versus if you go hire someone full time, their salary stays the same the whole year round. That fixed cost of say 4 or $5,000 in their salary plus a couple thousand dollars in rent and equipment, et cetera, you're paying 6, $7000 very easily per month. And that stays fixed throughout the winter as your demand go down throughout the winter. We also need to flux and bring down and throttle back on labor at Command Center. And we are watching to make sure and we will absolutely ensure that if there was missed calls or a workload that was too great on a specific day that we do throttle labor up. So I hope that made sense. It's something that we've always recommend to all of you. It's just something that we've had to learn what the workload looks like at Command center and realize that we are about six weeks shifted prior in spring rush compared to all of you because we got to, we've got to train and onboard all the new people in January and February. So hope that made sense. I just wanted to put it out there because I don't want people thinking that, you know, we're missing a bunch of calls. I know it can be the word disconcerting when you get that text message like, oh my gosh, are they missing like every call today? It's like, no, it's not happening. We are monitoring every single day and if there was even five or ten calls missed on a Saturday, we'd be putting more staff members at Command center during the weekend. So hope that made sense. Feel free. If anyone missed this and they are asking about it to let them know. But yeah, I'll maybe, maybe on Monday when I get back to the office, I will share you guys a screenshot or take a picture of what we look at every single day. We have two massive boards in both rooms. Even in the break room, we have a massive 52 inch screen that is literally showing live if we're missing calls. So that way, literally if someone's on break. It's like, oh, we're missing a call, I'm out. And we have one in there and we have one in the main room. And so it's something we monitor consistently. And like I said, the average the past three weeks has been three second, three to four second pickup time, just depending on the day. And 99.4 to 99.6% of calls are getting answered. So I ensure that it's above 99%. And if it wasn't, we would be getting more people on staff. And again, we are already flexing like Mondays where they work longer days, and then other days where we will actually let people go in the afternoon to ensure that when time is being booked, it is being as efficient as possible and that it's not just a matter of being wasteful during times when things are slow. So I hope that is helpful. And my goal in doing that and having command center is to be as efficient and lean as possible so that you all can focus on selling and marketing and hiring, which is ultimately going to be the thing that grows the businesses instead of taking phone calls on Saturdays. So hope that was helpful and we'll talk to you again on Monday.
