Tip #75: Run Charts – useful for identifying trends in the data

May 6, 2009 4230 Comments2009-05-06+11%3A08%3A43Ben+Nash

So you’re a HR professional responsible for supporting customer service reps in a call center. The supervisor tells you that productivity is going down mid morning and mid afternoon. What to do? Well you may want to collect data on the customer service rep productivity by setting up a “run chart”. When you are using a run chart, time is represented on the horizontal (x) axis and the activity under study (in this case service rep activity) is tracked on the vertical (y) axis. So you start to track phone activity on your chart. At 8:00 AM you have 100 customer service reps that are doing great. They are handling an average of 8 calls an hour and everything is going fine. At 10:00 AM the call handling average has gone down to 7.3 calls per rep/hour; and by 11:00 you discover that the rep call average is down to 6.1 calls per rep/hour. What is going on? Now you have data to show you that somewhere between 2 and 3 hours after the start of the shift productivity seems to drop off a cliff. You go and interview the service reps and find out that due to being short staffed they are not getting their breaks and many of them are working all morning non stop. Now that you know the root cause of the problem you can start to address the real issues.