How to calculate your call volume (and use AI to reduce it)

What is call volume?

Call volume is a metric used in customer service to show the total number of incoming calls handled by your customer support teams over a specified period of time. It’s an essential metric for assessing the workload and overall efficiency of your customer service operations.

However, with the rapid advancement of AI, call volume is no longer a tally you tot up and then simply cope with if the volume becomes too high. There are now easy, affordable ways to actively manage call volumes to bring them down and deflect any stress away from your teams, improve overall efficiency and reduce overwhelm.

How do you calculate your call volume?

To calculate call volume, count the total number of incoming calls (C) over a specific time frame, usually a day, week or month. Then divide this total by the number of hours your teams are online (H) to find the average call volume per hour.

Call volume formula

C ÷ H = call volume

For example, if you take 7,000 calls a week Monday-Friday and your teams are online for 40 hours in total, your call volume would be:

7,000 ÷ 40 = 175 calls per hour

Using call volume to analyse performance

If you know your call volume is 175 calls per hour, you can start to figure out if you have enough resources to handle your volume. Monitoring volume alongside other metrics can help offer extra insight into how well your teams are able to cope with demand:

• Average response time to see if you’re prompt in answering all calls
• Escalation rate to see if you’re getting many complaints
• First contact resolution to check calls answered are fully resolved
• Repeat contact rate to see if customers have to call in more than once

A persistently high call volume and poor average response time or high repeat contact rate, for example, might suggest the need to increase your support resources or optimise your workflows.

Improving performance

If you find call volumes are higher than you can comfortably handle or contact teams are overwhelmed, your focus will be on reducing call volumes and associated stress. Using AI is fast-becoming the go-to aide for business leaders looking for new ways to handle high call volumes, especially if your budget is tight, you don’t want to spend the lions share of it on recruitment, or simply don’t have a consistent need for more staff. Crucially, AI can help you determine if all the calls you receive are necessary in the first place or if you can deflect them away from your teams to lessen their workload, especially of repetitive enquiries and mundane tasks.

The move to AI-powered services doesn’t have to happen overnight, either. You can have a warm handover and start by routing your phone queries through AI-driven IVR. Rather than a traditional IVR system that forces customers to choose from a list of set options to find the team they need to speak with, they can simply say what they need. Using natural language processing (NLP) capability, a next-generation AI assistant can recognise what they’re asking for and route them through to the right department straight away.

On top of that, you can add AI telephony, where the AI assistant solves the problem independently over the phone without having to put the customer through to your teams at all. Of course, if the query is unusual, sensitive, or needs strategic thought, you always have live chat available to pass your customer through to a human agent and the dedicated skills and expertise they offer.

Leisure providers, Mytime Active, transformed their customer service in just six months with the introduction of AI-powered support.

Maintaining your success

Using AI to manage customer queries can transform your insights, so you’re not only reducing your call volume, but actively working on your customer service mindset to make the customer experience better overall.

You don’t have to rely on manual mathematics any more to make sense of your metrics. Using an AI assistant it becomes easier to see what customers want to speak to you about most often and get instant feedback on their experience to track your customer satisfaction score (CSAT) or NPS. You can then use what you learn to plug any bottlenecks in support and fix all the problems you can.

Everything you need to know shows up on one central dashboard, pulling in data from every channel your AI assistant appears on to encourage more real time engagement with customers to continuously top up your knowledge.

“Having an AI assistant can help reduce the number of enquiries you have overall, resulting in your support agents having more time to provide a better quality experience for your customers,” says Aaron Gleeson, Implementation Lead at EBI.AI. Like JLL property managers who use an AI assistant to help reduce their routine maintenance tasks.

The right way to measure results

When you make the shift to AI automation, it’s important to make sure you track call volume before and after the launch of your AI assistant as well as document any shift in the type of customer queries you get. That way, you can see the true impact and value, both strategically and financially, of using AI automation to support your customers and help grow your business.

Barking & Dagenham Council saved £48,000 in their first six months after launching a next-gen AI assistant and their return on investment quickly reached 533%. With AI assistants now available to everyone at a totally affordable rate, a high call volume can soon become a thing of the past for you too, alongside reduced support costs.

Launch an AI assistant today

You can get started with just your website URL and your AI assistant is ready in less than 10 minutes!