There's no WFM without Capacity Planning | Eric Bainbridge

🚀 Capacity planning: The most overlooked part of WFM?

This week on WFM Unfiltered, we're breaking down why capacity planning is not optional—it’s the foundation of a solid workforce strategy.

We’re joined by Eric Bainbridge, a WFM expert who’s spent 20+ years mastering the art of balancing cost, efficiency, and customer experience.

🎯 Why do so many companies get capacity planning wrong?
🎯 What’s the real impact of bad planning on business outcomes?
🎯 And how can YOU take control of forecasting, staffing, and resource allocation?

The episode drops this week. Don’t miss it.

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Transcript

Irina: 0:18

Hi guys. Hi. I'm so excited. Oh my God. Welcome to WFM Unfiltered, by the way. But, I just kicked off a conversation with somebody who is such a charming person and just a great professional that I'm already rambling and, we're going to Maryland, by the way, and I'm sorry, but I cannot wait to introduce you to Eric. Eric, please. Let's, let's introduce you to the audience because we need to start talking now.

Eric: 0:45

Hi everyone. Eric Bainbridge out in Maryland. been in workforce management now for about 20 years. Just most recently at Care First Blue Cross Blue Shield is the Director of Workforce Management there. Super huge fan of all the workforce management studies, all the data. I'm, I'm a data nerd. I, I lived to end up pulling in information and how to end up making it utilized by us so that we can use data-driven type of decisions and, and do the things that we need to do to move our business forward.

Irina: 1:16

that's not all. Just don't be so shy. Can you please mention what you mentioned to me before we started the recording, like what's the background before the workforce management?

Eric: 1:27

okay. So before workforce management, I was military police for about, Eight, eight years in change, with the United States Air Force Security forces as it's known today, or security police back when I was in,'cause I'm old now. after that I ended up going to MBNA America, which later was bought out by Bank of America. Started off, very, very, very, very, very humble beginnings doing, outbound telesales, cold calls for credit cards. and. I moved into the retention area not too long after that. And then within a year I was doing some supervisory work. way that I got into workforce management.'cause nobody ever really goes to school for workforce management or, or goes, you know what, as a kid, I wanna be an astronaut. I wanna be a, I wanna be a, a police officer. I wanna be a firefighter. Nobody goes, I wanna do workforce management'cause that sounds really awesome. most, people just kind of stumbled into it and the way that I stumbled into it. Was at MBNA, I was running a fraud services team of about 17 personnel, and I was trying to figure out how I could help the team get better with the KPIs that we had. So I started to bring in the KPIs that were at the corporate level, figuring'em out on Excel, and then started figuring out how I could put my team up against those goals. And how they would rate amongst each other in the team. So each morning I would pass out and yes, we were in the office. This is all way, way, way pre Covid. You could see this, you know, grace coming in here. So it's way pre covid. But, people started to notice that, hey, you know, I'm, I'm number one. And then, you know, everybody would hear who number one and probably all the way to like, number five was nobody would ever hear who number 17 was. So some number 17 would kind of come into my office there in the cubby at the end of the, of the aisle and say, Hey. Eric, how, how can we get better? And so that started to move us forward. And once you show people, and I'm a firm believer, most people want to succeed. And if you give them the tools to do it, they'll, they'll succeed. They'll shock you. They'll do editing and everything possible to do a good job. we ended up performing a 15 month streak of top performing, fraud team in, in the company. And then my boss decided to get me into our IVR strategies area, with the fraud department. So I got to learn a little bit about that. and then I was doing workforce management and it's like a really kind of a thing to be on the other side of it and go back and forth, but I. It turns out I kind of had a, a knack for it. Love numbers. you, you have to be a bit of a, a numbers nerd to be able to be in this field. I, and you also have to like, to solve problems.'cause that's what you do. You put out fires all day long, whether it's. With what you're doing from a real time perspective, what you're doing from a forecasting scheduling perspective, or if you're starting to look at different strategies on how you're going to do call routing and how you're going to bring in new queues or bring in new business so that you can end up optimizing your staff. It's always something which I, to me, is the greatest selling point on being in workforce management because there's always something new that you get to dig into.

Irina: 4:40

Amen to this one and what, what background and what an interesting career changes and how does it all come together in the end? And I, I don't even know. How to start that conversation because you're just so, so diverse into your background. But because we're talking about numbers and this is ultimately the, the foundation of workforce management, as you mentioned. I usually go back to the topic of capacity planning, which is something that you indicate that you really, really like. And for me, capacity planning is actually that kind of middle ground where numbers connect to strategy and we basically marry them both together and we try to translate that to the business to see, okay, how can we go forward for here and how our operations are gonna look like. But this is also a topic that a lot of people underestimate or completely eliminate from the WFM cycle. So walk me through that.

Eric: 5:44

Wow. I, I hate to hear that someone would eliminate that in, in my mind. plan is the single most important document or product that the workforce management team delivers to the operations or sales teams. without it, there's, there's no, everybody's kind of running around playing whack-a-mole and with a lot of industry now taking a bit of time to. You know, train staff and get them onboarded and everything else, you're losing a lot of time by not having the right people in the right place at the right time, which is all workforce management is right people, right place, right time. And that's what, that's the whole goal of it. And it does come under three things that you need to make sure that you're doing and that's scheduling, forecasting, and you've gotta report on it.'cause if you don't report on it, you don't know how well you're doing. So those are the, in my mind, always those three main pillars that are there. for capacity planning. it all starts with your customer base. So how many customers do you have? Do you have seasonality? Are you seeing, and it's never a one size fits all, so whatever industry it is that you are in, you can't sit there and give a cookie cutter response for, oh, I'll use health insurance as a, as an example, because I did health insurance at my last job. So to say that, going to say that for every 10,000. Medical members, I'm going to get x, y, Z number of calls in the door. That's a a fairly poor blanket strategy. You wanna have something a little more refined than that. It works if everybody's the same age and the same demographic and in the same location. But if you have a large group of business, say that is. In Washington state, like Microsoft, let's say you, you have a, Microsoft is is one of your customers and they're in Washington state, which is one of the best health states that that's out there. And there are also a lot of younger folks, you know, 30 somethings, gonna have lower utilization than you would say if you had. Krispy Kreme as your, as your, Krispy Kreme, probably not with the same, focus on, on health. So there's gonna be a higher utilization, so you have to make sure that you're, you're looking at these things. In a different lens, the blanket statement of, you know, this many per 1000, 10,000, 50,000 members, whatever it is that you're looking at, doesn't always fit and shouldn't be utilized. In banking, you have the same type of thing. What is your product that you're looking at? Is it, I'd look at my product and I look at specifically jobs, like job codes. If you have those available where you could see what people do for a living, that demographic. That demographic responds typically very much the same, regardless of age when it comes to banking. So if you have the CPA, the CPA is going to dig into you on everything that you do, and they're going to look over every piece of information you give them, and they're gonna call you a lot more because they're going to, they're going to challenge everything. A doctor and a lawyer. They're not gonna call you regardless of the age, the reason why too busy saving lives. So they're not gonna call you as much unless something goes very wrong. So you have to be able to see what your contact rates are, and you have to be able to see them by month so that you can see that seasonality and then then put everything together. Then you start deciding at that point, what are your demographics inside the organization? Are you able to put, specific, skills together and have this group of people handle this group of business? Can they handle all groups of business and everything? Get funneled in. Extremely unlikely. But if they can, then your economies to scale become greater. You could end up having fewer number of people answering those calls. The more finite you get, the larger more, the larger your staff needs to become in order to handle those niche type of, of clients or customers that you have. That's the quick, that's the quick and easy version.

Irina: 9:42

I, I, I have so many questions, but first, the first thing that I'm hearing and that I really liked you mentioning that,'cause I usually keep on coming back to the same point, and I think this is one of the reasons why capacity planning fails in a lot of. Organizations is, people do see it as purely a task of numbers. Let's say we're pulling a report and we're seeing, oh, we're getting a hundred calls. Okay, let's extrapolate those a hundred calls, and this is what we'll be getting every week, every month, every whatever for. Until the end of the year. But what you do mention is that you need to dig deeper and understand your customer base and ultimately your business. So if you are to launch new products, okay, who is responding to those products? How do they respond? What is their behavior? What would that mean in terms of interactions for your, contact center and. I think this is the level of detail that traditionally w FMRs do not go into. But I also think that this is why we're seeing a lot of like very senior leadership from WFM and potentially administrative roles that just prepare reports. So how, how do we. Teach W FMRs that they need to invest time into learning the business in order to reflect it in the numbers.

Eric: 11:13

That's, so that's something that has to start at the top. I'm a hundred percent with you. Workforce management has to understand the business in which they're supporting, or they're, they're going to be less effective. I'm not gonna say they're gonna be ineffective, but they're going to be less effective. you have to know what happens in your industry overall. And politically what, what is going on? I'm not saying take political stances and bring them into work, but you need to understand

Irina: 11:38

Yeah.

Eric: 11:38

political decision impacts your, your line of business and ultimately your internal clients that you have. a prime example, again, and I'll go back to the health insurance industry. A prime example was the Affordable Care Act. passing of the Affordable Care Act knew was going to drive a lot of phone calls because of, there was a lot of. Misinformation being thrown around. And it was also a very new product. So people were going to be very curious about what it was, what it was doing, it, whether you liked it or didn't, this is what was coming into the, to the, to the business. So you had to know, okay, do I now wanna look at segmenting off that population and having my senior people handle those calls? So that's, that's when you start having that dialogue. With the business too, which you absolutely have to have. You should, you should be having it monthly, at the very least. And if you're in some type of peak season, you should be in, in touch at least twice a week during peak season. That, that's my own personal go-to. I love having, I, my thing is I've always loved having a morning standup right before the, right before the business opens up or your peak opens 24 7. Let's talk about how we did yesterday. How were we in relation to forecast? And if, if you missed how, why did we miss, did we miss in forecast? Did we miss in in our KPIs? What, what went wrong? Or did everything just go swimmingly? Which if it did, then you know, you're, you're probably gonna work yourself out of a job real quick, but it's more than likely in peak season you're going to. You're going to have those anomalies that crop up that you weren't thinking of, and it's okay. It is okay to have something come up and throw your plan a little bit. It's okay. You're not Nostradamus, you're just looking at data. I. So it is okay if something goes wrong, you need to recognize what it was, and then you correct what you can where you can. So if you have like a reserve of, of personnel that you're able to utilize such as part-timers, maybe you can move them into a full-time slot for the, this week. So we could get over, a goofy email that went out saying, yeah, we just canceled all of your policies and you know. That's like a, a worst case scenario, but you know, how do we get, how do we get some extra staff in here to kind of stymie that, that swell? That's, that's okay. Nobody's, you should not be planning for your business to fail. If you're planning for your business to fail, you got a bigger issue, running around out there.

Irina: 14:10

But I like that you're mentioning that because the, the other important thing, and I'm gonna connect it to, your, your, your own introduction is, you mentioned that you're in numbers, nerd, but what I'm hearing is that, okay, numbers are great, but you need to understand what's behind these numbers. So the reasons why your call volume or interaction volume was as. Spiking yesterday, and it's okay if you couldn't predict it or you didn't predict it, but at least the least you can do is understand, okay, we had a tech issue, we had an announced marketing campaign, we had whatever went wrong, wherever in the chain and. The thing that I'm often missing in an organization whose responsibility is that, is it responsibility of the agents, of the team leads to come and say, Hey, we're getting much more calls because something is going wrong. Or it's, let's say the real time thing, seen that spike and going and saying, Hey guys, is there something going on? What's happening?

Eric: 15:11

So my mind that real-time analyst, they're the ones that are gonna see that big picture first, and

Irina: 15:16

Hmm.

Eric: 15:16

that have to raise that flag. That's if they're sitting there going, Hey, my IDPs are, my intraday plan is saying that. I should have only taken 500 calls in this interval and I took 1500. I, I should be raising a flag somewhere along the line going, Hey, something went wrong. Does anybody know why we got a sudden swell of calls? Or can we look at some speech analytics and see what's, what's driving this, this to us? the other thing that's out there too. Now, speech analytics, that's, you can get it. If you can get something behind that, find out why people are contacting you to begin with, whether it's call, email, text, whatever. You need to know why they're calling, so you can see what you could do to be proactive to stop those calls from coming in.

Irina: 16:00

It. It's so great that you're mentioning that because I really like bridging conversations to my own personal experience and what I learned throughout a, a lot of mistakes. And I keep on saying that. When I first got introduced to capacity planning and I was requested to do it, I was strictly focused on the numbers coming out of reports, and I was going in those meetings because we had. The usual weekly cycle where we reviewed what happened, would that reflect in the upcoming weeks, months, do we need to, recruit more people, whatever. And I had zero idea about the business, like what's behind these calls. So they would end up talking about campaigns and stuff and anything. And I was like, I, I can't even understand, I can't translate that into the, these numbers. So I wanna bring you back to that. Strategic part of workforce management capacity planning. Who is responsible to basically teach WFM about the business? Is it something that we need to potentially be more proactive and go with different groups and understand, or this is something that we would be expecting is organized for us as a training.

Eric: 17:15

I would expect the leader of workforce management to do any and everything in their ability to get that staff and that workforce management staff to have some training or some, I prefer education to training, get them some education, that they can end up understanding what their business is. What drives their business? The, the question that rarely gets asked I and needs to be asked, whether you're in a not-for-profit or a for-profit, is how do we make money? And because that's what's gonna keep you employed, is how do we make money? Your workforce team should understand how this business operates, what goes into it, so that what you, you can help decipher what's gonna come out of it. If you know a new product is coming in, what does that product do? Is that product going to be a boon or is it going to, you know, cause damage to your overall model? It's, what is it that, that it could swing? Some products are great, some products, you people love'em right from the jump. Some products, not so much. Some products people immediately get upset with, they don't like the limitations to them, and then they'll call and complain. So you have to understand. What's there. And to do that, you have to partner. Workforce is the responsible party. You need to go partner with that operations and sales team, or collections team or whatever it is that you're supporting. You need to understand that business and without, that strong partnership. If you're not making partnership and all you're doing is sitting behind your desk all day long, looking at the a SA, go up and down and do all this other stuff. That you're not doing what you need to do from a workforce management perspective. You need to understand your business so that if you see that spike and you understand, Hey, wait a minute, didn't we make a change last night to X, Y, and Z? Could this be the cause of it? Be informed. You're not gonna be informed of everything, but be as informed as you possibly can so that you can understand impacts to the business and you can bring it out there. You can offer solutions when things happen because the operations team. The operation, if it, if you're supporting operations, typically operations is in whack-a-mole. I gotta, I gotta, oh, this problem, I got this problem, I got this problem, I got this problem, deal, what? Whatever it is that you put in front of me. And that is their job. Their, their job is to handle the fire that's in front of them, and their job is to coach and develop their staff. Workforce needs to see the big picture, and you can't see the big picture and understand what's going on if you don't know your business.

Irina: 19:42

this is so exciting for me. I feel like I can listen to you for hours, and we can go into so many different directions and I keep on coming back to the numbers element and I. For me, one of the massive mistakes is that we focus only on the numbers, but we forget that behind that numbers is indeed customers. So whenever we're focused on targets, say for example, service level abandonment code, this is not the metric as such. This is your business that sits behind it, and often what loses chunk of the business is your service. Right. So even if you're not a revenue based contact center and you're not in sales, but you're a customer service one, I have dropped products just becau because how shitty the customer service was because I didn't want to subject myself having to interact or back for help or anything else. So it it's great that you're translating that into the, the human element of, of the WFM, it's, it's numbers are great, but again, they represent something, they represent people, represent cost, budget, headcount, whatever. So tell me how, what the, the thing that always starts the conversation for me is if you're in an organization that does not believe in capacity planning, and you're often getting the situation where we have a set budget, that's how many people we can hire. That's it. I don't care. You can be understaffed over stuff. I don't care. That's how much we can hire. What do we do with that?

Eric: 21:21

that's a great question. if you're lucky, you're slightly overstaffed. because if you're unlucky and you're understaffed, which most everybody ends up,

Irina: 21:31

Yeah.

Eric: 21:31

being in order to catch back up it, it is gonna take you, take you a year to catch back up at best because you're now, when you end up getting that type of pressure, your attrition rate typically is. Spikes too. People are like, nah, I'm done with this. You can't sit there and kick my teeth in on every single phone call and expect me to continue to take that. I'm just a human being and I'm not gonna sit here and take this kind of abuse for that long, and that's understandable. You know, when the first, you know, as someone, you know, gets to a phone call the first thing is that you hear is you people, you know, that's say, oh yeah, just buckle up. You're in for a long phone call. Yeah. Thank you for calling x, y, Z company. My name is Eric. How can I, you people have had me on hold for X, Y, Z? And he's like, yep, okay. I'm gonna get yelled at a lot here. and. That, that starts off poor at that point. From a, your NPS dies, your CSAT dies, and most of all, your first contact resolution, it, it implodes because people have, this is the third time I've called because I can't get in touch with you people. I, it is, it's just. goes poorly. I'm not saying you need 30s ASAs and 80% service level and 30 seconds all over the place. I don't think that's necessary. I think most people have come accustomed, if you've waited a minute, I don't think people are gonna freak out even, even up to two minutes. So you start getting a little bit beyond that. Then it starts to get a bit excessive. Your abandon rates go off and then, then you start to, then you feel that that crunch and that pain. My thought is you. If I get stuck, if I get stuck and I'm understaffed and I, I gotta switch into a new mode of how do I deflect some of these calls and I gotta, I gotta figure out how we can self-serve. So with any luck, I'm partnering well with my IT team, not just the voice operations side of it, because voice operations is, I'm wildly important, but IVRs? The utilization of IVRs right now. I think people cuss at an IVR more than they. than like at Alexa. I can't say that too loud or mine's gonna go off, but it is, IVR is, you know, the, they're the butt of all jokes. You know, you just see people, you know, on, on TV all the time. An operator or representative, one of those things, just'cause they're just done with them. in certain realms, I think that they're useful and, and very helpful and you can self-serve. others probably not as much because your, your websites and your, your apps. Those should be at a, at a high level if, if I have to call, it's because something really sticky has happened. I, I'll tell you, Gen X and I can't stand to make a phone call into a a and any of the places I do business with, I can't stand to do it. So if I have to call you, you're already starting here. You gotta bring me down here'cause I'm ticked, I'm ticked that I had to call you. I shouldn't be able to handle whatever it is I need to handle right here and down. so that leaves that customer service agent in a deescalation mode the entire time.

Irina: 24:30

And what I'm hearing again on coming from you is that this is where WFM also, it's triggering that strategy element.

Eric: 24:40

yep.

Irina: 24:41

for me, again, another mistake is that. If we're not having a strategy, what usually happens is let's switch the callback functionality on and let's have a message that, we're gonna call the customer back when the lines are okay, but we don't have the capacity to call them back. So basically it's a huge virtual middle finger. And by this point, yes, the client starts calling you back and yelling and ing and, going absolutely.

Eric: 25:11

I, I, I know a lot of, a lot of companies love the virtual hold or the callback.

Irina: 25:17

Hmm.

Eric: 25:17

there's some that will actually measure the time as part of the average speed of answer with, from the time that they disconnect to the time they pick back up. But a lot of companies won't. So that kind of gives you the, the false, illusion at any rate that your ASAs and your service levels are so much higher when they're really not. the customer experience is not good. I hate the virtual whole technology and the callback, and here's why. Essentially, what you've said is, thank you for calling us. We know this is a convenient time for you. It's not for us. I'll call you back when it's convenient for me. that's not the message you wanna send to your, to your customers. That's especially in a sales environment where it's, it's your prospects. Hey, I know you wanna do business with us, but hold on, I'm busy right now. I'll get back to you when I can. you need to be, you need to, that's one of those immediately it's, we gotta do better. We've gotta do better. What can we do to get ahead of this? And I. know that you know that you look at C-Suite and senior leadership, that they, they see these things like as a, as a win. They're not, they're not. You're not thinking of yourself as a customer, and you think of yourself as a customer calling in and that, by the way, shout out to my old MB and a pee. That was exactly what our motto was. Think of yourself as a customer. That's what kind of drives me. with all of this now the workforce portion is just, I wanna get you in and get you to the right person without a long wait.'cause I don't want to add to your frustration'cause you're already frustrated'cause you had to call me or text me or email me or whatever the case may be. But I want to get you to the right person, whether it's through, you know, strategic routing or, you know, in certain cases, Bullseye routing if, I don't know if everybody's aware of that one that's out there with Nice, that's one of my personal favorites that you could use. Those types of things. You could use those types of things to, you know, get people in a spot where you need them quickly. I, I, I guess we're not talking about NICE at this point. But, Genesys has it, Five9 has it. All of them have it. All the have it. It's, it's, it's what you need. You need it to work as workforce. You need to know what that is so that you can utilize the proper tools to get people there. Once you get them there, then that's that handoff. In order to make sure everybody understands though, gets the whole thing level set. When you go to set up your capacity plan, the, my, my model has always been I would get my, my sales projections'cause I'd have to work with my sales team.'cause I gotta figure out what my membership base is gonna look like, you know, month over month. So what are you expecting to see coming in the door by market segment or by, you know, product type or whatever the case may be. I get that. Then I can give myself some type of hit rate off or contact rate off of what I'm looking at with those particular numbers. I'm gonna start talking to, I'm gonna list out all of my assumptions. A whole tab on that capacity plan should be all of your assumptions. A h, t, adherence, conformance, shrinkage, occupancy. All of those things need to be there, and then you need to be able to sit down and articulate those with the business and have the business buy it. If you wanna see, so if you wanna have a problem with getting your, your capacity model blessed and move forward and have it sit in front of the CFO and say, yeah, we do need to hire to this, you're gonna need to have a lot more people to just workforce management on board with it. You need to have your operations, sales, collections, whatever it is that you're supporting. A hundred percent behind you on this. And if, if, if, if get that, I don't believe you. I don't think this is right. This is some voodoo magic ang, I never heard of that. Who's AK Lan? Never heard of that guy. then okay. Who do you trust? You trust a finance person. And, the way I found too, if I can get someone from the finance team to take a look at the model and explain exactly how Ang C and Lan X work. That buy-in comes into play, and now you're sitting there providing a very solid model with a forecast at any rate there to, to all those parties. The way to further instill confidence is not just have the model with the forecast on it. Have I, I set it up where my January column is, my actuals, and then my forecast. I wanna see what it looks like right next to each other. I wanna see what all these pieces are are that are coming together. You know, my a HT, my adherence, my conformance, my shrinkage, whether it's on phone, shrink off phone, shrink, versus leaves and things of that nature. I wanna see it all right there. And if we've had a spike, what happened? Well, in 2020 we all kind of know what happened. We had a spike in our overall leave utilization because there was this weird covid thing running around. So went through the roof, but our call volume also dipped because no one was calling in'cause you couldn't really use health insurance at that point. So it's, you know, those types of things. That's when you have to, you're gonna come back and have to explain and, and it should be a monthly explanation. Why did we miss, you know, why is our forecast off? you could tell me as the workforce analyst, why your forecast is off and, and have that list there. I'm, I'm okay with that. Because then that also means, you know, maybe for future use, I don't use this month, or this May in 2020. Personally, if anybody's using 2020 data or 2021, I think you should scrap that. 2020 is, you know, is the covid, year 21 is the, is the correction to it. I'd scrap both those years and not utilize those in any of my models. but and you have to be able to explain those types of things and it's okay. It is okay to miss as long as there's an explanation. It's okay to miss. Everyone should understand what your assumptions were walking in, and then you should end up being able to explain why the misses occurred if they did.

Irina: 31:20

This is a, a great way to, to wrap the conversation and maybe just to get your final thoughts on the part that... I keep on speaking with people that are absolutely terrified of walking in a room and speaking to senior leadership and being challenged by, I don't believe that, or You are wrong. And somehow I'm getting the feeling that they take that feedback personally and translated as criticism to their, professionalism or, character assassination or something. So. Give me some advice. How can we tell people that this is not, no, this is the job of senior leadership is to question, to challenge, and at some point, if you have good explanation, it is okay.

Eric: 32:08

Yeah, a absolutely, and, and it's, that is you're, you're spot on. Senior leadership, your CEO, CFO, COO, all of those folks are supposed to be questioning you. supposed to be poking holes in it and truth, it should be even further down the line. It should be poked holes should be poked in all the way up the chain, up until you get everything finalized. People should be asking questions, probing questions. It doesn't always. The, the, if, if it's just, I don't believe this, then, then, okay. What, what don't you believe in? Oh, I don't believe we need that many people. O okay. Why, why don't you, why don't you believe this? I've shown you why I think we do. Tell me why. Tell me where the assumptions went wrong. And again, when you have that list of assumptions and you're putting that out there first to everybody so they can see this is what your model's based on, then they can challenge those assumptions. That's that's fine. If a CEO comes in and says, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm going to decrease our overall average handle time and we're gonna increase our adherence because this is our, it has been. I'm just making this up off the cuff, but this is something we haven't monitored very well. We haven't worked on, from a performance management perspective, we're bringing it back. So I wanna make sure that all that comes into play. Okay. What do you, what's the new goals then that you're putting out there? What is it that you're going to do so that we can look at, you know, do I need to decrease a HT by 10% month over month? What? What's your plan? And then that way, okay, now I can put that back in the model and I should be able to kick that off quick and easy. Once the model's built, you should have something there that does give you those levers that make it really quick and easy.'cause if you start, if you show a C-suite or your VPs or whoever, you know, Hey, if I adjust by 10%, here's what you gain back for the number of fte. If I, if it goes the other way though, you know, because you brought in something where you. You want someone to spend more time with one of your customers, whether, know, you're trying to get that first call resolution or first contact resolution up, you know, and you know it's gonna take longer, then okay, we build that in. You need to be able to show them that. And when they can play with that in real time, kind of builds their confidence too. So they, they see that, oh, okay, this, the numbers do move. but it, it is, it is. You have to be ready to be challenged and you have to take emotion out. This is, it is just the facts you're looking at, just the numbers that came across your desk, you know, LX would be a great example, right? So for if you say that you're getting, text messaging and you're doing, or, and you're doing chats and you say, you know what? I don't want it to be one-to-one anymore. I think you handle up the five. Okay. Here's what that does for your staffing needs, but this is, again, everything is set. So if they want to challenge something, here's the, here's what you can challenge the numbers, the, the math that comes out on the other end shouldn't be in question, especially once you get finance on board that they should be able to sit there and deflect a lot. No, no, no, no. We vetted the bo, we vetted the formulas and the volumes that that should be fine. But the assumptions can always be and should always be challenged if, if you, if you think that things are gonna be lax, if there's no business that's gonna sit there and accept status quo.

Irina: 35:24

I don't know what to say. for an end and I enjoyed that conversation so much and thank you for just being so passionate about it and just raising awareness, how important that topic is because a lot of organizations are ignoring it. In different parts of the world or in different industries. So thank you so much for this conversation and we're ending up on the note that Eric is currently available to be snatched for a director's position. So I believe now everyone is falling in love with him and his passion. So how do they find you, Eric? How do they snatch you?

Eric: 36:04

you could find me on LinkedIn. I'm, I think I'm the only Eric Bainbridge out there. you can email me at EricMBainbridge@gmail.com. Feel free.

Irina: 36:15

And hopefully this will be a success story. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Eric: 36:19

Thank you. Appreciate the time.