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If your call centre uses an IVR to route calls, not only will you be able to count calls by type but you should find that without too much effort you will be able to extract AHT by call type too.

This is likely to be the best starting point, though it does have its limitations.

In the previous section we needed to know the AHT of a successful sales call and an unsuccessful one; unfortunately, callers aren’t too good at choosing this as they make their way through the IVR!  Sometimes you need to be more inventive about how you split an AHT figure down into its constituent part (see next page).

Another method is to get your agents to log call types on your ACD.  As they close each call they enter a code on the ACD itself; you can then run reports to view the number of calls and AHT per call type, an invaluable aid in the planner’s armoury.

The downside of this is that agents generally don’t like doing it and have to be incentivised if they are to log sufficiently many calls.  It also has the problem of increasing AHT slightly, adding to the problem your actually trying to solve.