How Many Staff Do We Need?
Issue: Get this wrong by under-investing and either you won’t be able to cope with the workload, which puts very expensive user productivity at risk along with risking group morale - or over-invest and waste company resources. Too often, staff numbers are arrived at without science, merely reacting to growing workloads by recruiting. Of course by the time you’ve increased headcount, the damage to service has already been done.
Approach: There are at least two dimensions here. The first is to recognise how much resource is actually consumed by the workload, and not just that generated by reacting to support requests and enquiries - you have to quantify all calls on your staff’s time. When you have that, then you can estimate how the growth in demand will affect your staffing - assuming of course that you’re already pretty efficient.
I can help: The low-cost benchmarking service will tell you how similar companies are staffed. But really, the issue is identifying and quantifying the workload, then using the benchmarking algorithm to estimate numbers. This two-pronged approach suggests an initial chat might be useful.