Measuring after-call work from your own data.
After-call work, or ACW, is everything an agent does between hanging up and being ready for the next call: notes, CRM updates, forms, dispositions. It is the most commonly automated thing on a floor and the least commonly measured.
The formula, and the trap in it
Total ACW time divided by total calls gives you average ACW per call. Multiply by call volume and you have hours. Multiply by loaded hourly cost and you have money. That part is simple.
The trap is that ACW as your dialer reports it is usually only the time the agent spent in the wrap state. Work that spills into the next available period, or gets done in a batch at the end of a shift, or happens in a different system entirely, does not appear. On most floors the reported number is the floor of the real one, not the middle of it.
Pull it in four steps
- One. Export wrap-state duration per call from the dialer for a full month. A week is too short: month-end and renewal cycles distort it.
- Two. Split by line of business and by call type. A service call and a new business call are not the same job, and averaging them hides the one worth automating.
- Three. Take the median as well as the mean. If they are far apart, a small number of calls is carrying the cost, and those calls are your target.
- Four. Sit with two agents and time the same work by hand for twenty calls. Compare it to what the system said. That gap is your correction factor, and it is the number nobody else can give you.
What a benchmark is worth
Published figures put after-call work at roughly 6 to 12% of an agent's paid time, with compliance-heavy lines at the top of that range. Read that as orientation, not as evidence. The figure circulates mostly through contact-center software vendors' own content rather than through published research, which means it is directional and it is not disinterested.
Your own month of data outranks it. If your measured number lands outside that range in either direction, trust yours and go looking for why, because the why is usually the thing worth fixing.
Turning it into a decision
Once you have hours, the decision is not "should we automate this". It is "which part". Break the wrap into its pieces and time each: the summary, the CRM fields, the disposition, the follow-up task, the form. One of them will dominate. That one is where a change is worth making, and it is usually not the one people assume.
Then set the after-measurement before you start, using the same export and the same split. Changing how you measure between the before and the after is how honest projects end up unable to prove anything.
Want this looked at on your own floor?
Twenty minutes on your systems and your numbers. You leave with the map either way.