Scheduling: Close for Lunch Hour?

[concept27]

Anyone closing their center during the lunch hour? I perform sales acquistion and I'm considering closing for one hour to alleviate the scheduling strain on the remainder of the day. I have 6 reps covering 8a - 7p with a pretty linear call flow. Average handle time is around 6 minutes...My preliminary analysis shows that I will get about 3 additional hours of full staff coverage during the day by closing for a one hour lunch. Anyone have anything to share???

[TPodlesak]

I am happy to hear someone else is thinking the same thing. I have a call center of about 20 agents. That is small and not all that common.

I have been struggling with the same issue. I plan to put some numbers together to see what volume of calls I receive between 12 and 1. I am very sorry to say I have no system that tells me real time status of my call volume. I have no system telling me if I am in que or how long a customer is waiting to get through. Does that shock you? I have been here for about 2 years and still fighting to get a system in place.

I believe as long as the customer knows you are closed for that hour, they will adjust there thinking. The one area I have been concerned with is our customer on the west coast. We have a large volume of calls come from that time zone. Upper Management would prefer we keep the phones open until I can show them unshakable facts. What information do you feel has helped you make this move? What does Marketing, Sales and Upper Management have to say about your request?

[adec]

We have an EMEA based technical CallCenter that takes about 4.5k calls a month (plus about the same in email), with approx 15 agents.

In the past we did close at lunchtime, but we did make it very clear on our website that this was our policy. In EMEA we have to cover English / German / French / Italian, so it seemed to make more sense from a staffing level point of view.

Recently though I've just moved the CallCenter to a new company, and their preferred take was to keep the lines open during the lunch hour.

Staffing wise (by languages) we seem to be coping ok. Mainly because in EMEA the lunch hour does seem to be the quietest part of the day.

(I think our customers don't want to disturb their own lunch hour by calling us, and would prefer to do it during 'company' time ;)

adec

[Steve Turton]

Could you possibly have another department or a few Home Based agents take these calls during lunch?

It's simple to set up, just some programming on the Queues, and you would see reports showing how many calls were handled, by which agents, how they waited, abandoned call numbers so you could call them back, etc.

For the other person who has zero report information..... don't go out a buy another system..... I might be able to help you to.

Let me know if I can help.....

Steve@telax.com

[Rachana]

HI
I will suggest rather then having only one lunch break for one hour you can also divide the same in to two half an hour breaks.
and the same can be at different time for all people who attend the calls or customers.
So there will be a througout availibilites of customers serving officers.

[getgunner]

why do you want to tell your customers that you are not interested in there business because your agents need to have a break???

Re-work your schedules so that agents come in a little earlier or overlap a shift, or shorten their lunch breaks and so that instead of an hour they take 30 minutes or 45 minutes, get them to work with you on this.

Get in touch with your telco company and ask them for a copy of your phone records and look at when the calls arrive. do some research yourself and stop looking for a reason why not to answer the phone and concentrate on how you can answer the calls more efficiently, and look after your customers, they are the ones who are paying your wages!!!