Responding to spikes

[dllohio]

We are a very small call center for a hospital and when staffing is low due to whatever reason responding quickly to spikes in call volume is challenging.

We have managers paged at certain wait times and # of calls waiting. We are looking into having sound play at key individuals PCs so they can react quickly. We also have calls waiting and wait times on our screens.

What do others do to respond to spickes in call volume throughout the day. Just curious to see if there are other creative solutions out there.

[Steve Turton]

Not to sound like a commercial.... but you could consider using the overflow from your busy queues to go to other departments automatically...... or even Home Based Agents.

These other departments can control the calls by putting themselves in 'available or busy' mode..... but they would also see on their PC screens, a little box which shows the 'Queue' activity and if lit up with a yellow or red background, they know they are needed..... so just hit 'available'..... and calls will start to come to them, in sequence. Once the Queue has died down again, they just hit 'busy'.

Let me know if I can send you any information.....

steve@telax.com

[Louie Gazzola]

I have just completed a number of small projects in the health industry and had the same kind of challenges. With older technology and limited staffing, it is very difficult to achieve service targets during spike periods.

What we had done was come up with a number of filters by using special phone numbers and a very simple voice mail system as an IVR to identify who the most urgent callers may be. This will help you priotize the calls but not answer the critical calls.

Therefore what we also did was provide an option to leave a voice mail and a promise to call back within a set time frame. By planning on having a resource action these voice mails, we were able to better manage our callers expectations.

Feel free to email me, and I can provide you more details.