Pooling vs. Specialization & Managing off-line work

[rdonnel]

Does anyone know of a good source to get information on specilaization vs. pooling and for how best to structure an environment with real-time call handling and very complex and time consuming back-end work?

I'm trying to determine if I should create strcuture that has phone reps that handle the customer contact and a backoffice / setup group to handle the complex after call work.

Direction appreciated...

[Fran]

I was team manager for our offline department for 4 years and I took over this position just when the company was going into transition following the sale of our company to another. Our backlog was enormous and so we needed to be innovative. The way it worked when I took over: each agent was delegated the same tasks on a daily basis. The agents were also on rotation whereby they would do offline and then go back to front-line service and another group would be doing offline for another 6 months. The purpose of this was to expose everyone to offline duties so that when they would go back to front-line the work forwarded to offline would be more accurate to eventually decrease the invalid requests coming to offline. I found that the agents were decreasing their productivity with task assigned responsibilities and I had to increase the amount of work produced from our department. The tasks changed where everyone was going to be multi-tasking. One agent was assigned to delegating the work, a tracking sheet was created to quantify their work and the agents were provided all work instead of some work. Their work was continuous and it was the delegator's task to keep them busy all day. Challenges addressed by offline multi-tasking?: THe balance of work from one agent to another; if one would leave on vacation or for another job, we were not stuck trying to find a replacement and train the agent; higher productivity; etc. I'm no longer managing the offline team but this way of doing offline work is still the same... it's been 5 years now ! Good luck.