Low Call Volume Set Up

[LT01]

I've been asked to consider telephony support for my organization today we only provide email support 5 days a week. I have extensive experience in this area from a previous job/company but - the company took 20K calls / day.

We have no idea how many calls we would take but, the number is presumably small. Any ideas as to how to manage this? Queue/ACD could be a real waste of capital....how bad is letting customers leave a voice message for a CSR to pick up?

Any advice?

[clecl]

Having been through something similar myself, I know how difficult this sort of planning can be.

The first challenge is to come up with at least a vague estimate of how many calls you are likely to be dealing with and on average how long those calls will last. I found that I was able to come up three scenarios with ranging call volumes and handling times. I was able to do this based on trending the different inquiry types we had been receiving by e-mail and judging which of those would most likely translate into phone calls when the service was offered. Knowledge of what was required to satisfy each request type help me arrive at estimates of average call duration.

I have never been a fan of voicemail as an option for telephone customer service. The grim reality is that customers usually don't like it and you can count on many of them having called again and spoken to someone by the time their message has been returned. There are several options for low-cost ACDs that are tailored for small organizations (both in cost and in features). Your decision in the end will naturally represent a balance of what is good for your customers, what is acceptable to your organization's customer service philosophies and, certainly, what fits your budget. Good luck!

[LT01]

Thank you for your feedback/reply....my challenge is less around technology costs as I agree that there are web/server based ACDs that are much less expensive than the old hardware solutions. The real challenge with low volume telephony support revolves around agent costs....It is very costly to provide a 20 second response time, 7/12 (seven days, 12 hrs) with low volume...lots of idle time and the need to have sufficient staff on hand to cover uneven flow of calls (erlang factor), agent vacations and absenteeism. The alternative is to outsource to a shared pool...not great service in my opinion - especially with the type of service support my team needs to provide.