Monday morning inbound call volumes

[wolfe]

I am responsible for several call centers for an insurance company. We have tried many things to level out our call volumes through the week, but have not been successful reducing the Monday call volume. We've tried educating the customer, but it hasn't worked. I'd be interested in hearing how others have overcome this problem either by impacting the volume of Monday callers or through some other staffing or technology solution.

[Thomas Williams]

I have worked for various 24/7 contact center types including including banks, telecommunications, software, cable, web hosting, and credit card companies and have noticed this to be a widespread challenge to change the customer's behavioral pattern such as not calling on Mondays.

In the past I have tried educating the customer by informing them to contact us at later times throughout the week using the IVR and mailings. Unfortunately, this caused little to no change.

Therefore instead of decreasing the customer contact on mondays I started concentrating on providing optimal service levels on this day by doing the following:

Changing my staffing schedules to reflect 85% employees working on Mondays and using new schedule days off mixes.

Using your other centers staffing in a virtual concept and load balancing between all centers.

Call Shaving by decreasing the amount of calls opting to Customer service floor by increasing IVR/VRU utilization from 40% to 70%

Shaved seconds off Agent handle times by performing more verification up front in the IVR. This happens using appropriate CTI platform.

By directing my efforts in these areas, I was able to deliver better service levels for my customers and have seen Monday go from my worst day to my best day.

If you have questions, please contact me 770-974-1820

[JoeB]

I agree with Thomas – it is ineffective (and not “right”) to attempt reduction in call volume by changing the customers’ behavior. In addition to what was already suggested, you may want to measure the load on Mondays more precisely and gauge if you would benefit from starting support at an earlier time. This is a bit tricky because if customers know that support hours begin at 9AM, they will not call at 7 AM, but the shape of the curve and perhaps customer interviews will give you some direction and you can optimize as you go.

The difficult part in increasing staff is to optimize service level and staffing. You will need to measure the call load and create a staffing model that can support this load within your SLA commitment. A good model and careful adjustment will allow you to stay within the SLA with minimum staff increase. Let me know if you need more information about call traffic and staffing modeling.

Joe Barkai
DIAGNOSTIC STRATEGIES
http://www.DiagnosticStrategies.com/
Tel. 781-433-0833

[WebConverse]

Hello Wolfe,

Have you thought about partnering with an outsourcer to provide call overflow?

This is another alternative to handling known peak times/overflow and effectively managing scheduling and keeping your customer's experience a good one.

WebConverse, Inc., located in Hayward, CA, provides outsourced technical support and customer service in our contact centers. WebConverse delivers a complete support solution. We currently provide services for clients in a variety of industries acting as their primary support solution or supplementing an
existing operation.

Our support services include telephony, email, chat, co-browsing,
self-service and knowledge base development/maintenance. We deliver each support program through an open support environment (browser-based application) allowing for interaction and seamless escalation between our agents and the internal support personnel at our client's location.

Our mission is to increase the level of service delivered to end users while reducing our client's overall customer support expenditures. The WebConverse solution allows our clients the freedom to concentrate on core competencies.

Let me know if I can be of further assistance.

Regards,
Tracy Vieira
tracy@webconverse.com
510-784-4158

[bottsro]

I have managed large and medium call centers for over 15 years. The replies you have already received are consistent with my experience. There is something you could consider in addition to these ideas.

I have had great success having CSR's define for the call center management the types of calls they are receiving. After looking at this data for several weeks a group of calls will stand out that could be diverted to some other channel of communications. This helps change your Monday morning call curve and total volume.