1 Skillset per IVR Prompt or as Few skillsets as possible?

[Mendes]

There has always been great discussion regarding this and wanted to see the feedback of the people who live and breathe it.

Say you have 6 Prompts off an IVR (we will pretend its a keyboard support company)

1 - Keyboard 1
2 - Keyboard 2
3 - Keyboard 3
4 - Keyboard 4
5 - Keyboard 5
6 - Keyboard 6

Agents get trained on Keyboard 1, 2 and 3 Initially. Then a month later on Keyboards 4, 5 and 6.

You have two options here

1. 2 Skillsets. 1 for Keyboards 1,2,3 and 1 for 4,5,6
2. 6 Skillsets. 1 for each Keyboard.

Which would you choose and why? Assuming there are no Scheduling conflicts that would be caused.

[Steve Turton]

Just my opinion of course.... but I would choose 6 skill sets. Because there may be different levels of knowledge even within each skill set. So by only having 2 skill sets, you are asumming that everyone is equal within those 2 sets. But I think with 6, there are some people more knowledgable than others, even though they may have had the same training. The objective would be to help the increase the product knowledge of everyone of course, but some learn faster or remember more than others.

The danger of having 6 might be that one person receives most of the calls, but you can do some load distribution balancing....to set numbers handled.

The Call Center Manager will need to review the number of calls handled by each CSR, and determine why one person is so much lower than another and vice versa.

Perhaps it will be necessary to try both ways and compare results.

Interesting question.