Managing Service Level

[vanguard_cool_bro]

Good day!

I would like to know the different and effective ways of managing service level. Making sure that Absenteeism rate and AHT are in acceptable levels is one thing. Proper staffing is another.

So in particular, how can one effectively manage break and lunch schedule adherence? Let say that the support representatives follow certain AUX codes for their respective breaks or lunches. That will help monitor if they go over their scheduled breaks or lunches. How about the actual time they took their breaks or lunches for example? Some support representatives tend to take their respective breaks or lunches off their supposed schedules so they can have them together with their peers. The consequence, of course, is that only a bare minimum number of support representatives are left on Avail to answer incoming calls. As such, if there's a spike in Call volume, for example, only a handful of support representatives are available. How can one monitor proper schedule adherence through Avaya CMS for example aside from the Agent Interval Report? How can one motivate support representatives to take their breaks on time aside from Education? Incentives for perfect attendance and manageable AHTs are okay. Incentives for following breaks are a little too much. Also, micro-managing break/lunch schedule adherence may possibly lead to support representatives that they're being watched like a hawk.

Thank you so much.

[n_meghanath]

It seems you don't have any work force tools for doing Real time monitoring. In absence of such a tools the scheduled time adherence is quite difficult to manage unless you have dedicated people to manage the break schedules on a real time basis. However, the challenges of maintaining require no of agents logged in can be fought by checking the real time queue report which shows no of agent staffed, no of agents active, calls in queue blah blah...

I would consider adherence of schedules to be a basic hygiene factor and may want to hold team leaders accountable for less than scheduled position staff. you may also want to try your hands to create a report from the login logout report.

[Steve Turton]

Sounds like you have employees who don't care about your business needs....they seem to be interested in themselves first.

Explain one last time the reason for schedules and the why it is important for them to stick to it. If they can't.....then time to move them someplace else.

I get the impression from your email that they don't listen to you or could care less what you ask for. Either you get them straightened out....or you will be moving someplace else.

Just my opinion of course....

[thetuan]

Whoa Steve! You are a little harsh with Vanguard Cool Bro (BWT i love your nickname). It seems like VCO needs some experienced guidance in dealing with a call center issue that is not so easy to deal with IF you don't have the right experience with workforce management and call center operation.

VCO - I am assuming that you are in the workforce department for a call center. Let me help you with your first question - how do you manage service levels? You basically answered that with your comments in your post. You manage your service levels by accurately forecasting the proper load, by effectively scheduling your workforce around your load curve and by managing your schedules real time to ensure proper adherence to what you have set up.

Your second question is around proper management of agents breaks and lunches to ensure proper adherence. You do that two ways - real time and "after the fact". Avaya CMS release 13 does have a real time module for supervisors to manage their agents' schedules so you do have a tool to inform you when the agents are out of adherence. You will need a clean workforce process to identify adherence issues and to inform the floor managers to resolve them real time. One way to do it is to send a message right to the work station informing the agent that he/she needs to take his/her break/lunch. If the agent is not back from his/her break/lunch, you will again need a process so that the operation manager can quickly find the agent in question and get him/her back on the phone.

After the fact - you will need to work with the operation group to come up with an adherence report - ideally, this report will show the adherence percentage of the agents/teams/shift/call center. To make a long story short, if the report show the call center's schedule adherence at, let's say, 80%, then your call center got some work to do in terms of correcting the agents adherence issue. With this structure of reporting, you can drill down right to the agent level and identify the adherence violators and correct their behaviors immediately. The adherence report should consistently show your call center schedule adherence at 95% or higher.

Obviously, I am giving you a very high level view of this issue - please get your call center manager and your workforce manager involve in this discussion and together, they will need to come up with the right processes and/or reports to solve this problem.

Good luck bud

Tuan