Suggestions for blended environments?

[Lorechaser]

So - I have a fair bit of experience with inbound call centers.

And suddenly, I've found myself in a blended inbound/outbound environment, and I'm a bit thrown for a loop.

I'm using Aspect eWFM 7.1, and the best fix I could come up with is simply to figure out the average time agents spent on outbound calls, and put that in as a separate shrink factor. It seems to have worked pretty well in terms of forecasted scheduling.

However - I'm about to take over all the aspects of the center, rather than just the forecasting side. I've got Empower installed, and I'm planning to roll it out. And now my managers are freaking out about the idea of automated approval.

Every time I mention it, they basically say "But what about outbound calls? If you approve vacation, I might not have enough people!"

Anyone dealt with this, and have advice? I don't want to do something like require manager approval on vaca requests, because that defeats the purpose. I know I can look in to the outbound adjustments, but I'm hoping for something a little less manual....

[mbaty1]

I have one question. When you state you now find yourself in a blended inbound/outbound environment. Does this mena that all of your agents are serving both purposes or do a majority of them assist with incoming calls while a small percentage are assigned to a blended team where they receive both types of calls?

One of the easier ways that we have attacked situations similar to this (when only a small percentage are blended agents) is to create a seperate work group for your blended agents. An example would be our Regular Customer Service Agents taking inbound calls would be grouped into one group while the agents that assisted in customer service inbound and outbound calls would be associated with a seperate group.

This allows a couple different things:

1) Reporting is able to assign one set of "goals" to report on for the inbound agents while allowing them to determine an appropriate standard for the blended agents, allowing a more "fair" and balanced reporting structure.

2) You are able to set your vacation allotments for the inbound agents at a certain rate, while being able to allocate a more limited number of hours for your blended agents.

there are a few other advantages, as well as some disadvantages to this method, but this seems to be a simple method while allowing for a more structured reporting process across all lines of business.

Hope this helps some.....