Traffic Departments?

[kathleen75]

I am interesting in learning what responsibilities fall into the hands of traffic departments in different call centers.

We started our traffic department about a year ago. Our call center consists of approx. 65 reps with 6 seperate skills.

When the traffic department started, it consisted of a manager and two call center analysts. For the past 6 months, we have been working with 1 manager and 1 call center analyst.

The responsibility of the call center analyst are as follows:

-Forecasting and scheduling of six seperate queues
this is a manual process entering data into Excel spreadsheets

-Monitoring real- time adherence through use of CentreVu
Supervisor

-Tracking sick, late arrival, early departure occurances

- create daily, weekly, monthly reports

- analyze above reports to adjust staffing calculations

- schedule training for the department

- consulting with managers on agent performance

- updating erlang C calculations based on call handling time


Above are the basic job responsibilties. The position includes varies other duties as well. Are these realistic responsibilites for one call center analyst to perform efficiently? What are other call centers traffic department staffing levels? Responsibilities? Especially those of similar size?

Any imput would be greatly appreciated.

[AMPawlak]

Hi Kathleen!

I am the only full time member of the Traffic department for my call center. I have one person who helps me out by pulling historical information several times per day and e-mailing it to the supervisors and team leads. My center has about 80 associates, with a total of 17 skills in use. We do utilize skill based routing through CentreVu Supervisor 6.6. Our staffed hours are 7-7 Mon-Fri.

We do not do as much forecasting as many centers since my agents are full time employees - we do not have as much "play" with the schedule because of their guaranteed 40 hours. I pull the interval information and run the call center calculations based on Erlang and making adjustments for shrinkage. That information is provided to the supervisors and they make the actual schedule. Our schedules are fairly constant until there is a new hire or termination.

The team supervisors handle tracking sick/late/early issues at the associate level - they need to be on top of the situation in order to administer the attendance policy correctly. Traffic is apprised of who is here, but we do not handle the tracking portion.

I handle the real time monitoring and moving agents amongst skills to maintain our service levels - some 80/20, others 80/30 based on the contract. We also have quite a bit of fax activity, so I make adjustments as needed to move people between the fax role and the phones.

The staffing also falls to me - both headcount transfers between teams for balance and decisions about needing additional headcount and where to place it.

Traffic coordinates any training or other project work that needs to be done. Daily, weekly, and monthly reports are created for two main purposes. One group is for the director and myself - to judge overall how the center is doing and what it may need. The second set is for supervisors and focuses on issues at the agent level.

I also function as point person for any center wide IT issues. We have had quite a few problems with our platform. I need to know the problems up front so I know how our stats will be affected.
I work with the Telecom department and participate in vector writing and VDN assignments.

The traffic department was created about 3.5 years ago, and I am the first person in the position. I've basically been developing it as I go along, so I can't offer any insight into what most centers do. To me, it would seem odd to have additional members of the department because I'm used to handling it on my own.