Floor duty!

[Ed Tooker]

For the last few years the management staff has had floor duty in the call center to ensure that the CSRs are on the phone and doing what is needed of them. Until know, we have not had any process or procedure on what the floor duty person should do and how they should approach the CSRs that should be on the phone but are not.

Does anyone have any insight or procedures that are proven effective that they would mind sharing. We have a task force indentifying what needs to be done and a great resource begins in the forum.

[zoinks]

Have you considered other quality and performance monitoring options? There are various software applications that might assist you not only with ensuring agents are doing what they're supposed to, but that they are doing it right as well. If you did a cost/benefit analysis you might find the cost of the application is less than the cost of management time spent roving. Many of these tools also offer automation so you can review them later. If you educate your agents as to the importance of this as a training and evaluation tool you might get buy in. After all, they're check is based on their performance.

[thetuan]

I am not a believer in floor duty for the frontline manager. It's a function of the workforce team (analysts and monitors) to manage the call center floor real time. The workforce team needs a tool so that they can have a bird's eye view of the floor and of all the schedules at all times. If a CSR is out of adherence, then the workforce team will immediately notify a member of mgmt (a lead CSR in my center) so that we can track down the CSR. Also, we can run an adherence report to show who and how much they are out of adherence. This way, we can also speak to the violators the next day. Overtime, CSRs know what is expected of them and they will notify a member of mgmt if they need to get off the phone because they don't want the managers to come to them all the time!!

Another negative point to floor duty for managers is that other managers will not be attentive to the activities of the floor because it is "not their floor hour". If you center have the right type frontline managers, that type of attitude will not happen but I was not that lucky in the beginning :)

Good Luck

Tuan