Giving Out Breaks And Lunches

[davidb]

Hello Everyone,

I am trying to revamp the way we are giving out our breaks and lunches to our Technical Support Agents. Currently, we have a single phone that our agents call when they are ready to go and we approve or deny their request. This procedure was fine when we only had 20 or 30 agents on the phones at any given time, but our business has grown so large that we now have on average 100+ agents. The Supervisor who runs the control center desk is currently spending 45-65% of his/her time answering the telephone granting breaks and lunches rather than concentrating on running the floor. Does anyone have any suggestions on how else to structure breaks and lunches? Our center is based on high productivity, efficiency and profitability so we attempt to have our availability as low as possible and only let between 10-15% of our staff go to either and any given time throughout the day. I have been looking into developing a web-based solution where an algorithm is developed that calculates the amount of people who can take breaks and lunches on a half hourly basis. Upon inserting the staffing/call forecast percentage into a sql database for each half hour, it would calculate and insert a value for a "breaks" field and a "lunches" field for each half hour. Agents on the floor would have a web-based solution to go request a break or lunch based upon the next closest half hour. It would also require that agent to submit their userid. Depending on whether the max number had been reached or not it would grant them permission. By having their userid we would have an audit tape to pull to see at any given point who was granted permission to go to lunch and who wasn't so people who abuse the system could be reprimanded since it is based upon honor. We could also go into the database real-time and update the number of breaks and lunches that could be taken in a given half hour if call volume was extremely low.

This is only an idea I have but before I begin developing this solution, is there any other way that has already been thought up before I go reinventing the wheel?

Thanks for your help!

David Bowles

[JerichoIlagan]

David,

You could try to use a scheduling software to make breaks/lunch schedules for your agents. There's a very efficient software that we use called TCS. You just plot down how many agents you have and the call volume that is projected and VOILA! everything is prepared for you.

Hope this helps.

Jericho

[gkern]

We monitor it and make adjustments to schedules (lunch, break, overtime) in real time during the day through the use of some internal tools that we have developed and management procedures. This is a tech support environment as well.

Some of these can be seen on line if you are interested. I would need to talk to you first before setting it up.

Greg Kern
CallTech
512-261-0409

[kelemvor]

Whichever mode you take, you will almost certianly have to pre-schedule breaks and lunches. Like you stated, you can do it at will with a smaller center but when the center grows it's impossible to manage that when it's different every day.

We have everyone's lunches scheduled becauase those are 30 minutes long and everyone can use their judgement if they need to take a quick break for whatever reason.

We also have a system so everyone can see real time how many calsl are waiting in queue and how many other people are on break. Then we have guidelines set up that no more than X people can be on break at once and onyl if there's less than Y calls holding...