Adjust your call flow to your staffing

[Martijn]

I like to know if anyone tries to adjust his call flow to his staffing. This can be in all sorts of ways, possibly by virtual queueing or by variable call rates or by letting people know when it's the best time of day to call you.

These are just a few ideas, i'm very intersted if anyone knows some more ideas and especially if anyone uses one of those ideas.

[stretch]

Adjusting call flow to staffing happens all the time by default - it is called understaffing, and causes poor service levels, call abandonment, and so on. It distorts the 'natural' call patterns so that it is always difficult to figure how you should staff properly.

The preferable options are to create optimal schedules, manage adherence and productivity to get the most out of available resources. If that does not work, make the case for more resources. If that does not work, you will know you are not really in the customer service business and you have some career decisions to make.

Sorry, there is no substitute for good customer service - it takes resources to do it well.

[Martijn]

I still think the question is legitimate and i still consider myself to be in the customer services business. Our Servicelevel and ASA are on a high level most of our opening hours but at dinnertime we usually have a dip in Servicelevel.

We can't get the agents that work across the day to stay until after dinner time, because of there contracts and legislation.

We do our best to adjust our staff to our call flow, but during dinner time we can't always get it done. That's why i'm still wondering if anybody knows ways of adjusting call flow to your staff and maybe uses something to do this.

[NatM]

A couple things that we have used:

1. Utilize part-time staffing to cover your evening hours. You can use contract or agency employees to fill this void.

2. Overstaff and then "shed." Make sure you have enough or even more than enough people to handle the volumes and then should volumes fall lower than forecast you can offer employees to have time off without pay, utilize their vacation/comp time, etc. You would be surprised how many people will actually take advantage of the time off without pay.

3. Use call routing to utilize agents in other (perhaps specialty) skills that are not as busy. In our Avaya PBX this is called Reserve Level routing. You can set certain thresholds such that a call will only be presented to those agents if the queue reaches a certain threshold. For example: say you have Bilingual agents that primarily handle Spanish-language calls. You can add the English calls to their skill set at a Reserve level such that they will only receive an English call if the queue reaches X number of seconds. This is part of the Avaya Business Advocate package and is also called Service Level Supervisor. You can read more about it at http://www1.avaya.com/enterprise/brochures/gcc0467.pdf.

[Martijn]

Hoi NatM,

thx for you reply. We already use point 1 and 2, but these can't help us enough to avoid the bad servicelvels at diner sometimes.

We're a rather big Call Canter and so we have a high utilisation. This makes us vulnerable for diving in to bad servicelevels.

The third point. We also have Avaya and we know of reserve-agents, but we don't have any reserve agents. All our agents are front-office agents.

Anayway, thanks again for the reply.

[stretch]

Hey Martijn,

Have you considered outsourcing your overflow calls for that period of the day? It sounds like you have gone through the standard solutions, and maybe you can use a thhird party to give you some relief.

There are options these days to use callback features, but they only work if you have excess capacity later (within a reasonable timeframe from when the client calls).

Yet another alternative to consider: are there other departments in the building with staffing resources that you can draw from to help out during your time of need? A correspondence or e-mail department for example, who have the option of taking a break and going back to their core workloads after plugging in for an hour or so?

Could you encourage your customers to switch to e-mail??

[Kepe]

If you use blending it help you some what. If you have multiskilled agents you can send email, fax, callback, backoffice tasks, outbound etc. during low traffic and have only inbound calls during peaks. As lunch and dinner is short you may offer callback as an option during this time and promise call back within 1-2 hours, some will accept this others will stay in queue.

Team Leads what never takes calls? This is the time for them to stay in touch with there hands on skills. Have them schedule to take calls 1 hour a day, this will help your service level fantastic.

Scheduling is not easy, especially in Europe!

[Martijn]

Stretch & Kepe,

i thank you both for your replies. As for Stretch, we're outsourcing a part of our traffic. But the outsourcer can't guarantee really high peakloads if we don't offer them enough traffic during the rest of the day.

We don't have any mid-office agents who can help us during peakhours.

As for Peke. We do have some outbound agents who can help us sometimes. But a lot of the time they have fixed appointments they need to call.

As for Team Leads, i think you mean supervisors (seniors). They have schedules with call time in them, but they don't always adhere to the schedules. This is a point we're working on.

As for scheduling is not easy, especially in Europe, i have to agree.

[Michcall]

It sounds as if you've tried most of the methods for handling the traffic with little success. Have you tried to offload any calls through an IVR? Are there any routine calls that you could automate to avoid the calls going to an agent? This could decrease your overall volume. I don't know the acceptance of that technology in your country, but they are fairly commonplace in the US. You could also use this to manage the dinner hour by giving callers the option to hold or use the automated system.

You could also put a message upfront in your queue that tells callers when is the best time to call. Of course, this will just move your volume from the dinner hour to the rest of the day, so you would have to be sure you could handle the increased volume at other times.