by Steven Fitzgerald, Chief Technical Officer, Consistacom
You may be losing cash and customers in a call center process you don’t even know about. Your technology strategies may ignore initial agent provisioning and ongoing agent configuration management, and this can make it impossible to achieve overall goals for quality and TCO.
Human agents are the most expensive component of the center. Waste or under-utilize their time and costs skyrocket. I typically see the telephone system experts using expensive gee-whiz technology for routing calls while the manager only has a workforce management system. It keeps track of agents on the payroll, types of calls they can handle, and automatically creates work schedules. On the back-end there are oodles of reports showing traffic and perhaps even agent productivity. Therein lies a chasm between designed and actual agent configurations. This is sucking labor hours, customer goodwill, revenue and competitiveness out of many enterprises.
The telephone system’s Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) decides which agent gets the next call. The routing algorithms can perform amazing feats with the right information, but usually don’t. I have repeatedly seen proof it is humanly impossible to audit and optimize agent configurations for maximum effectiveness, and most organizations don’t even try. This effectively dumbs down routing strategy and configuration errors result in misrouted calls.
Consider the typical agent configuration workflow. After hiring, someone manually adds him to the ACD. This includes configuring the types of calls he can handle, and possibly proficiency with different ones. The ACD configuration gets changed in planned fashion when graduating from training, transferring to a different business group, or altering a routing strategy. Day-to-day tactical changes are undertaken when a snowstorm closes a center, a billing error result drives high call volume, and so on. At end-of-day all tactical changes must be reversed. Each of these is a manual operation with opportunity for error.
The scale of changes is enormous. A national service provider we studied makes over 40,000 a month. The insurance industry is the extreme case. I have seen dozens of humans constantly changing agent skills, all unnecessarily. Rather than let the ACD make decisions, they keep trying to help in an incredible waste of administrative effort and agent time. All they need do is get accurate and complete information loaded one time, and then routinely update it. Instead they introduce more opportunity for error. I have seen automation reduce a workforce management team size from 12 to 3 while speeding up competitive initiatives to increase revenue. Most organizations go the other direction.
There is a lot of money at stake and this is something only automation can solve. It usually pays for itself in under a year.
Contact the author at tooltalk@consistacom.com.
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