Timeout! Sports, Kids, and Contact Centers

Timeouts in the sporting world are almost always used in an effective manner. Sure there’s the odd time where it turns into an amazing disaster (Chris Webber in the 1993 NCAA Finals comes to mind), but for the most part, they are used as methods to take a breather, either to get your players rested for a final push down the stretch or to get a break from getting overwhelmed by the opposing team. In terms of kids, timeouts are administered when a child needs a break, either from misbehaving or being overstimulated. How can we apply timeouts in our contact center? Let’s have a look at a few of the ways the Q-Suite can use these.

• Hold Timeout – When a agent handles a call, there may be numerous reasons as to why the agent needs to place the caller on hold. If your contact center has hard limits on how long a caller is allowed to be placed on hold, you can set a Hold Timeout duration. Upon setting the duration, a contact center administrator can decide what to do if the timeout is exceeded. Stay on hold or route to a different IVR are options that can be chosen.
• No Answer Timeout –  This setting applies to outbound dialing and is the amount of time that the dialer will wait until it determines that the end point is not answering. The duration in seconds for this particular contact center configuration option is typically set to something between 30-40 seconds. Setting the timeout too low may result in many calls that get flagged as no answers simply because the end point did not have enough time to register the attempt.
• Queue Max Wait Time – The sophisticated visual IVR builder in the Q-Suite allows you to configure nodes that will route a caller to an inbound queue. The Max Wait Time option is a very crucial setting as this will handle the amount of time that a caller will stay waiting in the queue before automatically exiting. Depending on what the business rules of the contact center state, this setting will vary widely across different instances. It is usually up to the client to determine a proper value. In most cases, sites have opted to set this value to be a very large number. This large number will cause one of two results: 1) if the caller does in fact wait it out, they are almost guaranteed to be routed to an agent or 2) the caller initiates some form of queue option via DTMF that will allow them to control where they go next.