Your call center has received an unexpected burst of calls. Volumes are up all day. Calls are waiting too long. What do you do?
When you’re using skills-based routing, the answer may be reskilling your workforce and logging in additional personnel.
When your response times seem to be out of whack, you may have a mismatch between the skills of currently logged in agents, or a race condition between a lower volume queue and a higher volume queue. Q-Suite comes with a few reports and screens that allow you to view the skills and queue assignments of your agents. If you have a queue that needs more people, you have a couple of options:
1) Log in more people, and temporarily assign them the needed skills. Sometimes you’ll have administrative staff and supervisors who are technically capable of handling the calls, but don’t normally log into the system. These people probably haven’t been assigned skills. You can apply these skills using the live skill assignment page, and have them log in to take some calls.
2) Remove some skills from people who are able to handle these calls. If one queue is getting hammered and another queue is not, you may want to temporarily remove the skills that allow some agents to receive calls from both skills. For instance, if Fred has the “tech support” skill and the “new enrollments” skill, and “new enrollments” is very busy, you can take the “tech support” skill off and let other agents with that skill handle those calls. That ensures the “new enrollments” queue gets Fred’s undivided attention until the burst of activity is over.
If you chose to make those skill assignments live, but did not change the permanent skill assignments, everything will go back to normal when the agents next log in. A combination of these methods should definitely help in dealing with spikes.
Of course, you may be adding a new queue with a new set of skills, and want to add those skills to a group of agents. You can do that, too. Just go to the skill assignments page, and add the new skills to the agents you want. You have the option of making that live, or only when the agent next logs in.