It’s that time of year again. Super Bowl Sunday is this weekend. Regardless of which teams happen to be playing in the big game, the Denver Broncos and the Carolina Panthers in this case, it is must-see TV. People watch for various reasons. They want to watch the game itself, they just care about the commercials and the halftime show, or they just want an excuse to hang out with friends on a Sunday night. Whatever your reasoning for watching the Super Bowl, the bottom line is that millions and millions of people tune in who normally would not be tuning in if it were any given Sunday. With the most-watched sporting event worldwide looming on the horizon, let’s have a look at how you can handle volume spikes in your contact center ACD.
- Staff more agents – This one should have been easy to figure out, especially if the volume increase is anticipated. If your inbound ACD is accepting a significantly higher volume of calls than you have agents staffed, a few things can happen and they are all negative. Callers will hang up while waiting in the queues, which inflates the abandoned rate and causes lost sales. Callers will be more irritated due to the long wait times, which tends to project onto the agents. Agents will be under fire for the entire duration of their shift which can cause added stress and can affect performance.
- Reassign agents on the fly – If you are in a situation where the spike in incoming calls to your contact center ACD is not expected, you can use real-time skills-based routing to get a desired block of agents ready to take calls from the heavily loaded queues. When more agents become available, some of the pitfalls from the first point can be avoided.
- Turn up new servers – Having more hardware available to tackle an expected spike in calls is definitely a solution, even though it’s a brute force solution. Load balancing calls over more Asterisk servers is an efficient way to alleviate system stress. Preparing more servers can be more difficult if you are relying on physical servers, but can be done fairly easily and quickly if you are using a hosted contact center ACD platform.
As with anything, proper planning can aid in preventing unexpected occurrences from ruining a perfectly good business day in your contact center ACD. In the off chance that your day is calling an audible and making things difficult, at least you have some tools to turn things around. Take these points into consideration and the only spike you’ll experience will be a touchdown celebration.
In case you may be wondering, I have no horse in this race on Sunday. I’m a New York Giants fan. It would be quite a sight to see one of the most legendary NFL QBs of all-time go out on top in storybook fashion. However, Cam. That Cam guy is awfully good and a complete blast to watch. With that in mind, I’m just going to hope for an epic game while I enjoy the company of a few friends and my homemade Montreal smoked meat. Game on.