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Philips Hue light bulbs can replace expensive LED wallboards

LED wallboards are expensive. In many cases, mounting a large LCD TV isn’t possible due to load restrictions or viewing angle. In many cases, most of the information on the wallboard isn’t even necessary, the agents just need to know how full the queue is. That can easily be indicated with a colour. LED wallboard systems cost thousands of dollars, a Philips Hue “mood light” kit with three bulbs costs $200. Indosoft’s Q-Suite can drive the lights with a very minimal amount of programming by listening to the event broadcaster. Lights can be programmed separately or tied together so they can be seen by more employees.

hue_purple
There’s a caller in the magenta queue

Continue reading “Philips Hue light bulbs can replace expensive LED wallboards”

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Real-time Agent Skill Reassignment for ACD Queues

Even with the best planning there are times when callers are overwhelming specific queues causing wait times to grow longer than usual which could be over the expected SLA (Service Level Agreement). Perhaps a marketing campaign is going viral and the response is much higher than originally thought, or a new product just shipped and calls are higher due to activate or inquiries about it. Knowing this was planned the call center already expected more inbound ACD calls and adjusted the staffing levels higher, but this is not an exact science.

This case is where from an admin interface you need the ability to adjust the skills for a number of agents to change which queues they are handling with which priorities. This allows a currently lower demand queue to have some agents removed or able to cover both. This may raise the wait time in the lower demand queue but if done correctly can keep it within the SLA for that campaign.

With the Q-Suite this is possible with it’s advanced skills based routing and Queues. Adjusting any skill for any agent is easily done from a single screen on the fly in real-time without any action required from the agent.

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Campaign Controls in the Q-Suite

The Q-Suite has a number of incredibly useful campaign controls that are available to the tenant administrator and/or the appropriately privileged user. Prior versions, before 5.7 to be specific, had most of these features spread across multiple pages in the administration portal. These can now be accessed on a single page based on the desired campaign. Let’s outline the controls and their uses. Continue reading “Campaign Controls in the Q-Suite”

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Populating Client Information to Agents in Your ACD – Part 2

In Populating Client Information to Agents in Your ACD – Part 1 I talked about getting your client data into your call center ACD software. That’s an important step, but it doesn’t complete the task. Today I want to address the topic of finding the particular contact who is calling in and presenting that information to the call center agent. Continue reading “Populating Client Information to Agents in Your ACD – Part 2”

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ACD Call Routing: What Happens When an Agent Misses The Call?

With Asterisk ACD Systems, or any ACD Software, one has to take into account the agent’s behaviour. One issue that can happen is an ACD call is routed to an agent due to indicating they are ready but are not able to accept the call at that time.

They may miss the pop-up on screen prompting them to accept the call. Or perhaps they are On-Hook and are distracted and unable to answer the call in time. Answering the phone while in On-Hook mode or clicking to accept the call are both forms of acknowledgement which when received bridge the caller and agent together.

What happens when this acknowledgement is missed?

This will depend on the configuration. Systems will offer two key settings related to these missed ACD calls. First is how many times to allow calls to be missed, if this is allowed then the agent will go back to being ready for a call after missing the acknowledgement. The second setting is related to how quickly they will go back to being ready. It’s typically best for the caller experience to not put them back in automatically until the agent indicates they are ready, however some situations will have agents missing the occasional call and then it makes sense to put them back after a few seconds.

No matter the reason or configuration when these cases happen we still need reporting to let us know what is going on with the system and agents.

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Connecting Call Center Agents

It looks like there’s a common theme running through recent blog posts. At the Indosoft blog this week, I wrote “Remote Agents in the Modern Call Center” discussing connecting at-home and remote groups of agents to a call center.  This seems like an obvious expansion of the Cloud to call center concept.

I had originally considered talking about connection methods in my post, but at the last moment cut it out as not being as important. That is a topic that was covered last Friday by Shaun, who wrote “Connecting Agents to the Call Center ACD” which talks about the types of devices an agent can use to connect in.

A couple of weeks ago, Brian wrote “Agent Connections With an ACD System” which discussed on-hook and off-hook agent connections, as well as VoIP vs. dial in or dial out connections for agent phones.  Between all three posts, I believe the topic of connecting agents to a call center is pretty well covered.

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Remote Agents in the Modern Call Center

Years into the VoIP revolution, call center managers are recognising that it’s not necessary, or even desirable, to have all their agents located in a single location. High speed Internet access is nigh ubiquitous, allowing the modern call center floor to be distributed over multiple locations. It’s no wonder that call centers have experimented with home-based and remote agents; it’s like having a location of one. If the center is already leveraging the multi-site capabilities of its call center software, the ability should exist to include additional single-user locations. Continue reading “Remote Agents in the Modern Call Center”

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Populating Client Information to Agents in Your ACD – Part 1

One of the major purposes of many inbound call centers is customer care.  Clients may call with technical issues, be updating their orders, or enquiring about new services. In this case, it’s obviously important to ensure that the agent handling the call have as much information as possible about the caller. The question becomes how do you get those details into your call center software and in front of agents?
Continue reading “Populating Client Information to Agents in Your ACD – Part 1”