I spent time with a client who has a contact center which takes no calls. Rather it receives and handles emails. So as I was doing my diligence inside their center I was looking at their wallboard and saw that they had multiple queues, set up in skill sets (so as to be able to handle only certain types of emails). Well, you know what I always say "...the more queues you have to handle a universe of (in this case) emails, the more agents you will need to service those emails...". In fact this center operation was operating with this very problem. I did some digging and found that there were agent queues that were idle while other queues had emails stacked up waiting. Sounds familiar, huh? They wanted to cut costs and boost service they provide to their customers, they also had a problem in that they were staffing using spreadsheets and they just had a feeling that they could do a better job.
I recommended they look into a new fangled switch that enables them to do "universal queuing". That is it will route emails, calls, chats, any manner of contact in the same way. So you can set up primary, secondary, tertiary agent skills and as long as you can ID and segment these contacts you can route them to the proper agent. This enables you to eliminate all your hard queues an improve service to your customers. Not to mention the fact that the agent population required would probably shrink by an estimated 20%, plus you now get real switch data that can be fed into a workforce management/scheduling tool, further tightening your need for agents and further improving your ability to manage to adherence and forecast needs more in line with reality.The good news is many of the name brand contact center switch vendors do sell cloud based switches that you can get implemented easily.
Reduce costs? Improve service? Better data for management and staffing forecasting? Is this heaven? No its your contact center in the 21st century. You can do it!!
Skip Stringham
