Agent Releasing Calls (Urgent Help)

[harryhoudini66]

I have a question for you. Have you ever heard of situations in which someone appears to be hanging up and it ends up being something else?

I did an agent trace on an agent that has a very low handle time. We do not have handle time goals. Under Agent/Trace Location it shows numerous calls come in and drop after 2 seconds or so. The RLS field shows Y.

The amount of calls dropped are so many, I cannot understand why someone would do it when there is no handle time goal. I am looking for a rational explanation. I checked other agents and they don’t exhibit the same issues. I want to make sure there aren’t any other possible causes before we pursue anything.

 

[jfh9219]

Sad to say we have experienced this problem. We had a very effective agent who decided for some reason to terminate ACD calls while speaking our standard greeting. We could see the RLS field = "Y" and were fortunate to have implemented a recording solution that verified the disconnect. Agent=Fired

We also most recently had an agent who decided that every now and then they didn't want to take calls but didn't want to be in AUX mode. They would receive an ACD call and without speaking transfer it back to our general VDN. This was verified by examining Call Records and again by listening to recordings. Agent=Fired

Without recordings you could service observe the agent and listen for the short duration calls to get more info.

 

[harryhoudini66]

I am afraid I have the same situation. It is also what I perceived to be a good agent. Up until recently this started occuring.

I did initiate a recording of all their calls via eTalk. I dedicated a line to recording. The recordings dont show the CTI hangup event but you can hear it. During the greeting part, the call got dropped. In other instances you can hear the call come in and get dropped without a greeting being stated. The numerous are so obvious that it is hard to beleive that someone would do something so stupid.

 

[Tolson]

Agents are not the brightes people.

 

[jfh9219]

To a certain extent I blame the supervisor as much as the agent. People will try to avoid work/unpleasantness. It is mgmt's job to make sure they do the work. Plenty of tools to catch bad behaviors and correct them before they become actionable.

 

[harryhoudini66]

I agree completely. The supervisor did not notice this for more then a month.

 

[smurfyIAG]

Agents are not the brightes(t) people."

Actually sometimes I disagree.
As I just replied at avayausers...

Harry - you have 1 General queue which is measured and the rest you don't care about so much (don't have a Service target).

I'd be having a close look at what type of calls the agent was dumping and what the state of the queue is at the time the dumping occurs before leaping to conclusions.
Potentially your agent could be responding to a driver to answer more "General Queue" calls within service level by ditching calls in busy periods. i.e. "There are 15 calls waiting, if I answer and dump 10 calls within 20 seconds, our service level will improve".
Do certain types of calls have a longer average handle time than others? They could be dumping calls they know will take too long and only handling the short (easy) calls. If the dumped calls are one or two skills specifically, it could be a lack of training/confidence in that skill/product?
It's still a bad behaviour but one that perhaps requires education rather than a disciplinary process.

I'm a firm believer that targets drive behaviour. If the agents have no min/max targets for handle time (it's not strictly measured) but do have targets for service level, then this sort of thing will happen, especially if they have $$ riding on it.

The RONA measure would have just been another example of a way the agent can "vet" their calls.


Sean Murphy
Call Centre Analyst
IAG New Zealand

 

[harryhoudini66]

Thanks for the feedback. In this case it was simply burnout. Only management has goals concerning an ASA. The reps themselves don’t have any call related goals with the exception of an ACW goal which the entire center is exceeding. We also have not met the goal in two years so that in itself lets you know we don’t pressure them much. Otherwise, we would have met it.

I know this rep pretty closely. He simply did something stupid. No real motive behind it. I had a friend that did the same thing and was fired as well. Years later he still remembers how it all went down. He realizes that what he did was very stupid. At the time though he though he was smart and would not get caught. Now he knows what he did was wrong.