Agent Skills

[charnny]

We have 150 agent call center which is very busy. We have IVR and CTI screen popping in place to reduce calls but our agents are still very busy and queue times high. I know the obvious answer is to hire more agents but I was wondering if we can improve service by tweaking skills and call handling preference. We have 12 skills and our agents call handling preference is set to either grestest need or skill level. Can anyone advise on the best way to skill agents when the call volume is exceeding the number of staffed agents available to handle calls.

Thanks in advance for any replies.

 

[nohuhu]

charnny,

the first thing to do in this situation is to run a thorough analysis of what you have, how you're handling calls, what agents are doing, what is the role of ivr and so on. hire some external experts if you can't do it yourself. don't change anything just because you can do it. analyze first. i wouldn't bet because i don't know your call center setup, but my practice shows that there always are ways to optimize a call center without any dramatic actions such as hiring or firing agents.

p.s. and the most dramatic increases in effectiveness after the audits were results of badly planned business processes.

 

[RGarcia87]

Look at excessive ACW times and Hold times for each agent. Many agents tend to abuse those two metrics.