Clearing Out The Queue At The End of The Day

[toveyb]

Currently our call center system does not allow any new calls to come in past 4:30, but calls holding will remain until answered or until the caller hangs up. As a result, we keep staff on until 4:45 in order to clear out the queues.

We are trying to ahcieve clearing out the queue by 4:30, meaning that there is no calls holding and staff can leave right at 4:30 instead of 4:45.

Any suggestions, ideas, or of any known practices/technology out there that can assist with this?

 

[rfwhite]

Do all agents log out together at one time or do they stagger times thus tapering off # of agents available?

If you have SCCS you could check # agents available starting at 4 pm and only allow call through if an agent is idle. You will, of course, be shunting some calls through to your after-hours treatment after 4 pm.

 

[StanleySteamer]

Maybe as rfwhite suggests, but give the surplus calls a busy treatment.

Steamer

 

[lretrievers]

I usually recommend that you stop queing calls at 4:25 which gives them 5 minutes to wrap up their calls. That may not be enough, you may have to back it up some after that.

 

[DancingDave]

If all of your agents for the skillset in question log out, the call becomes dequeued from that skillset.

You could use that as a test and give the customer an out of hours message or similar. That said, it's not particularly good customer service. I know I'd be hacked off if I'd waited for five minutes, had messages and music and then been told the call centre was closed.

The idea of closing the lines to new calls five minutes before the published time seems the most customer focussed way. If someone complains that they wrer told office hours were to 5.30pm and they phoned, you could always fob them off with some chat about the difference in clocks etc.

DD

 

[lretrievers]

You would actually have to use the REMOVE FROM SKILLSET command to get the call out of the queue. It doesn't automatically dequeue the call if everyone logs out unless you check for out of service condition.

In my waiting loop, I check for out of service so that when it loops around, we see if it is closed or not.

 

[DancingDave]

We have the following in our loop section

IF NOT QUEUED THEN
IF NOT OUT OF SERVICE sk_skillset THEN
QUEUE TO SKILLSET sk_skillset WITH PRIORITY 3
WAIT 2
ELSE
EXECUTE closed_section
END IF
END IF

 

[lretrievers]

Yes, but the EXECUTE closed_section would only execute in the event the call is not queued. You would either need to check for time of day or skillset closed in the beginning of your wait loop and then do whatever you need to do with the call.

 

[carolien]

We use the following script:

IF ( (TIME OF DAY = 16:15..16:20) 
AND( EXPECTED WAIT TIME SKILL_NAME> Time_Before_Close_1) )
THEN EXECUTE Closed_Overflow
END IF 
IF ( (TIME OF DAY = 16:20..16:25) 
AND( EXPECTED WAIT TIME SKILL_NAME> Time_Before_Close_2) )
THEN EXECUTE Closed_Overflow
END IF 
IF ( (TIME OF DAY = 16:25..16:30) 
AND( EXPECTED WAIT TIME SKILL_NAME> Time_Before_Close_3) )
THEN EXECUTE Closed_Overflow
END IF

Closed_Overflow then gives an announcement that we cannot help you within openinghours and we ask the customer to call back next day.