How do you handle overflow?

[Benighted]

We're a mid sized call center (compared to Nordic standards) with some 60 agents logged in at the same time. These are distributed over 5 different call centers on site, with Customer service being the largest followed by New loans, Collections, Mortgage and Auto Finance. We have several different CDN's. Each are connected to unique skillsets. Some skillsets are busier than others, and needs to be backed up. Some are backed up when needed, and other always overflows to other teams if not answered.

Currently I see different methods of handling overflows. I see that it's handled in the scripts by executing other skillsets or by routing the calls to specific backup skillsets. Some teams want to get overflow only after the customers have had a certain max wait time.

I also see that some teamleaders brag about their fantastic servicelevel, but what we see is that they have gone into skillset assignments and put up alot of agents in i.e. customer service as secondary backup on their most critical skillsets. Hence their servicelevel isn't giving the right image of their specific teams performance.

So I'm a bit curious, how do you handle overflow?

Thanks a lot for your expert opinion.

 

[captaingadget]

This is not easy to answer as it all depends on what you want/need to achieve. There are a number of tools available to help.

1. Skills based routing, whereby agents are placed in multiple skillsets with differing prioities in each. The call will search out the agents with the highest priority, and then search agents with the next highest etc. This means that you have one queue to skillset command in the script. The supervisors control agent and skillset prioities. The call will search across skillsets immediately.

2. You can queue to differing skillsets in the script with either a wait command, or age of call intrinsic.

3. You can queue to different skillsets depending on estimated wait time, number of available agents, number of logged on agents, number of calls in queue etc. or any combination of the above.

This is not an exhaustive list but hope it helps.