Reserve agents for emergencies

[Jouik]

Hello experts!
Just scratching my head about one task I was given by our worldwide customer and I'm looking for an easiest way to do it. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Here is the background:
Worldwide call center customer with hundreds of sites, a lot of agents and few call centers. There is an existing Avaya CC mix of Avaya CM (current version 6, plan to upgrade to 8), Avaya IPO and AACC. The voice part of the call center is handled directly by Avaya CM with over 750 vectors currently present.

The example scenario:
Lets say a group of 10 agents who are taking calls for department A, English speaking customers.
In this group there are 2 agents speaking English AND Italian. There are thousands of calls in English, but only a handful of calls in Italian per month. The service level is 20s.
When there is an outage, all the 10 agents are already busy with English speaking customers, and the few Italian customers can't get hold of anyone speaking Italian => the Service level is broken and kills the stats for the month.

The task:
The task is to reserve somehow the Italian speaking agents, for the few customers calling in such outage scenario (which occurs very rarely), so they can be answered within 20s, but still have them available to take the English speaking calls.
At the same time I would like to avoid checking/tampering with all the 750+ vectors and would like to do this on some more simple and "global" level, if such option exists.
There are dozens, if not hundreds, of such groups with similar design. This is just an example.
Basically the goal is, to have the Italian customer who is calling in 0.5% of the cases ALWAYS answered by an Italian speaking agent.

Of course we could break all this CC routing apart, re-design the skills and groups, re-write the vectors etc. but this we want to avoid, or have it as a last resort option.
If you could suggest some concept, way of doing this, a feature in the CM we should utilize...

Hope that is clear enough, excuse my English.
Should you need more info, please ask.

regards
Jou

 

[ZeroZeroOne]

Assuming the skill sets are set for EAD-MIA or EAD-LOA (Expert Agent Distribution / Most Idle Agent or Least Occupied Agent) to distribute calls based on skill level....
One suggestion is to set the English Skill Level on the Italian Agents lower than the other Agents. If the primary English Agents are set with Skill Level 1 then set the Italian Agents with Skill Level 2 or higher to decrease their chances of getting the call.
That way English calls will only ring to the Italian Agents if all English Agents are busy. Italian calls may still queue if all Italian Agents are busy but this will reduce that situation while still allowing those Agents to answer English calls during peak times.

 

[Jouik]

@ZeroZeroOne
This is indeed true, but it will not ensure, that the Italian caller get someone within the target 20s, because in case of outage, there are 100's of percents increase in call volumes and all the agents will be most likely busy with English calls, because the percetage of English vs Italian calls is roughly 98%EN to 2%IT . What we need to ensure is, that the 2% are served ALWAYS within the target 20s and at the same time the Italian agents do not sit there the 98% of the time unused. I'm sorry, but I'm no CM/CC expert... still trying to learn this.

regards
Jou

 

[BIS]

You need to queue them at different priority. English to medium, and Italian to high, for example.

 

[kyle555]

Wouldn't queuing at different priorities only change their priority with respect to the specific queue? Like, 100 calls in the English skill at HIGH and 10 calls in the Italian queue at TOP don't heave any bearing on each other, only on English calls at medium or Italian calls at medium. I'm not sure of the answer on that, I'm just thinking aloud...

Presuming that this very infrequent outage is something of a major/catastrophic event - like, stats are ruined for the day anyways, and presuming all your Italian agents can also handle English calls and presuming you have different skills for English and Italian, could you not find a way to send your Italian calls to the English queue at top priority?

I'm sure there's a more correct way to handle it that could account for unilingual Italian agents not getting English calls, but quick and dirty off the top of my head...

Pretend skill 1 is English, 2 is Italian, and 3 is the primary site outage check skill.

What if all non-Italian agents are assigned skills 1 and 3. You'd never route any calls to skill 3, you'd just use it to check if agents at any other site are logged in.
What if in the vectors for Italian you first say "goto step 90 which queues to skill 1 at priority top if agents staffed in skill 3 = 0"

That would account for the Italian site being isolated from the rest and still getting English and Italian calls.

It wouldn't trigger if you had 3 English-inly locations, and you lost only the largest. You'd still have a flood of calls coming in.

I think this is the use case for Business Advocate where your Italian agents would be "Italian only" and be used as "reserve agents" for English. Once the bad stuff happens, advocate tries to maintain service levels and would hold the Italians close to its chest knowing there's a flood of English calls they *could* take but you'd like to avoid.

It needs some pretty serious math to figure out. Like, what's your average handle time? Is it something that's < 1 minute? Is it something that you don't care having the Italian agents on English calls during the outage so long as if an Italian one comes in next, they take it? Because if your AHT is too high, then you want them sitting idle and available because just taking the next Italian call that comes in would still probably make it bust service level.

 

[Jouik]

I was thinking about the reserved agents, but that wouldn't solve our problem. I need to figure out a way how to monitor for call levels/queue time/queue occupancy and if that is getting too high, then to exclude at least one agent for Italian-Only, so he/she is always free in the time of high call volumes. When the high call volumes situation is gone, the agent can be again assigned to the English skill so it doesn't sit there idle for the rest of the year until another outage occurs. But at the time of outage i need him to be free and available for the Italians.
There were some "check-if" options for the skills to see how busy they are i guess... need to study this through :/

Here is a great document I found.

regards
Jou

 

[ZeroZeroOne]

So to restate what you need (To make sure I understand)
[ul]
[li]In a normal day with normal call volume: Italian Agents can act as backup for English Queue.[/li]
[li]During High Call Volume: Italian Agents must be available for Italian Queue only.[/li]
[/ul]

Perhaps you need three skills:
Skill 1 = English
Skill 2 = Italian
Skill 3 = English-Restricted.

Italian Agents would be assigned Italian and English.
English Agents would be assigned English and English-Restricted.

You could then use a vector step to check the number of queued-calls so that up to a certain threshold, calls normally queue to the English Skill and are answered by any available agent based on skill level.
Once that threshold is reached, however, calls queue to the English-Restricted skill and are no longer presented to the Italian Agents.

10 goto step 20 if calls-queued in skill 1 pri m >= 10 
11 queue-to skill 1 pri m 
... 
20 queue-to skill 3 pri m

Or perhaps "counted-calls" would be better than calls-queued.

Just a thought. I'm not an expert, either.

 

[Jouik]

So to restate what you need (To make sure I understand)
In a normal day with normal call volume: Italian Agents can act as backup for English Queue.
During High Call Volume: Italian Agents must be available for Italian Queue only.

Thats correct!

And thank you for the hint! I guess its worth a try!

regards
Jou