Before I began working with call centers, I envisioned seas of desks, endlessly ringing phones, and maybe even some papers flying through the air as people rush to and fro amongst a maze of cubicles. But not every call center resembles the call center from Boiler Room (Giovanni Ribisi, Vin Diesel, its a good movie, you should check it out). Some contact centers just aren’t that busy and some companies have their agents perform a variety of tasks that make them unavailable to receive incoming calls. Regardless of how big an environment is or how many duties agents are responsible for, tracking how employees are using their time can be essential to the success of any company. So this week’s Feature Friday post (that’s right it’s back) covers agent Busy Reasons.
It’s one thing to know that an agent has signed off, but there are endless potential reasons why an agent has signed off. It could be a lunch break or a call wrap-up, but it could also be that an agent is scheduled to receive new training, or perhaps they’ve been asked to assist with some testing, or maybe they’ve been recruited to assist in a special project.
Many call centers ask their agents to do quite a few things other than simply answer calls, but that doesn’t mean those companies don’t need to know what their agents are doing when they’re not taking calls. A call center manager may know ten people are staffed everyday, but how many agent available hours are there? And if they discover they’re not meeting their goals, how do they know what their agents are doing and what they can cut back on? That’s where our Busy Reasons feature comes into play.
If an agent is asked to do anything aside from be available to answer incoming calls, he or she can indicate exactly what they are doing by selecting the appropriate busy reason in the Call Center Agent (CCA). When a report is run, managers can see exactly what agents are doing with their time. That information can be used to determine if there is a need to hire additional staff, if the current staff has enough time to take on additional responsibilities, or if things are running as smoothly as can be expected.
As is the case with all the features we here at Telax offer, it can be customized. If a company decides they want agents to spend time scanning financial documents, that task can be added to the list of busy reasons. This additional business intelligence allows managers to see exactly how much time agents spent on that particular task.
Adaptability and visibility are two very important words in the contact center industry, and features like customizable busy reasons allow us and our customers to be both.
Tags: business community, business intelligence, busy reason, call center, contact center, efficiency, feature friday, telax