You have now set up your call flow for your Call Centre. You have forecasted your volume of calls using your historical data and tweaked it with the real time volume, which may resulted in some overtime if the volume is higher than forecasted or letting the agent go home early if the volume is less than forecasted.
When you forecasted your number of agents needed on the phone, did you take in consideration which agent is taking which type of call? Could this be a reason why your Service Level forecast is not accurate even if your call volume is? Yes, let’s look at an example for our Road Side Assistance Call Centre:
Let’s pretend you forecasted 200 calls for your Sales call flow, which meant 10 agents needed based on the model and shrinkage. (Yes, the shrinkage will be part of a future post!) Also, you forecasted 200 calls for your Assistance needed call flow, which meant 20 agents needed based on the model and shrinkage. The model forecasted a service level of 80%.
In real life, you achieved 90%. A few of the reasons might be the distribution of the calls, the AHT, etc. Let’s again pretend the distribution and the AHT was as forecasted. What else could’ve happened?
How are your agents skilled in the Call Centre? Are the 10 Sales agents loggued in only in Sales? What about the Assistance agents? This could make a huge difference. Forecasting based on agents that are multi-skilled is complicated when you create your model by hand. Many Forecasting and Planning application take this into consideration. But again, are you often changing the agent skills during the day?
What is a skill or skill level?
Let’s take the Sales call flow and pretend there is no option within the call flow. We would then have one Sales skill. Idem for Assistance. Within your phone system skill interface, you would update your agents’ profiles to match their skill (knowledge, training) with the proper Call Centre skill. Is agent John Smith a Sales agent or an Assistance agent. In John’s profile, you would then assign the proper skill. In this case Sales. Most phone systems would also allow you to assign the skill level. A skill level is a priority you assign to a skill. For our phone system, the priority range would be from 1 to 16. 1 being the highest level, meaning the first one. I recommend using 5 as the default.
Now, let’s talk about Julia. Julia is an experienced agent that have been in the Call Centre for many years and assigned to the Sales calls but has enough knowledge to help with Assistance calls. In her profile, we would then assign her the Sales skill and the Assistance skill because we want to use all the help possible. For Sales, we would use level 5 as default. Now for the Assistance skill, do we want Julia to take both type of calls at the same priority or we want Julia to first focus of Sales calls and then, if available, on Assistance calls? For our example, we would like Julia to first take the Sales calls and then the Assistance calls if there are Assistance calls waiting and no core Assistance agents available. In this case we would assign her the Assistance skill at a priority higher than 5. I used to use 12 for backup skills in the past.
Could we use level 1 and level 2? Yes, of course. In our example, it would make a difference. But, the example and the call flows are quite basic. In your Call Centre, I am sure you have way more skills like, VIP, French, English, Spanish, etc. If your default priority is 1 and you want to have some agents to take VIP calls prior to the basic skill, but have them at the same level on the basic skill there is no more room to play with…
I have seen many different definitions of Call Centre Management. The high level definition we will use in this site is the science of having the right number of agents at the right time.