Ideas For When Your Call Volume is Reduced

With reduced volumes and all of our staff working from home to “slow the spread” due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are using that temporary boost in agent capacity on various tasks that we may not have typically been able to in a business-as-usual situation:

Focus some staff on non-phone correspondence to clean-up and clear out those queues.  Some of this staff works non-business hours to lighten the load on systems during regular business hours.

Have a small group of staff on outbound call campaigns for various marketing or network programs.

Conduct daily 15-minute Team “check-ins,” i.e., a small group of agents have a conference call with their Lead agent to review urgent and temporary company news and policy updates.

Increase mentoring and coaching, especially for those agents who are newer or were actually in the middle of training when they were sent home to work (yes, this happened!).

Do additional cross-training on various specialized tasks or call queues.

We all know these call patterns won’t last forever.  So if you’ve found yourself with a significant boost in capacity and have other items that were on your “wish-list” that you could just never fit in during the daily grind, take advantage of this time now.  Don’t add “I wish I would’ve done that…” to your wish-list!

This tip provided by SWPP Member John Clapper of United Concordia Dental.  He may be reached at john.clapper@ucci.com.

Don’t Average in “Special” Data

The workload you are now receiving is likely to be significantly different from normal.  If you are importing your ACD report data into your WFM system on an automated link, it is important to save the current data in a separate “special” file.  Don’t let it average in with your historical data or it will give you skewed results for forecasting both now and when things are back to normal.

This tip provided by Maggie Klenke.  She may be reached at maggie.klenke@mindspring.com. 

If you have a tip to share, send it to vicki.herrell@swpp.org.  We’d love to hear from you!