Some Omni-Channel WFM Stuff
By Ric Kosiba, Ph.D.
I recently had the pleasure to have a few calls with the incredibly smart Maggie Klenke. She was looking for some data or stories around the omni-channel agent experience about how it shapes the workforce management process. With more and more companies requiring agents to do some real-time channel switching, she was interested in the cost of it all, and how we would best plan for it. And it turned out that I just so happened to have a bit of data around it.
From a workforce management perspective, it is very important to have a good picture of the level of effort required to answer our customer’s questions, for both forecasting and planning purposes, and for understanding agent performance. But it is also very interesting to know what our customers experience from a CSAT perspective, and ways we could make the whole process smoother and cheaper.
Let’s start with the WFM part. There are some basic questions that we should answer, to make sure we are staffing correctly. In Figure 1 below, we start with the basic building block for WFM: the handle times associated with each channel. In this data set, the overall handle time is 391 seconds, but contacts that are voice are lower at 331 seconds. Interestingly, contacts that involve co-browsing jump in AHT to 493 seconds, and contacts that are concurrent with another contact are 473 seconds. As expected, contacts that are transferred require much more time to handle. All of this is intuitive.
Figure 1. Handle Time and Contact Resolution by Channel
To the extent that we can, we should move customers to more efficient channels. But there is a chicken and egg issue in this data. Situations such as transfers and co-browsing are likely associated with the nature of the contact and are really not driven by the contact center; they are driven by the customer question.
The second graph in Figure 1 is the complicating one. In it we look at the contact resolution associated with each channel. Most noteworthy, contacts that involve co-browsing may take longer, but have a higher contact resolution. Co-browsing leads to both a better customer outcome and also fewer future contacts attempted. There is a trade-off that we should do the math around—is it better to have shorter handle times or fewer future contacts? Interesting also, concurrent contacts lead to more follow-up work for your contact center.
Figure 2 shows something weirdly noteworthy. In it, we look at the handle times of digital contacts that are concurrent, meaning agents are chatting with more than one customer at a time.
Figure 2. Handle Time and Contact Resolution of Different Digital Contact States
In the first chart in Figure 2, something strange and, maybe, psychological pops out. In it we can see that during an agent’s concurrent chats, the first customer has a much higher handle time than the second concurrent customer. Why is this?? My guess is that agents, like me, may actually be poor multi-taskers and once their attention goes to their second concurrent chat, they try their best to finish that second one so they can get back to their first chat. This “hypothesis” is backed up by the fact that the first chat has a higher contact resolution than the second (in the second chart of Figure 2).
Finally, I want to flip the discussion slightly from an agent’s contact resolution to the customer’s level of effort, how much time do they have to invest in us. It is relatively easy to query your ACD to determine how hard you are to do business with. In Figure 3, we look at the list of customers and the minutes they spent chatting with your agents over a three- and one-month interval.
Figure 3. Customer Level of Effort (in seconds)
As we’ve discussed here in On Target before, repeat callers represent a huge opportunity to improve our efficiency. It is absolutely a best practice to find these customers and do the hard work of understanding why they burn so much of your resources. Are they needy customers? Are they confused by your agents or a business process? Are you encouraging them to contact you somehow? Answer these and you can improve both your efficiency and your customer’s satisfaction.
Ric Kosiba is a charter member of SWPP. He can be reached at kosibas@comcast.net or (410) 562-1217. Please know that he is *very* interested in learning about your business problems and challenges. Follow him on LinkedIn! (www.linkedin.com/in/ric-kosiba/)
As we’ve discussed here in On Target before, repeat callers represent a huge opportunity to improve our efficiency. It is absolutely a best practice to find these customers and do the hard work of understanding why they burn so much of your resources. Are they needy customers? Are they confused by your agents or a business process? Are you encouraging them to contact you somehow? Answer these and you can improve both your efficiency and your customer’s satisfaction.
Ric Kosiba is a charter member of SWPP. He can be reached at kosibas@comcast.net or (410) 562-1217. Please know that he is *very* interested in learning about your business problems and challenges. Follow him on LinkedIn! (www.linkedin.com/in/ric-kosiba/)