During our Bay Bridge days, it was important for us to know what really was happening within the contact center so we could build staffing models that were accurate. We would get a description of which queues were supposed to be answered by which skills with which priorities from management, but we would often find that our simulation models were having a hard time validating.
That meant one of two things: 1) we made some sort of mistake, or 2) we were modeling the wrong operation. We had a very smart group of implementers led by Chris Johnson and Jen Dziekan who had a great idea: let’s figure out a simple way of checking whether the operation is set up the way we were told it was.
What they came up with was a simple table. On one side we would be a row of every skill (or a roll up of major skill groups) and on the other would be every queue (or a roll up of every contact type). In the table, we would keep the volume of which queues were answered by which skills. Simple, no?
It became part of our standard capacity planning system implementation. And was it ever enlightening to both us and our customers. What we found was that the routing, which our customers thought they understood were a tad different in practice. We’d see things like sales backing up technical support or billing backing up customer service. Paths that we were told were just not possible, were in fact, not only possible, but were traversed by a significant number of callers. I suspect this leads to a terrible customer experience and too many internal transfers.
Why did this happen? I suspect it was because routing within you CaaS or ACD system grows over time, mistakes can be made, and paths which are illogical are sometimes allowed. It becomes part of the spaghetti routing that is just too hard to clean up.
Looking at this simple table can help us all do a better job of making sure that the correctly trained agents are handling our customers.
Note: This week’s tip is provided by Ric Kosiba, a charter member of SWPP. He can be reached at ri*@re*********.com or (410) 562-1217. Please know that he is *very* interested in learning about your business problems and challenges and knows a bunch about capacity planning. Feel free to set up some time at realnumbers.com. Follow him on LinkedIn! (www.linkedin.com/in/ric-kosiba/)
